No olive oil, garlic, lemon – even chocolate: A new generation of Scandinavian chefs has broken the ice up North with a cuisine built around local, seasonal produce and pure, pared-down flavours.

Often trained abroad, many of these chefs are now coming home to Stockholm, Oslo, Reykjavik and Malmoe, turning their hand to local produce that was long dismissed as dull or austere.

“It’s a cuisine born in a frozen land, and it takes that heritage on board,” said Jean-Francois Rouquette, chef at the Park Hyatt hotel who recently invited Swedish duo Sebastian Persson and Ola Rudin to showcase their skills in Paris.

One of the drivers of the Nordic food revolution, the Danish restaurant Noma was this year named the world’s best table by Britain’s Restaurant Magazine, winning plaudits for radically-local dishes such as radishes in edible soil. Set up in a converted 18th century shipping warehouse, the Copenhagen restaurant took the crown held for four years by El Bulli, the famed table of the avant-gardist Catalan chef Ferran Adria. Noma’s young chef Rene Redzepi, who trained both at El Bulli and at the celebrated Napa Valley restaurant French Laundry, has banished the classic toolkit of gastronomy: Foie gras and truffles imported from France and Italy.

Instead he made way for a new palette of flavours: Musk ox, dried scallops, roots and elderberries.

In step with the Danish film directors who launched the Dogma charter calling for simplicity in movie-making in 1995, Mr Redzepi and around 15 fellow chefs have published what they call a Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen.

Article one of the 10-point text pledges to “express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics that we would like to associate with our region”.