Sifton Soundtracks: Aquavit, b/w The Cardigans, "Iron Man"

Sifton, again so soon. Sifton takes one of Aquavit's previous three stars and puts it in his pocket, leaving it with two. Aquavit shares a homeland with this summer's bisexual hacker It Girl, and rest assured, Sifton cannot resist going there in the lede:

IT has been a Swedish summer here in New York. There seem to be Stieg Larsson novels on every fourth lap on the D train choogling over the Manhattan Bridge, on every third iPad glowing in the dark of the jitney driving east on the Long Island Expressway toward Montauk.

And:

Up front is a bistro serving fairly traditional Swedish food: meatballs and gravlax. In back, past a long bar, is a formal dining room. It is comfortable if slightly shopworn back there, a company boardroom and meeting space, replete with chic wooden plates and scarred wooden floors. Mikael Blomkvist, the hero of the Larsson novels, might arrive at any moment to blow smoke in the face of a criminal plutocrat.

You have to feel bad for the Swedes, who will have to wait a while until something displaces these books as the primary referent for folks elsewhere -- it's kind of like if you are from Chicago and you travel in Europe, people used to assume your two next door neighbors were Al Capone and Michael Jordan.

It could be worse, for the review and the restaurant -- there are no gags about torturing fish as if they were hapless victims of Avocat Bjurgmann, for instance, but Sifton does make it clear why he is turning down the rheostat:

Aquavit’s dining room can be somewhat lonely these days, only a little more than half full at peak hours. There is a sour scent to some of the passageways, the sort that flowers cannot battle.

So, a song from Swedes about a fellow a little past his prime seems like just the thing. Play us off, The Cardigans:

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