01907 Spring 2024

20 20 | 01907
01907
Writer Stuart Foster
cuts into the lamb
pinnekjøtt served
with rosemary glaze,
smoked garlic oil, and
lingonberry gel.
Sesame crush ahi with
pickled vegetables,
sesame oil powder,
lingonberry unagi
sauce, and wasabi.
Gui Chai, a chive rice
cake, served with soy
sauce and sambal.
HAVEN, continued from page 18
and it tastes great, I do it,” Golden said.
“But I’m not Oppenheimer, I’m more of a
caveman… At the end of the day it’s about
fire, it’s about wood and sticks. Cooking’s very
primal, and that’s the thing I like about it.”
Njord Haven has been open for nearly two
years, and the first thing Golden did was tear
the walk-in fridge out of the kitchen. Jason
Stokes, the restaurant’s bartender, said he
thought it was a terrible idea at first, but he
quickly realized the point: to ensure the Njord
Haven is only using fresh ingredients.
Before the restaurant opens for the day,
Golden goes shopping at markets across the
greater Boston area for ingredients and drives
them to Swampscott in his Honda Accord. He
grows a number of the Scandinavian ingredients
himself.
If Golden doesn’t have access to the
ingredients for a recipe that day, it won’t go on
the menu. As a result, Njord Haven prints a new
menu every single day.
Regardless of what dishes are available for the
day, Njord Haven’s menu gives you hit after hit.
The pinnekjøtt, a Norwegian grilled lamb chop,
comes with a smoked garlic oil and rosemary
gel that combine for something irresistible. The
wok-seared broccoli completely changed my
view of the vegetable. The incredibly high heat
of the restaurant’s wok combines with oyster
sauce and sesame to bring an incredible texture
and deep flavor from this humble ingredient.
In the Phu Quoc chicken, the alchemy
really stands out. The chicken is brined in skyr,
an Icelandic yogurt, deep fried, and topped
with palm sugar and fish sauce. Then, it gets
drenched in an “herbal monsoon” featuring Thai
basil, cilantro, and mint to create an incredibly
balanced, resonant, and refreshing dish.
“I hate when you have a good meal and you
wake up the next day and you feel like you were
in a boxing match,” Golden said. “I want our
food to be very clean.”
From busboy to head chef
Golden’s first experience cooking came when
he worked as a busboy at a Greek restaurant
when he was a teenager.
“Many chefs never work in the front, and it
really got me very connected to the trials and
tribulations of being a customer and the trials
and tribulations of being a server,” Golden said.
The chef, who had gotten tired of cooking
lunch for Golden, started teaching him how to
cook it himself.
One slow day there, the chef had drunk a
little too much when a tour bus with about 40
people pulled up. With the chef unable to get
off the barstool, one of the waitresses asked
Golden if he would be able to cook one of the
few dishes he knew for the crowd.
“It actually went really well, people were
raving about the food,” Golden said. “I got
promoted to the kitchen the next day.”
He went on to play in a rock band, and he
and his bandmates, with little to spend, lived off
of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hot dogs,
and pizza.
This was all pretty unhealthy, and Golden
decided to use his experience at the restaurant
to start cooking for his bandmates. Armed with
a cast iron, a Dutch oven, and a copy of “Chef
Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen,” he
would make Cajun and Creole food for them
on the side of the road.
He went to cooking school while his band
was working on a record deal and went on to
work at Allegra (before it was the Cactus Club)
in Boston and as the executive chef at Goulston
& Storrs, a law firm, where he cooked for
then-Sen. Barack Obama, Al Gore, and Tom
Brady. He got familiar with preparing Spanish
tapas, which informed his passion for small
plates shared between diners.
Golden then got a job at Shriners Children’s,
cooking for burn victims. His boss gave him
free reign in the kitchen, and Golden started
cooking all kinds of different dishes for the
patients.
“They don’t want to eat American food if
they’re from Honduras or Mongolia,” Golden
said. “When you haven’t eaten for a long time
and you’ve been tragically injured, you want your
version of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or
French toast.”
When the doctors at Mass General learned
about what Golden was doing at Shriners, they
started coming in droves to eat there. A group
of doctors told him they had a clinic in Saigon,
Vietnam and invited him there to repay him.
On that trip, he explored Vietnam,
Cambodia, and Thailand, going off the grid,
staying with a family when he couldn’t find a