Kosters Trädgårdar

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A garden that feeds you

Reach Sydkoster by ferry from Strömstad, walk 400 metres from the jetty at Långagärde, and you will find Kosters Trädgårdar on your right. The setting announces itself before the food does: hens picking across the yard, staff tending a permaculture-designed garden, a farm shop stocked with organically grown produce. This is not a restaurant that gestures towards sustainability — it is built on it, and has been for close to twenty years.

From the ground to the plate

The sequence here is unusually direct. Once an order is placed, staff walk straight into the kitchen garden and harvest what is needed. Small chive flowers land on a dish of smooth grey-pea hummus served with sourdough baked from heritage grains — simple, precise, and quietly memorable. The menu is built around a selection of small plates that showcase the garden's output in its most honest form. On Fridays and Saturdays, a wood-fired oven turns out sourdough-base pizzas. In the glasses: microbrewed beer, natural wine, or organic juice and cordials made on site.

The café draws visitors in for a slower moment, while the farm shop lets people take a piece of the island home with them. The whole place operates as a coherent whole — garden, café, restaurant, and shop in easy conversation with one another.

Recognised for exactly what it is

White Guide awarded Kosters Trädgårdar its Fine level recognition in 2026, singling out the atmosphere as much as the food. The review noted "full marks for the feeling" — a rare acknowledgement that a place has mastered something beyond the plate. That feeling is not manufactured. It comes from the permanence of the project, the visible labour in the garden, and the straightforward honesty of what arrives at the table.

Most visitors to the Koster Islands already know to come here. Those who don't are quickly pointed in this direction when they ask around the harbour. That kind of local consensus, sustained over nearly two decades, says more than any award citation.