- Written by: Mona Biedrzycka
The morning of March 6 arrived in Stavanger with an improbable blue sky. I had packed for another Norway: wet, grey, severe, the North Sea pressing against an oil town built to withstand it. The cold was certainly there. The rest of the forecast had gone missing.
Stavanger’s prosperity is easy to spot around the harbour. Offshore vessels share the water with pleasure boats; the compact wooden city has spent more than half a century living beside an industry whose scale reaches far beyond it.
Rogaland Comes Before RE-NAA
Torill Renaa had made other arrangements. Meeting her reorganised the day within minutes. The cautious choreography that usually surrounds a visit to a three-Michelin-star restaurant never had a chance. Soon, we were heading towards the water. A boat would take us across the fjord, away from Stavanger and into the region Sven Erik and Torill had decided we should see before we ate at their restaurant.
From the boat, Rogaland was all interruption. Water enters the land, islands break the water, houses appear beneath steep slopes, and cultivated ground occupies whatever space the rock permits. Stavanger’s restaurants speak frequently about proximity. From here, the word acquired measurements. The sea, farms and city belonged to the same working territory.
Rogaland is one of Norway’s most productive agricultural regions. Its farms account for a fifth of Norway’s animal production and its greenhouses grow 85 per cent of the country’s tomatoes. Beyond the docks are fields, sheep farms, and an intricate coastline that supplies kitchens with fish and shellfish. Offshore engineering, agriculture and fishing operate close enough to see one another. Stavanger’s wealth could support an ambitious restaurant; the surrounding coast and countryside gave Sven something worth cooking.
By the time we reached the Ådnøy farm, on the island somewhere in the middle of Høgsfjorden, the polished apparatus surrounding Norway’s first three-star restaurant outside Oslo had been replaced by Sven Erik cooking fish soup in a wooden building overlooking the fjord.
Fiskesuppe belongs to homes, harbours and family kitchens across Norway, changing with the catch, the season and whoever is holding the ladle. Sven Erik served it as our first meal with him in a barn. He offered no thesis on Norwegian cuisine. He cooked.
Its pleasures are immediate: temperature, broth, fish, the balance between richness and acidity. Everyone knows what the dish is supposed to do. A reputation is of little help to the broth. What made this one different? Cod, shrimps, turbot, mountain trout and mussels on top of a traditional base of vegetables, cream and dill oil. This taste demanded an additional serving and effectively spoiled any future fiskesuppe for me.
Sven Erik stayed near the stove while we moved to the farmhouse to enjoy the butter-roasted celeriac and the steak with truffle sauce, then joined us to share the almond cake at the end of the evening.
By night, the city felt distant. We stayed beside the fjord, surrounded by the water we had crossed that afternoon. We had yet to enter RE-NAA or taste the menu that had brought Michelin’s inspectors back to Stavanger.
I had imagined a slow morning before dinner at RE-NAA. Torill had other plans. By mid-morning, we were climbing towards Preikestolen.
The trail rises through forest, across exposed stone and up sections cut into the mountain. Torill moved ahead, entirely at home with the idea of several hours of walking before an evening at a three-star restaurant. From the plateau, Lysefjord lay more than six hundred metres below us, the water running between walls of rock towards the coast.
At the top, Torill served pancakes with hot dogs, a local habit and a Renaa family tradition, brought up as a surprise for her guests. RE-NAA was still hours away; Torill had already begun service.
Later that evening, sea urchin, squid, langoustine, cod, monkfish and reindeer arrived with their distances already attached.
Sven Erik’s Norwegian and Italian Inheritance
Ask Sven Erik about his squid and, sooner or later, you arrive at a spinach lasagne in Emilia-Romagna.
His father was Italian, his mother Norwegian, and neither side of the family appears to have regarded cooking as a hobby. Sven Erik remembers his Italian grandparents blanching spinach, crushing it, working it into dough and rolling the sheets by hand. The labour took hours and produced something that, as he puts it, “never tastes like what you get in cheap places.” He says this with the impatience of a man who considers the evidence conclusive.
