Finally, after five years and a three-day, 850km drive I got to Faviken. It seemed as deserted as the rest of northern Sweden and it took us ten minutes to find someone: a kitchen junior running through the snow pulling a cart laden with king crab legs, wearing only short-sleeved, thin cotton chef's whites. It looked like a scene from a North Korean prison camp, bar the king crab legs. Eventually we found chef Magnus Nilsson himself, whose kindness belies his Game of Thrones appearance and austere, monastic reputation.

The dining room is in the old barn, with vast, ancient low beams, low lighting and whole cured hams and dried fish and a wolfskin coat as slightly macabre hanging decorations. There, after a sauna, I'm served probably the most extraordinary meal I'll ever eat: 24 tiny courses, each designed to mess with your head. There are unfamiliar ingredients: fermented carrots and lupin curds. There are familiar ingredients used in jarring ways: the desserts are made with bone marrow, vegetables, and meat. And there's stuff you never expected to see on a menu, like the egg coated in ash, or the broths of decomposing leaves and moss, or pine tree crumble. All of it tastes like nothing you've tasted before. Some of it tastes better than almost anything else you've eaten. And some of it just doesn't taste like food: you wouldn't ask for second helpings of the spruce syrup on the ice cream, but when did you ever taste a tree before?