By Greta Rosen Fondahn
STOCKHOLM, Dec 9 (Reuters) - In a bustling kitchen at Stockholm's city hall, chefs have gathered to prepare an intricate dinner with a secret menu - and a family twist - for the scientists and royalty converging at the Nobel Prize banquet in Sweden this week.
More than forty chefs are entrusted with the task of making the three-course meal for the annual banquet, where guests include the laureates and their families, Sweden's royal family and a generous slice of the country's Who's Who.
"We want to implement our way of cooking, our DNA, and put it into this dinner for 1,300 people," said Pi Le, who together with Tommy Myllymaki is in charge of this year's first two courses.
"Take something that you recognise in flavour and add a little bit of a twist."
The two chefs normally run a 2-star Michelin restaurant on Stockholm's Djurgarden island.
The menu was set at the end of September after "a lot of tryouts", Myllymaki said.
A closely guarded secret, the menu won't be revealed until the guests - the men in white ties and tails and women in evening gowns - are seated at the 59 tables filling the so-called Blue Hall on Wednesday.
But the chefs share some tidbits. Nordic forest ingredients feature, such as dried porcini mushrooms for the first course and sloe berries and wild raspberries for dessert, while 400 bottles of champagne will be served with the starter.
Yet for the chefs, the banquet is also a family affair.
The tableware has been updated for the first time since it was created more than thirty years ago with an oak butterknife developed with Le's brother.
Hand-making the 1,300 knives, with wood from southern Sweden, was time-consuming.
"We needed to bring reinforcements to keep the deadline," Le said. "My mom, my sister, and my dad came to help."
Nobel pastry chef Frida Backe, returning for a second year, has drawn on childhood days spent in the forest with her grandparents when creating this year's dessert.
Sloe berries are a "little bit of a forgotten berry", she said. "It takes a little bit of stubbornness and creativity to work with it".
Separate festivities are held in Oslo for the Nobel Peace Prize.
(Reporting by Greta Rosen Fondahn in Stockholm; Editing by Niklas Pollard and Saad Sayeed)
