The Restaurant

The Restaurant (Vår tid är nu, literally Our Time Is Now) is a four-season SVT drama created by Ulf Kvensler that ran from 2017 to 2021. Set in a fictional but carefully detailed Stockholm establishment named Djurgårdskällaren, the series tracks the Löwander family — owners and staff of the restaurant — across three decades of post-war Swedish life, beginning on the evening of 7 May 1945 and continuing through the political, generational and cultural reconfigurations of the 1960s. Harald Hamrell directed the entire run and is generally regarded as the series' authorial voice.

The ensemble is anchored by Suzanne Reuter as the formidable matriarch Helga and by Adam Lundgren and Charlie Gustafsson as her two sons, who return from the war to opposed visions of the family business. The production design, costume and styling departments led by Camilla Olsson recreated period Stockholm with the attentiveness of a public-broadcasting historical drama in the BBC tradition; the score by Adam Nordén and the photography of Erik Persson hold a register closer to Italian and Scandinavian cinema of the same eras than to the broader streaming-era period-drama palette.

Vår tid är nu won the International Emmy for Best Non-English Language Drama in 2018 and was sold to broadcasters across Europe, becoming one of SVT's most-watched dramas of the decade. The Guardian, Sveriges Television's own audience research, and the Swedish Television Academy all noted the unusual care the series took with working-class characters within an upstairs-downstairs structure.