STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Banquet 2025 gathers Nobel laureates, Sweden’s royal family and 1,300 invited guests in the Blue Hall of City Hall as Michelin-starred chefs Pi Le and Tommy Myllymäki present a forest-inspired three-course feast built around mushrooms, turbot and Swedish blackthorn berries. The duo, joined by returning pastry chef Frida Bäcke, aim to balance comfort and surprise while grounding this year’s celebration in the flavors of Nordic nature, Dec. 10, 2025.
Nobel Banquet 2025 menu leans into forest flavors and Nordic seas
The official menu reveals a distinctly Scandinavian progression that starts deep in the woods, moves out to sea and ends back among the berries. Diners begin with a silky porcini soup served with a tightly bound salad of Swedish cultivated mushrooms, Almnäs Tegel cheese, ginger oil and black winter truffle, plus truffle butter and crispbread scented with porcini. The main course pairs turbot stuffed with scallops and sugar kelp with roasted celeriac glazed in lovage, butter-cooked potatoes and nutmeg-fragranced silver onions, all surrounded by Savoy cabbage, leeks and mushrooms and a butter sauce sharpened with fermented quince and Ingrid Marie apples. Dessert layers blackthorn sorbet with a baked fresh-cheese cream, browned-butter sponge, buttermilk caramel, buckwheat-and-oat crunch and a wild raspberry consommé perfumed with juniper shoots — a finale that keeps the Nobel Banquet 2025 firmly in the forest.
Behind the scenes, more than 40 chefs and an army of servers turn the Nobel Banquet 2025 into a tightly choreographed service for a hall filled with white ties, tiaras and television cameras. A Reuters report from inside the Nobel kitchen details how the team plates thousands of portions while pouring around 400 bottles of champagne for the starter and debuting an update to the Nobel tableware for the first time in more than three decades. Central to that update is a new butter knife carved from southern Swedish oak — an idea developed by Le with his brother and finished by family members who helped sand all 1,300 knives by hand.
According to a press release from the Nobel Foundation, this is the first time the Nobel Prize banquet kitchen has been led by a chef duo rather than a single head chef. Le and Myllymäki normally cook at Aira, their two-Michelin-star restaurant on Djurgården, and also oversee several Stockholm establishments including Bobergs Matsal and Nordiska Kantinen. On Aira’s announcement to diners, they describe the Nobel assignment as a chance to scale up their signature style — recognizable flavors, sharpened with a twist — from an intimate dining room to the vast sweep of the Blue Hall.
Bäcke, who runs the patisserie Socker Sucker and has repeatedly been named Sweden’s “pastry chef of the pastry chefs,” returns to the Nobel Banquet 2025 determined to spotlight ingredients many guests rarely encounter. In interviews compiled by the Nobel Foundation, she links the dessert’s wild raspberries and blackthorn to childhood walks in the woods and to a desire to honor late-ripening berries that demand patience from pickers. The foundation notes that her team will use roughly 45 kilos of wild raspberries and 20 kilos of blackthorn for the dessert service alone, much of it hand-picked in northern Sweden. A profile in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet underscores how closely she and the chefs collaborate, describing tasting sessions where the trio fine-tuned textures so that the final course felt both nostalgic and precise.
While the Nobel Banquet 2025 pushes deeper into forest flavors, it also fits a recent trend of menus rooted in Swedish ingredients. The 2024 Nobel banquet menu highlighted beets, apples and whole grains in a chicken-centered main course designed to showcase sustainable farming. The 2022 banquet menu paired seaweed-baked pike-perch with Swedish venison and a plum-driven dessert, while the 2019 menu opened with Kalix vendace roe and featured duck stuffed with black chanterelles. Together, the line-up shows how the banquet has shifted from continental luxury toward a distinctly Nordic, place-driven identity over the past decade.
What sets the Nobel Banquet 2025 apart is how fully that Nordic identity is expressed in the storytelling around the meal. Forest walks with grandparents, late-harvested berries, hand-sanded oak knives and a kitchen brigade cooking for 59 precisely laid tables all fold into a single evening that lasts just a few hours. When the last wild raspberry consommé leaves the pass, Le, Myllymäki and Bäcke will have added their own chapter to a banquet tradition that has been evolving, one carefully composed course at a time, since 1901.
