Rök, 26 Curtain Road, London EC2 (020 7377 2152). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £80

It’s the morning after the night before and I need only sniff my clothes to know where I had dinner. My shirt smells like I spent the evening crouched over a bonfire staring at the embers, brooding. Hallelujah! I’ve been cured. Or at the very least my body has started the curing process, courtesy of the benign fumes rising from the open kitchen at Rök in London’s Shoreditch.

I’m told Rök means smoke in Swedish and if it doesn’t it really should. (Regularly in this column, I claim a word in a foreign language means something in English because I read it on the internet and trust everything I find there. Later I am corrected with an orgy of eye rolling, hence I’m hedging my bets.)

There’s certainly a Nordic agenda at play here, though not one that’s followed slavishly. Yes, there’s an awful lot of pickling, fermentation and smoking. Those are the signifiers: we are deep in the grips of a northern winter, attempting to stretch our ingredients out through the hunger gap, by virtue of ancient food preservation techniques. But there’s also a clear understanding that nobody has ever had a really good time by being stupidly doctrinaire. Just ask the Swiss.

Rules are all well and good, but the real fun comes in knowing where and when to break them. So amid all that northern latitudes stuff there are outbreaks of fat-speckled charcuterie full of southern European sunshine, of garlic and macadamia nuts and chilli. The result is one of the most pleasurable meals I’ve had in a long time, full of big flavours and a certain casual decadence.

If you want colour you must look to the plate. The room is all white-washed brick walls, austere dark wood tables and guttering light. It is a space in which to see out the long winter nights, quoting the funniest bits of Ibsen at each other. This may be a Shoreditch address, but it has none of the gloss or polish that has affected most of the buildings in these parts. It is hemmed in by huge erections of glass and steel thrown up by property developers desperately trying to overcompensate. It’s as if Charlie Bucket’s house from Willy Wonka has been repurposed as a restaurant. That only adds to the sense of a place in which to hunker down over food.

The shelves built into the bar that hem in the open kitchen are laden with jars of pickles and ferments. There are discs of crunchy, sweet-sour cucumber and piles of shredded cabbage with a big chilli kick. Slices of spiced salami from Cobble Lane Cured of north London, the pleasingly dry, chewy kind, come with thin slices of pickled golden beetroot and still-warm sourdough. It’s toasted to black around the edges, so that the fat from the charcuterie begins to melt into the bread.

Readers of this column often look at pictures of what they regard as burnt toast and exclaim that anybody willing to pay for such a thing is a fool who deserves to be separated from their money. As it happens, I like burnt toast. Sometimes I even burn it for myself. I like the bitterness and the crunch and fracture, and until the Department of Health tells me it’s a cancer risk I’ll keep liking it. And probably afterwards, too. Certainly sourdough with a burnt crust, layered with fatty cured meats and pickles, is my idea of a good night out.

Whorls of a smooth, gutsy duck liver pâté, the offal soothed by a slick of blackcurrant jam, come on fragments of crisp knäckebröd, a kind of charred Ryvita in high heels. A scotch egg made with fiery ’nduja, that glorious chillified Calabrian sausage meat, with a soft-yolked quail’s egg at its centre, is laid on mayonnaise punched up with Dijon. It’s lots of different dialects being spoken all at once, but still making sense. Prices for these are keen. The pickles are £3 each, the duck pâté and scotch egg £3.50 and the charcuterie £6.

The most expensive options are the meat dishes. There’s a piece of pork belly that has been slow smoked until the spiced outside is lightly charred and the fat is melting, atop slices of pickled Granny Smith apple. A duck leg has apparently been cooked for 12 hours, and has taken on the quality of confit, to be partnered with lingonberry jam. Both of these are priced in the mid-teens.

But they are completely overshadowed by the non-meat dishes, costing just a fiver each. Sweet potato has been roasted and blackened until the skin has a caramel crunch. Those sugars are then cooled down by dollops of crème fraîche flavoured with huge gratings of fresh horseradish. It’s one of those simple ideas you know you could carry away and do at home.

But the standout dish is a hunk of green cabbage cut into quarters through the heart and blackened on the grill, then piled under snowfalls of soft rice, cracked macadamia nuts and drifts of västerbotten – a salty, hard cow’s milk cheese (like a very fresh parmesan, but with lightly bitter notes). It’s a beguiling plateful. Even the small iron pot of mash, flavoured with garlic, parsley and depth charges of bone marrow, can’t match it – though the latter is bloody good. Look, it’s potato, garlic and bone marrow. How could it not be good?

The only item that doesn’t work is a smoked beetroot ice cream atop a chocolate pudding. The pudding is great – the deep, dark liquid pond of cocoa greatness you want it to be. The ice cream, though, is just a hit of cream and sugar. On the upside it doesn’t taste of smoked beetroot. White chocolate ice cream with slightly salty pain perdu and a puddle of rhubarb jam is much better.

Our waiter seemed to be on a mission to explain. He was determined to take us “through the menu”, with long speeches on cooking techniques and flavours. I take the view that if the words on a menu can’t do that job themselves, you should find new words. (And he did insist on taking our order without writing anything down. Oh, and the menu wasn’t online. Cue the grinding of teeth.) But I’ll forgive such things, because of the sheer pleasure of this food produced, for the most part, by just one rather intense chap in the kitchen. I came away not just with the flavours on my breath, but with the smell of the kitchen on my clothes. I wore it with pride.

Jay’s news bites

■ For a more glossy (if equally loose) approach to matters Nordic, try Aggi Sverrisson’s restaurant Texture, in London’s Portman Street. Norwegian king crab is partnered with celeriac and walnuts, Icelandic salt cod comes with grapefruit and barley, and Icelandic lamb with humble swede and carrots (texture-restaurant.co.uk).

■ The global sandwich chain Subway has said its ‘foot-long’ sandwiches, will in future measure 12in, after complaints. In 2013 a study by the New York Post found that of seven ‘foot longs’, four were under a foot. A US lawyer successfully represented plaintiffs, though didn’t get them any money. ‘It was difficult to prove monetary damages, as everybody ate the evidence,’ said Thomas Zimmerman (subway.co.uk).

■ In a victory for good taste everywhere, sales of rosé wine are on the up – 37% by volume and 11% by value last year in the UK, according to a French industry body. Amazingly, rosé has also overtaken white wine in France to become the second most popular.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1