Small plates: Stockholm on a budget

Having recovered from the sticker shock of just about everything in Stockholm, I decided to try to forget the all-too-simple exchange rate and not worry about what I was spending. It’s hard not to notice that your 200 SEK lunch just set you back £20 for a salad and a soda but I made a valiant effort to stick it all on a credit card and think about it later. One restaurant that came up in my research as good value was 12 Kungstensgatan, a chic little place that specialises in small plates to share. Now, I am not a huge fan of the small plate phenomenon. It started in New York when I lived there and seemed to be mostly a way for restaurants to charge not much less than main course prices for not much more than appetiser portions. As someone who regularly gets nervous that tapas will leave me broke and hungry, the prospect of artfully arranged modernist plates at £13 a pop is alarming, to say the least. So, a small plate place in Stockholm as “good value” seemed a strange idea but one I was willing to test out.