Chef
Fredrik Berselius
Chef and Owner, Aska
- Discipline
- Chef
- Based in
- New York City, New York, United States
- Venue
- Aska · Restaurant
Made By record
Awards & recognition
1 total
verified records
i. Biography
Before the work at Aska in Brooklyn, New York, the useful tension was already in place: Stockholm, Sweden, and New York as two different sets of conditions. In Fredrik Berselius’s case, Scandinavian tradition, climate, preservation, elemental ingredients, and memory formed one side of the practice; New York supplied the pressure of service, proximity to a different landscape, and a sharper professional register. He moved to New York in 2000, and the later cooking drew from those held impressions rather than from nostalgia as a fixed style. Technique entered through formal study and city kitchens. In New York City, Berselius studied at the Natural Gourmet Institute, then worked through demanding rooms where repetition, control, and discipline became part of the craft. The later restaurant language connected Scandinavian memory with the ingredients around his Brooklyn restaurant, making biography useful only where it could be translated into place, product, and service.
The Path
Training at Natural Gourmet Institute gave the foundation before the craft was tested in service as a cook at Aquavit in New York City, a cook at Per Se in New York City, and a cook at Corton in New York City until 2012. In Fredrik Berselius’s progression, those kitchens mark different forms of precision: mise en place under pressure, restraint in fine cooking, and the habit of treating small decisions as consequential. The value of the résumé is not its sequence alone, but the working habits it records. The pop-up tasting-menu format can function as a proving ground when the idea is narrow enough and the execution visible enough. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Berselius was co-runner of the pop-up tasting-menu restaurant at Frej (2012–2012), a short project that placed Scandinavian-inflected cooking into a Brooklyn setting without the insulation of a long-established dining room. Its brevity mattered less than its role as a practical test: menu, room, audience, and point of view compressed into one year. A permanent restaurant gives a language enough repetition to mature. Since 2012, Berselius has been the founder and chef of Aska; from 2018, he has also been a cookbook author there. The work in that dining room gathers the earlier materials—Sweden and New York, memory and immediate sourcing, instinct and exacting craft—into a structure built for continuity rather than a one-off statement.
The Work Today
New Nordic cuisine at the Brooklyn restaurant is rooted in Scandinavian influences and locally sourced Northeastern U.S. Ingredients. As chef and owner, Fredrik Berselius works in that overlap: a Swedish frame of reference applied to the seasons, materials, and surroundings of the Northeastern U.S. Region. The point is not to reproduce Scandinavia in Brooklyn, but to let Scandinavian influence meet landscape. The bridge is practical before it is symbolic. The kitchen emphasizes ingredients from the surrounding Northeastern U.S. Region while carrying the influence of Berselius’s Scandinavian homeland. That combination gives the cooking its orientation: heritage supplies memory and method; the local region supplies the product and constraint. The restaurant’s identity sits in how those two sources are edited together. The stated aim is an extraordinary guest experience that goes beyond the usual restaurant experience, with every element on the plate carrying meaning. In practice, that places pressure on selection and sequence: ingredients, textures, associations, and memories have to do work, not merely decorate the meal. Here, intention is treated as part of the mise en place. The blood course is one clear expression of that position. “Everyone talks about the blood course I serve. I want people to like the blood. It's very natural; it runs through the veins of every mammal.” Fredrik has said.
Career - Founder and chef — Aska, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2012–present) - Cook — Aquavit, New York City - Cook — Per Se, New York City - Cook — Corton, New Yo
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