Holger B. Nielsen might have been tempting fate on November 5, 1948, when he opened the Selandia restaurant at 711 Elliott Avenue West in Seattle. Some six years earlier Bill Rose, who billed himself as “Seattle’s most famous sea food chef,” had opened Rose’s Sea Food at the same location, in a modern building overlooking Puget Sound, but his timing was certainly off, what with the nation having just entered World War II. Rose soon abandoned the restaurant business to build homes in Seattle, and in 1944 John B. O’Keefe and his wife, Lois, opened O’Keefe’s Marine Grill in the same space, advertising it as “Seattle’s Distinctive Shore Dinner Rendezvous.”
In 1940 Nielsen, a native of Esbjerg, Denmark, had launched his own brand of Scandinavia’s trademark distilled spirit though the Old Monastery Company of Seattle. It evidently wasn’t a match for its imported rivals, however, and “Nielsen’s Aquavit” soon disappeared from the market. In opening Selandia, which he billed as “Seattle’s New, Unique, Smorgasbord,” Nielsen hoped to succeed where Rose and O’Keefe had failed. To draw attention to his new restaurant, he had a billboard-size sign painted on the side of the building fronting Elliott Avenue that depicted the island of Selandia on a map of Denmark, calling it the “ancestral home of the Nordic Vikings.” (Selandia is the Latin name for Sjaelland, Denmark’s most populous island and home to Copenhagen, its capital city.) And to make sure things ran smoothly, he hired John E. Berglund, who’d formerly managed the Bit of Sweden restaurant in Los Angeles, to Selandia’s its day-to-day operations.
From the beginning, Nielsen’s advertisements for the restaurant described it in glowing terms. “In the course of a scant five months the Selandia has earned itself a reputation seldom attained in less than a period of years,” one ad in the Seattle Times said. “The Viking table’s 72 square feet of surface is laden for your pleasure with not less than 55 varieties of savory taste-thrills.” Other ads went so far as to call Selandia “America’s Finest Smorgasbord.”
In 1949 Nat Lund, a restaurant critic for the Seattle Times, offered his readers this tempting portrait of the fare at Selandia: “In Holger B. Nielsen’s immaculate establishment, the smorgasbord buffet offers between 60 and 70 items, ranging from four varieties of cheese through Waldorf salad, poached salmon, Swedish meat balls and brown beans, shrimp, crab, roast beef, apples baked with cinnamon, devilled eggs and stuffed tomatoes to boiled tongue and grilled meat patties bedecked with butter-fried onions. Mr. Nielsen advises at least three plate-filling junkets around his horn of plenty, and each trip yields some fresh discovery.” One such discovery was “skidden eggs,” which Lund described as “a Nielsen invention made up of hard-boiled eggs buried in a creamy mustards sauce.”
In 1952 Nielsen sold Selandia to Gunnar Hansen and Sigurd E. Jensen, two of his employees, and used the proceeds to buy the El Rancho nightclub at 250th and Aurora Avenue. Hansen, who had started out at Selandia as a busboy in 1949, was still in his mid-20s; Jensen, his cousin, had been the restaurant’s bartender. They added a new cocktail lounge, Viking’s Corner, at the front of the building and also established a catering service, but the main attraction at Selandia remained the smorgasbord.
“Choose Whatever You Wish—Eat as Much as You Wish,” a typical ad for Selandia’s “Smorgasbord Supreme” promised in 1956. “60 Different Dishes–$2.60.”
Those unlimited trips around the restaurant’s “horn of plenty” ended in 1960, however, when Selandia closed without notice.
Chicken Livers, Danish Style
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Loading...From the day Holger B. Nielsen opened Selandia at 711 Elliott Avenue West in Seattle in 1948, this dish was a popular item on the restaurant's bountiful smorgasbord table, which typically featured upwards of 60 different items.
Ingredients
- 12 (about 1/2 pound) uncooked chicken livers
- 1/4 cup all-purpose flour for dredging
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 1 cup stemmed and chopped button mushrooms
- 1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
- 4 small ripe tomatoes, peeled and seeded
- 1/2 cup red Burgundy wine
- Chopped flat-leaf parsley, for serving
Instructions
Rinse the chicken livers. Cut each liver into two lobes, removing any sinew or membrane. Dry them on paper towels.
In a shallow bowl, blend the flour, salt, and white pepper. Dredge the pieces of liver in the flour mixture, then set them aside in one layer on a baking sheet.
Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat and add the chicken livers, mushrooms, onion, tomatoes, and wine. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for about 15 minutes or until the internal temperature of the livers reaches 165 degrees.
Remove from heat, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Notes
If you want to reduce the gamy taste of the chicken livers, you can soak them for up to three hours in ice-cold water or milk before rinsing them, patting them dry, and cooking them.
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