Ystad’s 5 best restaurants (and must-try dishes)

Ystad’s old-town prettiness can go dangerously polite; Le Petit Bistrot has a better inheritance. Jennie Fredman Benson and Jonas Fredman Benson opened the family-run restaurant in 2021 with Jennie’s father, Crister Svantesson, one of Swedish gastronomy’s great names and the chef who put Gothenburg’s Johanna on the map with Leif Mannerström. Since Svantesson’s death in 2025, the place reads less like a star-chef project than a family bistro carrying a very specific classic Swedish-French line. The current menu moves through oysters, rillettes, cured halibut, raw beef with chorizo and manchego, seafood stew, steak minute and tarte tatin.

The old station building gives Tryffelsvinet Ystad more drama than its Kivik original, but the appetite is the same: Italian-leaning, wine-friendly and built for sharing. Start with vitello tonnato or burrata verde with grilled asparagus, ramson pesto, basil, roasted almonds and bottarga. Then go pasta: ravioli with cheese cream, truffle, sage butter, ricotta cream and pine nuts, or the long-cooked ragù Bolognese. The raw beef with truffle mayo and fries has proper pull too. Kivik still carries the original neighbourhood-restaurant feeling; Ystad makes it bigger, louder and closer to the tracks.

Hidden in Ystad’s former military area, Tumült takes its name from the Swedish word for commotion, with the umlaut doubling as a wink to chef Daniel Müllern. His hometown restaurant is built for noise, sharing plates and a menu that runs from lobster taco with Korean mayo to tuna tartare, tonkatsu, raw beef and a 500-gram Swedish entrecôte. Lunch changes by week, with the much-liked schnitzel turning up as a recurring signature. Dinner is more unruly: generous, a little fatty, with real hits, some misses and zero fine-dining stiffness.

Per Helsas gård gives this one its charge before the food arrives. Inside one of Scandinavia’s best-preserved half-timbered blocks, with parts dating back to the seventeenth century, Grändens Mat works best when the courtyard is open and Ystad stops pretending to be modest. Chef duo André Svensson and David Norström run the kitchen on Swedish meat and chicken, local produce where possible and a menu that makes seasonal sense: poké bowls for summer, long-cooked stew when the weather turns, plus fika, lunch, dinner and take-away. The food is easygoing and always tasty, but the setting does the heavy lifting.

Days in Ystad get sharper at Söderberg & Sara, the stone-oven bakery Per Söderberg and Tilde Möller run with proper grain discipline and zero pastry theatre. White Guide Café named it Sweden’s Bakery of the Year in 2018, which tracks: the bread is slow, the flour comes from small local producers and the coffee is taken seriously. We go for the cardamom buns first, then whatever looks too good to ignore. There are sandwiches, lunch dishes, pizza Wednesdays and a Malmö sibling by S:t Knut, but the Ystad original still has the strongest pull.