On his Norwegian grandparents’ farm, autumn meant slaughtering, vats of blood pudding and sausages made for the months ahead. Then the 1970s arrived with tins, packets and freeze-dried convenience. Work disappeared from domestic kitchens, followed by some of the flavour. Sven Erik remembers the change because he had seen the alternative: people cooking according to the animal, the harvest and the time required.
Italy reinforced the lesson from another direction. There, hours spent making lasagne caused no existential crisis. Nobody needed to describe the process as artisanal. It was lunch.
Professional kitchens initially gave Sven Erik a stricter education. In Trondheim and Oslo, serious cooking remained firmly anchored in French classicism: Escoffier, stocks, sauces, hierarchy and repetition. The Norwegian pantry supplied the raw material; France still wrote most of the instructions.
New York interfered with that arrangement. Sven Erik joined David Burke at Park Avenue Café in 1997 and entered a kitchen moving at what he remembers as a savage pace. Yuzu and bok choy appeared alongside the French techniques he already knew. Ingredients crossed borders freely, experimentation was part of the job, and novelty had to survive service rather than conversation. The experience loosened his cooking without relieving it of discipline.
Years later, the whole untidy history appears in a squid from the Skagerrak. Sven Erik cures it in seaweed, steams it for exactly one minute and cuts it into ribbons. Black garlic, fermented and grilled lemon, browned squid butter and toasted sourdough crumbs follow. He calls the dish “pasta without pasta”. Emilia-Romagna supplies the memory, Norway supplies the squid, France keeps the sauce in order, and New York gives everyone permission to be at the same address.
Inside RE-NAA, the Squid Can Wait
By evening, Torill has exchanged hiking clothes for service and appears entirely refreshed, an achievement I find personally suspicious. Now she is ready to host twenty-four people for several hours, fresh as someone who had climbed nothing more demanding than a staircase.
Before service, Sven Erik gathers the brigade around the central worktop. He speaks; they listen. At the end, everyone strikes the surface with both hands. The sound is brief and emphatic, the culinary equivalent of kicking the tyres before driving at speed. Seconds later, the group disperses, and the kitchen resumes its preparations.
RE-NAA keeps its cooks close to the guests. Sven Erik remains visible, as do the hands completing each course. Torill and restaurant manager Kristoffer Aga move through the same compact space with the front-of-house team. A cook can see how a dish is received. A sommelier can delay the next pour when a conversation takes longer than expected.
The first courses arrive quickly. Smoked daikon with tarragon and ponzu gives a root vegetable the sharpness of an opening argument. Sea urchin from Tromsø follows, in its shell, with finger lime and fermented green strawberries cutting through its marine sweetness. Fermentation works in minute quantities, supplying acidity, depth, or a change in texture before receding into the background of the ingredient.
Sven has spent years preserving ingredients through the productive months. Berries are fermented, vegetables pickled, seafood cured and other products dried for later use. By March, the pantry contains traces of several seasons. Spring may be late in Stavanger, but the previous summer has been kept busy.
Then comes the squid.
The biography makes the dish funnier. Here is a chef using the full apparatus of a three-star kitchen to produce something recognisable as pasta while refusing to use pasta. The ribbons have the tenderness and slight resistance the conceit requires. Black garlic brings sweetness, and grilled lemon supplies bitterness.
Langoustine from Bjørnafjorden is brushed with rosehip vinegar and served with a creamy emulsion. Arctic cod from Lofoten arrives with vin jaune sauce and anchovy butter. The cod is translucent; vin jaune and anchovy butter give it the French backbone Sven Erik learned before New York encouraged him to misbehave.
The menu’s geography stretches beyond Rogaland when the product justifies the journey. Tromsø, Lofoten and Røros all appear during the evening. Sven Erik buys from people who understand how he will use what they send. The conversation can concern the size of a langoustine, the handling of a fish or the point at which a vegetable should be picked.
