"Take care when eating the mini sausages at Aquavit, which are fermented for twenty-four hours, then cold-smoked, baked, seared to order, and served with a slightly fruity whole-grain mustard. Their tight, crisp skin, encasing a mixture of barley, spiced pork, and beef, is slick with delicious fat, and you might find, while reluctantly cutting the last of three in half—for equitable sharing with your dinner date, of course—that it slips from beneath your fork and bounces off your plate, as you both look on in abject horror. Which is all to say: take care to eat the mini sausages at Aquavit. Last summer, the thirty-two-year-old Swedish restaurant closed for renovations; it reopened in October. The dining room has been outfitted with midnight-blue banquettes and blond hardwood floors. The wall dividing it from the kitchen is now made entirely of glass, with an automatic door for servers to glide through. The prix-fixe dining-room menu includes a number of new dishes—from the same chef, Emma Bengtsson, who has run the kitchen since 2014—while retaining fan favorites. I was as pleased to try a marbled medallion of Mangalitsa pork collar, as tender and shaggy as corned beef and plated with a tart, crimson umeboshi-plum purée, as I was to revisit the Arctic Bird’s Nest dessert, a dramatic trompe-l’oeil featuring white-chocolate eggs with sea-buckthorn-curd yolks. These updates make the restaurant feel subtly refreshed, which I imagine will go a long way for the types of diners who’ve been keeping the place afloat; on a blandly corporate block of Midtown East, Aquavit seems to attract mostly suits and well-to-do middle-aged tourists. The plush and quiet dining room is lovely, but conspicuously lacking in sex appeal. (On two recent visits, the soundtrack included Norah Jones’s 2002 album, “Come Away with Me.”) Where things get more exciting, and where there is potential to attract fresh blood, is in the bar. The high-ceilinged, stripped-down corridor that was previously a zone for drinks and snacks is now essentially its own establishment (although it shares the dining room’s kitchen), with a full menu focussed on husmanskost, or Swedish home cooking. Various iterations of the restaurant—which relocated in 2005 and has had many chefs over the years, most famously Marcus Samuelsson—have included a more casual café, and, before the renovation, the lunch menu offered husmanskost. But as dining habits at large seem to be trending away from formality and toward the celebration of unpretentious traditions, the bar menu feels newly relevant. Here is where you’ll find those remarkable sausages, plus dill potato chips sliced so thin they’re as translucent as green stained glass, yet somehow sturdy enough to hold up to onion dip. Dense, pale-crusted sourdough bread is served with cultured butter that tastes alluringly briny, a detail I found befuddling until it hit me—sea salt! Recently harvested sea salt. That the classics are fairly straightforward makes them no less spectacular. Pink folds of gravlax are showered in fresh-shaved horseradish. Swedish meatballs are nestled with quick-pickled cucumbers, lingonberries, and a luscious potato purée. A fat wedge of princess cake—whipped cream, raspberry jam, and vanilla sponge layered beneath a thick sheet of candy-green marzipan—looks exactly the way it does on “The Great British Baking Show.” And then there are the surprises. Duxelles—a concentrated paste made of mushrooms, shallots, and thyme—sits with fluffy caramelized sour cream at the bottom of a shallow bowl, overlaid with julienned apple and crackly fried sourdough twists. Finished tableside with a frothy and fragrant broth, it redefines cream-of-mushroom soup. Among a handful of ice-cream flavors, the humblest-sounding steals the scene, malty, starchy, and just right: rice. (Bar dishes, $6-$34. Dining-room prix fixe, $115-$225.)" - Hannah Goldfield
