It’ll be a nice way to center your chi for the week ahead after having some fun on the Fikan weekend, making sure your eyebrows are on Fika, or just feeling like Fika’n a leash.
New episodes come out every Monday on Vimeo and are free to watch. It is the moment that you take a break, often with a cup of coffee, but alternatively with tea, and find a baked good to pair with it. Swedes, immigrants, and former barista champions all weigh in on what it means to Fika. (From Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break: 'Functioning as both a verb and a noun, the concept of fika is simple. You can do it alone, you can do it with friends. A ‘fika break’ roughly translates to ‘coffee break’, but it’s so much more than just a coffee break.
In the first episode, Schmid talks to various Fikans (my newly coined term for “those who Fika”) about the ritual. Fika roughly translates to a short coffee break but in Sweden, fika means more than just stopping to grab food and coffee. As we write in Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, Functioning as both a verb and a noun, the concept of fika is simple. And now there’s a docu-series about the popular Swedish tradition with Monday’s release of episode one of “ Fika: To Have Coffee.”Ĭreated by Zurich University of the Arts Cast/Audiovisual Media student Fabian Schmid, “Fika” is a six-part documentary exploring different aspects of the mid-afternoon coffee break. While the word fika can be used as a verb (as in, to take a coffee break) or a noun (describing the coffee or the break itself), the concept stretches far beyond the drink, says Swedish. I mean, who isn’t interested in taking an hour for coffee and cardamom buns? No one I care to associate with, that’s who. We Scandinavians love nothing more than to meet up for a Fika. Fika, the Swedish art of the mid-day coffee break, is seeing somewhat of a surge in global interest. ‘To Fika’ is a good old Swedish word that basically means to ‘meet up, have a coffee and a chit-chat’.