A grilled monkfish glazed with mushrooms brings peas, chanterelles and birch vinaigrette. Reindeer from Røros follows from the wood-fired grill, served with berries and sweet koji. Sven Erik likes acidity and bitterness, and here his Italian inheritance may be more revealing than the squid. Italian cooking has a long appetite for char, bitter leaves, citrus peel and flavours that refuse correction by sugar. At RE-NAA, acidity and bitterness keep richness alert. Sweetness gets fewer opportunities to settle the matter, including at dessert.
Wine Is Only One of Torill’s Competitive Sports
Torill let me wander between the Experiential and non-alcoholic pairings, which is how a lacto-fermented Norwegian pear drink with rosewater came to follow wine without being treated as an intermission.
She was twelve when service first looked glamorous. The waiters at a buffet restaurant were so immaculate that a farm girl from Klepp mistook theirs for the best job in the world. Nobody showed her the hours. By the time she discovered those, the damage was done. She liked the pressure.
For much of her career, she spent making sure the people who followed her knew exactly what the job demanded. Young waiters and sommeliers are trained for competitions; service is treated as a profession worth choosing with open eyes. In 2020, that work made Torill the only waiter to receive the Ingrid Espelid Hovig Food Culture Prize.
Bocuse d’Or gives her appetite for pressure its least forgiving test. In Trondheim in 2024, she led thirty-two servers. Once a candidate released a plate, Torill controlled its passage to the judges, cameras and press. Everything had to arrive identically and on time; an error could affect a career. She compares arriving at the handover to a boxer entering the ring. People move.
Asked whether she and Sven always agree, Torill does not pretend. You choose your battles. Sven decides the menu; she runs the operation. The arrangement has survived since the day they signed their first lease and brought their first child home from the hospital.
At RE-NAA, Torill develops the pairings with the wine director and restaurant manager, Kristoffer Aga, the head sommelier, Sander Johnsson, and the beverage team. Their cellar has collected Star Wine List awards with embarrassing regularity, covering Austrian and Californian wines, sparkling wines, cider, and Norway’s best long list. The non-alcoholic pairing receives the same restless attention: fruit, vegetables, kombucha and light fermentation, with sweetness kept under firm supervision.
During service, Torill rarely stops. When she does, it is to chat, check on a guest or laugh. Then she is off again. The toilets play Prince. Only Prince. Behind the door, the funk has been left in charge.
Inability to stand back
The Renaas have little left to prove. Over more than fifteen years, they have built the company, trained the team and persuaded travellers to come to Stavanger for dinner. RE-NAA retained its three Michelin stars for 2026 and remains both a destination for travellers and an occasion for Stavanger.
A reasonable next move might have involved a holiday. Being busy seems to be their preferred condition. Their 2026 calendar offered little space for one.
Sirkus Renaa opened its first Oslo address at Harbitz Torg on 8 May. Another Sirkus was already planned for Bjørvika in the autumn. In Stavanger, their attention was fixed on Matbaren, the French bistro built around Norwegian ingredients. When it closed in 2024, Sven Erik compared losing it to losing a foot and an arm. Evidently, he was not prepared to leave it missing.
Months after my visit to Stavanger, I watched from home as Sven Erik and Torill reopened Matbaren on 4 June. They stood arm in arm before the crowd, visibly proud and happy to have it back.
As Sven Erik begins his part of the opening speech, Torill turns towards him. After all the restaurants, children, leases, prizes and risks, she still looks delighted that he is the person beside her. I would give a lot to be looked at that way.
Practicalities
RE-NAA by Sven Erik and Torill Renaa
Address: Nordbøgata 8, 4006 Stavanger, Norway, inside the Eilert Smith Hotel.
Open: Wed to Sat, dinner only. Closed Sun to Tue.
Reservations: Book RE-NAA
Accolades, 2026:
Three Michelin stars, retained in the 2026 Nordic Guide. RE-NAA remains Norway’s first three-star restaurant outside Oslo. Michelin Guide 2026
Falstaff Restaurant of the Year Norway 2026, with 100 points and four forks. Falstaff Guide 2026
La Liste score: 94/100. La Liste
International Austrian Wine List of the Year 2025. Star Wine List
Member of Les Grandes Tables du Monde. Les Grandes Tables du Monde
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