Since I've never learned anything about a place by sleeping there, I forced myself slowly toward the Scandinavian clock—and the Swedish table. Food has opened a hundred doors for me, and the Swedes, like people everywhere, are what they eat.

"Sweden is in a wonderful transition," the chef Marcus Samuelsson had told me in a briefing just before I left New York. Samuelsson helped establish the New Swedish cuisine that revived Stockholm's dining scene in the 1990s, then came to America and conquered Manhattan with his Aquavit restaurant. "There is something contemporary and modernist occurring in Swedish culture in general, not just food," Samuelsson had suggested. Comparing his native land with Spain, which is undergoing an across-the-board cultural renaissance, he noted that "Stockholm is very modern right now. Trendy, maybe."

Design is old news, food has popped, and denim has had its day. The industrial minimalism of Ikea has taken over the world. Now it is music that has refashioned Stockholm into a cutting-edge capital. The club-driven scene features bands so sweet that they could give you cavities, with unabashed romantics like Jens Lekman, Pelle Carlberg, and The Tough Alliance (TTA) recycling disco into a retro-new hybrid of Eurotrash hipness. Eventually, these lushly un-ironic acts grew too much for me—get me my Members Only jacket!—and I tuned my iPod and perambulating rhythms to Stockholm acts of the very latest sort: the punk Hives, the rap chanteuse Robyn, and the willfully eclectic Teddybears.

Watery Stockholm was founded around 1250 specifically to block foreigners from sailing into the country. But in recent decades the city has chosen to absorb waves of such immigrants: Chileans, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs. In 2006, it accepted the majority of some ten thousand Iraqi refugees welcomed by Sweden, the single biggest wave of immigration since Danish troops overran the place in 1520.

But for all of Stockholm's cosmopolitan bona fides, there is still a tension in these changes. The quota for Iraqi refugees has already been sharply curtailed, and the government of Stockholm has, like much of Scandinavia, moved to the right on social issues, cutting subsidized housing and loosening its famously thorough safety net. Symbols of tradition, from meatballs to difficult diphthongs, are ascendant in the national psyche.

The changed city is most visible in Södermalm, a once quiet southern residential district that has, since the early 1990s, ridden Sweden's booming economy to the center of urban chic. Today it is dotted with sleek eateries, rows of cozy pubs like Pet Sounds Bar and Snotty, and vibrant music venues, including Marie Laveau, named for the voodoo high priestess of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

At the very southern tip of this southernmost neighborhood, I settled into a worn wooden booth at Pelikan, a Viking-worthy beer hall where I ordered a hard cider and a platter of husmanskost, the traditional snacks of Old Scandinavia. I received three cheeses, paté with berries, dilled egg with ham, boiled potatoes, salmon two ways, and a triptych of little herrings that went down like an arpeggio of salt, spice, sweet, and vinegar. Candles made the place glow; Stockholm convivial and relaxed conversation made it hum. The bill, when it came, was notably modest in a country where high standards, a tax of twenty-five percent, and an exchange rate that feels like a mugging can easily turn dinner into a hundred-dollar-per-person event.