The funny thing was, we had been talking about rotten herring in the car. Mathias Dahlgren had casually asked if I had tried sürstromming – the notorious fermented herring loved by northern Swedes but feared by the rest of civilisation - and, blissfully unaware of his evil plans, I had shuddered and said that, no, I had managed to avoid it thus far.
Having lived and travelled in the Nordic region for some years, I was all too aware of sürstromming's reputation: the fish decompose in their can yet somehow remain – in the broadest sense of the word – edible. After more than a year though, it becomes somewhat unstable. Ashen-faced friends had recalled traumatic detonations that showered them with a hazardous fallout whose after-stench had proved impossible to remove.
But all the time Mathias knew what we would be having for lunch – because he had planned it.
I had come to Umeå, the biggest city in northern Sweden, and one of 2014's European Capitals of Culture, to spend a day with one of its most illustrious sons – albeit, for the first day at least, on a more culinary than cultural quest.
Mathias is a former winner of the Bocuse D'Or world chef championship (in 1997) and a signatory of 2005's New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto, with his friend, René Redzepi of Noma. Mathias had left his Stockholm restaurants – two-Michelin-starred Matsalen and one-starred Matbaren, both in the Grand Hôtel – to spend the day showing me his old stamping ground and its delicacies.
He comes home a couple of times a year. "I was brought up in a small village outside of Umeå," he told me as we drove from the airport. "When we went shopping in Umeå, it felt like a new universe. Wow, it was big! Of course, it's not quite the same today. It's like, when I was really small, say two or three, my mum would take me into the forest to a very big rock. To me, that rock was the top of the world. Then, at five or six, I went to Umeå, and that became the top of the world. Now I have my restaurants in Stockholm and when I come home, that rock in the forest is smaller and smaller."
We drove along frozen forest roads, passing the farm where Mathias grew up. He's a bulky man in his mid-40s, with that permanent air of being a bit knackered that all the best chefs have. We were meeting Eva-Lisa Myntti, an improbably glamorous reindeer herder. Eva and her Sami husband "sacrifice" a few reindeer every year, selling the meat fresh or cold-smoked (reindear.se) to restaurants.
"The best is the snow-cured reindeer," Mathias enthused. "It has an extremely interesting character, a beautiful raw texture. When you fry it, it smells almost like French cheese."
Looking back, I realise that his enthusiasm for game packed in snow in a hut in the wilderness and left to thaw and refreeze several times during the winter so that it ends up "cheesy" should have rung warning bells.
Anyway, all was going well until I made the mistake of asking Eva-Lise how many reindeer she had. There was a silence. "That is the one question you do not ask a reindeer herder," she answered briskly.
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to ... Why?"
"It's like asking someone how much money they have," said Mathias.
The mood soon thawed, and we continued our search along ever more remote, frozen forest paths, but to no avail. No reindeer did we spy that day … though we did see a couple of camels.
The camels – residents of a petting zoo – were the first of several surreal encounters during my two days in Umeå. There were also the architecture students who were testing a "vision distortion device" (VDD) outside their college next evening: the device was made from a street lamp lens, and they had attached a collar to it so it could be worn like a deep-sea diver's helmet, "changing your perception of the world around you," as they put it. They showed me blurry photos they had taken from within the VDD in the town's new shopping mall, called Utopia.
At the Västerbotten cultural history museum (Umeå is the capital of Västerbotten province), I heard about the world's oldest ski – at 5,000 years it is older than the pyramids at Giza.
Not weird enough? How about this: Umeå has not one but two Eurovision-themed clubs. And then there was the deeply surprising Umedalen sculpture park in the grounds of a former mental asylum. The curator, Stefan Andersson, drove me around pointing out an Antony Gormley here, a Louise Bourgeois or Anish Kapoor there and, my favourite, some subtly subverted Swedish road signs. One of them, in the style of a motorway emergency phone number, instead featured the number of its artist, Mikael Richter. I dialled it and, to my joy, Richter, who was in Stockholm, answered after two rings. That's the thing about Umeå: the weirdness is accessible to all – indeed it wears it proudly.
Andersson told me the sculptures had been donated by the local property firm, Balticgruppen, owned by self-made multimillionaire, Krister Olsson. Olsson's company also built the Utopia mall and was involved in the city's ambitious new culture centre/hotel complex. He was everywhere – "Mr Umeå", as one local described him.
I think it was at this point – after the camels and the VDD, the Eurovision clubs and the world's oldest ski, and seeing a 10m-high sculpture of a clothes peg down on the riverfront – that I began to toy with the idea that I had inadvertently wandered into a David Lynch movie, with Olsson as the puppet-master figure. (Olsson's lawyers please note: I am sure that in real life he is a lovely, benevolent property developer.)
