Nobel nosh

In 1901, Emil von Behring ate brill garnished with shellfish in a creamy sauce; 61 years later, Watson, Crick and Wilkins celebrated with roast chicken and foie gras drizzled with Madeira sauce. And in 1997, Stanley Prusiner tucked into breast of squab with mushrooms, potatoes and onions in a sweet and sour sauce with raspberry vinegar.

On December 10 each year, the Stockholm City Hall plays host to a banquet in honor of that year's Nobel Laureates, when 1300 guests, 200 synchronized wait-staff, 10,000 flowers and mounds of gold-rimmed flatware fill the cavernous "blue" hall (which is in fact the color of red bricks).

Prize-winners and dignitaries aside, landing a seat at one of the banquet's 65 tables is nigh impossible. For the rest of us, the only chance to savor a taste of the Nobel experience is to head for the "Stadshuskällaren" restaurant, in the city hall's cellar.

Given enough notice the kitchen will whip up dishes from any Nobel banquet in history.

On the water's edge near the town center, the tall red brick tower of city hall is capped with three golden crowns that glow bright against the inky autumn sky on the evening of my visit. The restaurant's vaulted ceilings are decorated with murals of goddesses and wreaths; the atmosphere quiet but relaxed.

Our table was waiting with the full, kitschy Nobel banquet setting, including gold-stemmed glassware and gold-rimmed plates. A little brochure explained that setting the tables for the celebratory dinner - held on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death - occupies 28 people for 8 hours, and five people are employed just to "uncork the bottles of wine, etc."

My menu said I was the 1534th person to order the 2007 Nobel menu, a dinner first eaten by Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies, laureates for developing techniques to make knockout mice. It started with a dish of lobster pieces in a ring of jelly with a disc of dill-baked halibut, topped by a dome of orange fish roe and an apple salad plus "Nobel roll."

The menu for the banquet is the subject of elaborate secrecy. In September each year, three possible menus are presented to the Nobel Foundation for tasting and testing. The Foundation keeps the selected menu under wraps until the day of the banquet. These days, the goal is to choose a menu that has a Scandinavian flavor, while avoiding foods such as offal that might not have international appeal, according to a Foundation spokeswoman.

Over the decades, the menus have reflected the tastes of the times: in the 20s, turtle soup was popular, with ice cream for desert. By 1977, when Rosalyn Yalow won the medicine prize for her development of radioimmunoassay for peptide hormones, fashions had shifted toward smoked snow grouse with juniper berry and rowanberry jelly.

Head waiter Magnus Öqvist, a former interior designer, explained that the Nobel banquets account for about half the meals served by the restaurant. People like to order meals from years when their compatriots win prizes, he says. Japanese diners, for example, often order meals from 1994, when writer Kenzaburo Oe took the literature prize (sage-scented veal with mushrooms), or 2002, when Koichi Tanaka shared the chemistry prize (goat's cheese tart with beetroot).

Our second course consists of slices of cockerell with a tiny sausage held on top with a metal skewer, plus a cooked onion filled with creamy vegetables - elaborate in the extreme, like the entire Nobel exercise. Fortunately the waiters do not take themselves so seriously. "The people who work here think it's fun, and if they don't then they leave pretty quickly," Öqvist says.

Editor's Note (10/13/08): In a previous version of this story, the name of the Stadshuskällaren restaurant was misspelled. The mistake has been corrected, and a link to the restaurant's website has been added. The Scientist regrets the error.