Philip Stenvall grew up in Sweden, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his resume.

“Funnily enough, I never really cooked Swedish food,” the chef says. “I mean, I cooked it when I was a young boy, like meatballs and mash and all that, but I never really cooked it professionally.”

Instead, Stenvall left Sweden in his early twenties and dived into the cosmopolitan cuisines of London, working at French restaurants and gathering up the skills to run the show himself before moving to Australia. After a few years of helming kitchens here, Stenvall eventually found the flavours of home calling, opening up Sydney’s Scandinavian-influenced Bar Suze in 2021, alongside Greg Bampton.

“We started to tinker a bit and tried to deliver something different – northern food,” Stenvall says. “It was using more of those traditional flavours, like a lot of pickling flavours and smoky flavours, and lots of dairy.” Stenvall’s Bar Suze menus constantly shifted and changed, a consistent feature of his style. You’d find dishes featuring smoked prawns, mussels or fish, northern fruits like lingonberries and currants, and lesser-known classics such as omelette suédoise – a Swedish take on the bombe Alaska with lingonberry sorbet, ginger ice-cream and meringue. Whatever you found, though, never stuck around long – the mystery box aspect of it was always one of the joys of visiting Bar Suze.

That restlessness carried into Stenvall’s two post-Bar Suze joints, BS Pasta Palace and, most recently, Caravin. The chef gets the guidance he needs from Square’s tracking tools, which help him keep the dishes that are working, see what guests are loving, and figure out what comes next.

“I just get bored so easily,” Stenvall says. “Sometimes I have [ingredients] in the restaurant and I feel like, ‘Okay, this is interesting – let’s see what I can do with that.’ You find new ways of cooking ingredients or just flavours. There’s so much fun stuff to do and I get to do it every single day, so I’m pretty lucky.”

With Pasta Palace, Stenvall’s Scandi menus switched to Italian and Italian-American flavours – spaghetti and meatballs, pizza fritta (fried pizza dough with garlic butter), fettuccine Alfredo. The space, though, was a short-lived holdover while Stenvall and Bampton worked on their next diner, the Parisian-style wine bar Caravin, in Sydney’s Potts Point. For Stenvall, it’s a return to the cuisine that got him hooked on being a chef to begin with.

“Caravin is the kind of food I’ve always wanted to cook,” Stenvall says. “I’ve always loved cooking French food because the first restaurant where I worked was British and French, and there’s just so much versatility in it.” Inspired by a new wave of Parisian bistros, the menu at Caravin combines old school French dishes (think cassoulet, pot-au-feu, roulade aux saucisse) with, frankly, whatever Stenvall is feeling at the time. “I’ve been quite obsessed with quail lately, and I’ll do that with different garnishes and sauces,” he says. “I did a quail in one of those classic peppercorn sauces which is quite nice.”

But Stenvall’s signature style – never cooking the same thing for too long – remains. At Caravin, his daily dishes are chalked up and wiped down from the blackboard, and some never return. But his technology provides oversight.

“I really enjoy how streamlined Square is – it’s just so easy,” Stenvall says. “I used to do this crab toast at Caravin since day one. Every week, I have a look to see how many we’ve sold. Say, for example, it was 100 a week and I noticed in the past month they went down to like 60 or 50. So I thought maybe it’s time to actually get rid of this one and just do something different.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Square.