This might have been just me. For Mathias, Umeå was just his home town, with all the baggage that brings.
"In one way they [Umeåns] believe in themselves, but in another way they look down on themselves," he said. "We like our city, but we don't think it's good enough and excuse a lot of things. It's a northern Sweden thing, a confidence thing."
The new cultural centre, Väven, is, I suppose, an attempt to conquer that sense of inferiority. As is so often the way with such projects, it won't actually be completed until the autumn, three-quarters of the way through Umeå's tenure as European Capital of Culture. Happily, part of the complex – the renovation of the adjacent, historic Stora Hotel – will be ready for two of the city's prime food venues to move into in March. These are the restaurant Viktoria, where Mathias had his first job after graduating from Umeå catering school and where he and I dined that evening (in its current location downtown); and the gourmet delicatessen, Duå, run by bespectacled twins Per and Lars Åkerlund (every Lynch movie needs a set of identical twins), currently just around the corner from its new home.
Once it opens, the hotel itself will contribute its own strange aesthetic to the city. It's still a building site, but the refit takes its inspiration from the first manager, a sea captain. With its exuberant "salty sea dog" look, featuring TVs set into brass "portholes", doors faced with 3D sea monster scenes, and a stunning staircase installation made of "shipwrecked" wood, the Stora Hotel promises to be unlike any other in the town (or anywhere else, come to that).
"Umeå has changed since I moved away in my early 20s," Mathias told me when we visited Duå. "It has become more part of the world, which is a good thing. The university is really important for that: it brings in a lot of young energy, and you can really see it in the food scene – these guys at Duå have so much knowledge."
Per Akerlund treated us to tastings of local bear salami (bear can be a bit of a challenge, I'd found previously, but this was nice), a cheese made by a local jazz musician, and an ice cider, made from frozen apples. The Brännland cider, in particular, was a welcome palate cleanser.
So to the sürstromming: Mathias's lunch surprise, laid on for us at the excellent Västerbotten cheese visitor centre, one of the area's prime tourist attractions. He had raved about sürstromming's "surprisingly mild, elegant flavour" and had sworn its smell was far worse than its bite. So I followed him outside to witness the opening of the can, which is done inside a plastic bag (again: warning, warning, warning). Perhaps if I hadn't stuck my nose in the newly opened tin I wouldn't have been so traumatised, but no matter how expertly Mathias prepared the sürstromming – in a crispbread sandwich with almond potatoes, crème fraîche and raw onion – and no matter how heartily we sang the traditional Swedish drinking song, Helan Går, as we toasted with schnapps, it still tasted of, well, shit. I am proud to say that I managed half a sandwich, though Mathias tucked in heartily.
Happily, there was plenty of Västerbotten cheese (vasterbottenost.com) on hand. This excellent cow's milk cheese, matured for 14 months and tasting like a mild, fruity-yet-sharp cheddar (you can buy it in some Waitroses), has been made in the village of Burträsk, 60 miles north of Umeå, since 1872: Mathias serves it in his restaurant, as does Noma.
They tried to move production to Umeå, but it just didn't taste the same. There are several theories as to why, one of which was shared with me after our dinner at Viktoria that evening.
"It is because of the meteor," the man said, half-seriously. A meteor had fallen on Västerbotten millions of years ago, he said, and had somehow protected the chalk layer beneath the soil, which otherwise would have been eroded by glaciers. The chalk was what gave the cheese its unique flavour.
I don't know about cheese and meteors, but Umeå's terroir has certainly yielded an intriguing city, with a quirky, frontier vibe. For such a comparatively remote place, it has a remarkably diverse and vibrant cultural life: for example it is famed in Sweden for music – both opera and hardcore heavy metal – and for its contemporary art museum, Bildmuséet a properly world-class, seven-storey wonder, both in terms of its gorgeous Henning Larsen architecture and its ambitious programme of exhibitions.
Umeå is a youthful, fast-growing place, all of which bodes well for Capital of Culture year. Just so long as they steer clear of the rotten herring.
• The trip was provided by Visit Umea (visitumea.se). Norwegian (norwegian.com) flies from various UK airports to Umeå, via Stockholm, from £165 return. Accommodation was provided by Hotel Aveny (+46 90 134100, profilhotels.se/hotelaveny, doubles from £92). Grand Hotel, Stockholm (+46 8 679 3560, grandhotel.se, has doubles from £295 a night). More information from mathiasdahlgren.com and umea2014.se
• this article was amended on 12 February 2014. An earlier version of the caption on the first image failed to credit the photographer.
