Genbergs Sommarcafé

Beautifully set beside the lock on the Strömsholm Canal stands the old ironworks manor where the Genberg family spends its summers. The café opens here on selected summer days and the counter fills up with freshly baked bread, buns and croissants.

At four in the morning the oven is lit. While most people are still asleep, the first bread of the day goes in. A while later the bakery fills with the scent of croissants and freshly baked buns.

Breakfast rolls with Vesterhavsost cheese, yoghurt with homemade blueberry jam and toasted granola, lemon cakes, butter buns and the now much talked about bacon & maple croissant – the range changes constantly and follows appetite and season rather than a set recipe. What is baked that day is what is served. And whatever is left over is welcome to come along home in a paper bag.

The story began in 2017. Max needed a summer job, Alice was in London, and their parents Elisabeth and Mikael wanted a project that would bring the family together. The inspiration came from Gotland, where small cafés and bakeries have been obvious day-trip destinations for many summers. They wanted to create the same feeling in Virsbo – a place for locals and passers-by to find, but also a reason to take a detour.

No one in the family actually works with food day to day. They come instead from different creative professions, something that leaves its mark on both the setting and what is served. The only one who works professionally with food is younger brother Max, who has worked at Carmen Kitchen in Amsterdam and most recently at Apollo Bar in Copenhagen.

In the first few years everything was baked in ordinary domestic ovens and the buns proved in the family fridge. Since then the business has grown slowly, one step at a time. An oven here, a proofing cabinet there. Today the house holds a fully equipped artisan bakery, but the philosophy is the same as when it all began: to do things properly, without hurrying.

In the evenings the tables are sometimes laid again. The café then turns into a small wine bar where simple dishes are made from produce from the garden, the forest and the growers round about. During the summer guest chefs and bakers turn up now and then, and on some Saturday mornings breakfast is served to Melodikrysset on the radio.

Perhaps that is precisely what makes Genbergs so special. That nothing feels contrived. Just a family baking what they long for themselves, setting out what they like and letting the rest happen at its own pace.