“The Hills Restaurant” is, first of all, a very elegant, unexpected, deep and subtle novel about the destruction of centuries-old structures. The main character serves as a waiter in a legendary old restaurant in the center of Oslo, is very proud of it and tries to follow the one and a half century traditions in everything. He has the gift of seeing, hearing and analyzing everything. Behind the walls of the restaurant, one world war passed, then a second, almost without changing the way of life of the establishment, described in the novel masterfully, with all the memorable details. Watching the guests day after day, the hero involuntarily gets drawn into the difficult relationship between them. Matthias Faldbakken is not just a master of style, he masters the entire comedic register, from farce to soft irony, knows how to bring everything to the point of absurdity, and his talent as an observer, the ability to admire details create a very strange atmosphere in the novel: stability and constancy turn out to be no less fragile than flouting the rules.