Page One Feature

December 7, 2000

Guests Can't Seem to Resist
Souvenir From Nobel Dinner

STOCKHOLM -- Alfred Nobel, the shy Swedish inventor of dynamite and the creator of the Nobel Prizes, couldn't have anticipated what a wingding the dinner after the awards ceremony has become.

These days, it's an annual white-tie extravaganza with a million dollars in crystal that is used just once a year, flag-waving students in white hats, elaborate seating protocol and dining etiquette intricate enough to stump the world's best brains, some of whom are present. The whole thing is broadcast on live television.

"This is the greatest dinner party on earth," says Lars-Goran Andersson, maitre d'hotel at Stadshuset, the city hall. "But it's also the hardest to organize. I'm the choreographer. The waiters are ballet dancers."

A Tight Fit

And the guests are cramped. Each one gets just 21.6 inches of table space, a tight squeeze for a dinner that goes on for three hours. The king and queen of Sweden once enjoyed more spacious accommodations, but now they sit there elbow-to-elbow with everybody else.
 

Nobel laureates eat off white bone china with silver cutlery -- though dessert is eaten with gold.

The first Nobel Prize banquet, in Stockholm's Grand Hotel in 1901, had 118 male guests. This year's banquet next Sunday will follow a stately afternoon award ceremony at a Stockholm concert hall and will feed 1,373 guests of both sexes. That exceeds the capacity of the 1923 city hall's Blue Hall, so named because it was to be painted blue until the architect changed his mind and gave the room dark-brown brick walls.

Laureates are invited to bring about a dozen guests but often ignore the limit. Last year, the medicine laureate, Guenter Blobel, brought 49 people. Organizers seated 17 of them and arranged dinner at a restaurant for some of the others. Mr. Blobel had to pick up the tab. The whole Blobel party was invited to the ball after dinner.

With 13 laureates sharing the six, $900,000 prizes this year, the rules will be more strictly enforced. Laureates get their 12 dinner guests -- and seven more at the ball. Traditionally, King Carl XVI Gustaf sits next to the wife of the physics winner; this year his dinner companion is to be the eldest wife of the three men sharing the prize.

Paying Guests

Three weeks ago, as they do every year, two foundation officials met to begin work on the seating chart. They clip name tags of the guests to pieces of paper representing tables. Each year hundreds of other people ask about buying tickets to the party; they are all turned down. More than 60% of invited guests pay for the meal: Members of the various academies and prize-awarding institutions each shell out 875 kronor ($91.20 or 102.38 euros). About 90 people among the nonpaying guests sit at the table of honor and include the new laureates and their spouses, European royalty and chief executives of sponsoring companies such as Volvo and SAS. "Everyone wants to be here," says Gunilla Lagerfelt-Berg, who has arranged the seating and invitations for the past 16 Nobel banquets. "But space is limited."

Once seated, guests are expected to follow intricate Swedish etiquette. They can't drink from their glasses before they have been addressed by the president of the Nobel Committee, during whose remarks they must stand, holding their wine glasses with two fingers at the stem, no higher than the top button of a man's vest -- women just lift their glasses -- and not lower than the second button. After one sip, guests sit down, then immediately stand up again to repeat the act as the king speaks.

Swedish-style toasting goes on through the night, mainly among Swedes: Looking their toasting companion in the eye, they raise their glasses. Maintaining eye contact, they take a sip then raise their glasses again. The staring contest is said to date back to the Vikings, who were afraid the guy they were toasting might kill them if they blinked. Vikings had but one piece of silverware to eat with: a sharp knife.

Tea for One

Modern Nobel banquet guests have considerably more flatware, $1.6 million in table settings designed in 1991 for the 90th anniversary of the prize. In all, there are 6,750 glasses, 9,450 pieces of cutlery, 9,550 dishes -- and one tea cup, for Princess Lilian, 80 years old and the widow of the king's uncle, Prince Bertil. She doesn't drink coffee. The princess's cup was made expressly for her in 1991, but the cup and saucer were dropped just before they were to be presented to her. A new cup is kept in a handmade wooden box with the princess's monogram on it. The latest tempest: The saucer is missing. The rest of the dinnerware is stored behind bars.

Each guest gets a set of four crystal glasses, available in stores for anybody to buy for $197 -- a red-wine glass with a long golden stem, a shorter-stemmed dessert-wine glass, a champagne glass with a stubby stem and a water glass. The main course is served on a $40 gold-rimmed, white bone-china plate. The cutlery is silver, except for the gold-plated fish knife (shaped like a fish, with a green stone for an eye), the coffee spoon and the spoon and fork accompanying the dessert.

The replacement rate is modest: This year, Mr. Andersson had to order nearly a hundred of the coffee spoons, which many of the fancy guests make off with as souvenirs. "People snag them all the time," he says.

The menu is a state secret. Stefan Jonsson, the Swedish chef who has planned and cooked for 12 Nobel banquets, each year gets calls from local tabloids trying to find out what's on the bill of fare, and he doesn't divulge anything. The secrecy, he says, "adds to the good feeling during the banquet." But last year he was hoodwinked. A radio reporter sent him a cake two days before the banquet; Mr. Jonsson spoke to him and let slip a few details about the dishes. The reporter secretly taped the conversation, and it was broadcast on a Stockholm radio station.

Mouthwatering Menu

For the record, the 1999 banquet was a three-course meal, starting with artichoke creme -- with chopped apples, lobster and caviar. The main course was filet of lamb wrapped in white cabbage. Dessert was spiced vanilla ice cream, with pineapple, passion fruit and spun sugar.

Waiters set the tables the day before the banquet -- a job that takes 25 people eight hours. At the dinner itself, 220 waiters serve the guests. The king and queen each have their own personal waiters, who know their idiosyncrasies. Queen Silvia, for instance, doesn't drink red wine and likes to test her command of languages with her waiter. "We chitchatted in Portuguese and Spanish last year," says Antonio Kallo-Larrosa, who serves her.

Things don't always work out exactly as planned. Two years ago, because of some disorganization in the kitchen, coffee was served six minutes late.

Mr. Andersson can't afford to rest on his laurels, and there had better be no mishaps next year, the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize. More than 180 former laureates already have accepted invitations. "We started the process years ago," says Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation. "It's an enormous task."