If it wasn’t for a friend’s birthday, we would never have bothered visiting Nordic Bar in Fitzrovia, in central London. It’s a Scandinavian themed cellar bar. The focus is mostly on bizarre cocktails but there is a small selection of beer.
Admittedly most of it is pretty mainstream (I’ve never seen so many different types of Carlsberg in one place, and none of them interesting) but there was also Nils Oscar “God” lager. It’s nice enough, with a big malt flavour, and streets ahead of the other offerings. But it’s no Brooklyn Lager.
Lapin Kulta (“Gold of Lapland”) has a great name, but is a stunningly bland beer. Here’s what the Blogobeer lads thought of it.
“Stockholm 7.2” is a festbier, and is passable — quite sweet and a little bready — but not exciting enough to warrant the strength.
The bar does have an interesting (for London) range of Scandinavian snacks and is a nice place to embrace the dark northern European winter.
4 replies on “Nordic Bar”
I suppose the the Nils Oscar God Lager must look pretty odd in the UK, but it’s not religious. The name simply means Good Lager.
Actually, Nils Oscar is a brewery I’m very fond of. Their beers generally emphasize drinkability and balance, but, perhaps because they grow and malt their own grain, they all have wonderful malt notes that I really enjoy.
One thing I enjoy about the name Lapin Kulta is that “Kulta”, gold, is not a native Finnish word, but a loanword from Swedish. The Swedish word is “guld” (gold), but the Finns won’t have any truck with soft sounds like “g” and “d”, and so replace them with harder alternatives (“k” and “t” in this case; same thing with “b” which always becomes “p”, etc). Like the Italians, the Finns don’t like ending with a consonant, so they stick the “a” on the end. Hence “guld” -> “kulta”.
I always read the name as “Sami Gold”, but looking at Wikipedia I realize that you’re actually right.
Scandinavian snacks sounds ominous. I hope they skipped the dried fish. 🙂
Thanks for the additional info. I didn’t see any dried fish, but it’s certainly the first time I’ve eaten pickled herring in a bar in London. Not a good snack for people on the pull, I wouldn’t have thought…
Depends on who you want to pull, probably…
Might actually help you out if were trying to snag a Norwegian fisherman.