Most towns on the North Shore would be lucky to claim a great restaurant specializing in either Asian or Nordic cuisine. Swampscott doesn’t just have both — it has both in the same building.
The menu at Humphrey Street’s Njord Haven is split into two halves: Reclaiming Scandinavia, which alludes to Chef Don Golden’s Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish ancestry, and Travels in Asia, which references the trips that have changed how he approaches cooking.
Golden doesn’t use the word fusion to describe his restaurant, though — he prefers alchemy.
“When I can add lingonberry to an unagi
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.”
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 hotel, living without electricity for a few days, and all the while trying phenomenal street food.
“It was the game-changing moment for me as a chef,” Golden said. “There’s ingredients I’ve never seen. I’ll be going back in a couple weeks, I’ll still see ingredients I’ve never seen, that I didn’t imagine existed.”
“It’s limitless, it’s a frontier without boundaries to me,” he added.
During the pandemic, Golden started to consider opening a restaurant more seriously. His dream had always been to have a restaurant in Cambridge. He had found great options in Cambridge, Marblehead, and at 408 Humphrey St. in Swampscott, facing Nahant Bay and the Boston skyline.
“One of my mentors told me, ‘Don, that’s a million dollar view. A guy like you will never get that view again,’” Golden said. “He goes, ‘If you don’t take that restaurant with that view, you’re gonna hate yourself some day.’”
Being able to get a full liquor license in Swampscott further sweetened the deal.
Around the same time, Golden had a DNA test done. While he had been raised very Irish, he learned that he also learned he has a lot of Scandinavian ancestry as well. He decided to take it as a challenge and use one half of his menu to reclaim his heritage by learning how to cook Scandinavian food, while using the other half to serve the Asian food he had become obsessed with in his travels.
“I very quickly started learning that Scandinavians and northern Europeans ferment and cure and preserve, because they have such a limited two-month growing season,” Golden said. “And the people in Southeast Asia do all the exact same things. The techniques are the same basically, but the ingredients are different because it’s so hot that everything will spoil.”
At this point, Golden started to realize that the seemingly disparate cuisines of his restaurant had a surprising amount in common.
For the name, he was inspired by Njord, the good god of the ocean who protects sailors in Norse mythology, when he was looking at the shore outside the restaurant on a stormy day.
“I thought, ‘It’s the ocean right outside the door, I’ve got Njord out there,’” Golden said. “Surely that day with the storm, he was sending me the message.”
Golden said he supports orphanages in Saigon and Bangkok, the latter of which mostly helps refugees from Myanmar. He makes trips to Southeast Asia yearly, and said that after this year’s trip in February the restaurant will make a continued commitment to support them.
“These kids are wonderful, they’re so sweet and full of energy, and the least I can do is make them some bananas Foster and make them smile a little bit,” Golden said.
Njord Haven’s current crew, Golden said, is the best in its history. He added that having a diverse crew ensures strength, and the employees are from a range of countries including Vietnam, Cape Verde, the United States, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic.
“When you build these monotonic teams, they really are not very dynamic,” he said.
Golden is also very appreciative of Njord Haven’s regulars and Swampscott, which he said has accepted his off-the-wall concept. He said the people at Town Hall have been very supportive, and the neighboring restaurants have been kind as well.
Above all, he said that everything he makes is an homage to the different cooks who have made an impact on him.
“When I cook, I want these people in heaven to look down on me and go, ‘Ah, Donny’s doing a good job, he remembered me,” Golden said. “That’s really what I want them to see, that I’ve learned from them.”
