Arctic Charming

With chefs turning old staples into inventive new dishes, Iceland is cooking up the world’s youngest food scene.

“I’m drunk and I smell of whale,” I announce to my friends, who are patiently waiting for me in the lobby of Hótel Reykjavík Centrum as I totter in from a harbourside snack of minke whale kebob and local beer. And they know just what I mean.

Over the past few days, as we toured Iceland’s geysers and snowmobiled across glacier-covered lava rock, we were involved in an impromptu game of culinary one-upmanship. This is, after all, a country where cubes of putrefied shark, seared lamb face and Brennivín – a liquor affectionately known as Black Death – are beloved gastronomic icons. So the minke (a species not endangered in Iceland and legal on menus) I sampled at the Sægreifinn seafood shack, with its tippy stools made from fish-packing containers and rough wooden planks subbing for tables, barely provoked a bored sigh from the group.

The next evening, at a new interactive restaurant called Orange, we sip our Tony Montanas (a mix of local Reyka vodka and Iceland’s answer to Red Bull, topped with sparkling wine) in a room that changes from blue to green to pink without a moment’s notice from behind the backlit bar. Sometime after the balloon carrying my basket of sesame shrimp floats away, but before the restaurant-wide round of bingo kicks off, it suddenly hits me: Iceland must have the youngest food scene in the world. And now it’s playing a game of culinary catch-up.

Everywhere, from streetside stands where gourmet hot dogs are topped með öllu (with the works) to Gullfoss Sushi & Grill, just a few months old, I get the same feeling – especially after one of us wisely jogs to the port area at 3 a.m. to secure some of those remoulade-and-fried-onion-topped wieners at Bæjarins Beztu, the city’s best pylsa vendor. While small island nations like Iceland may have a lot working against them, these hot dogs aren’t one of them.

At the white-linened Vox, the country’s first high-end Nordic restaurant, chef Gunnar Karl Gíslason upholds the principles of the New Nordic Kitchen, a kind of culinary manifesto signed by an elite group of Nordic chefs. Among the 10 key points: “To combine local self-sufficiency with the regional exchange of high-quality goods” and “To reflect the different seasons in the meals.” “The idea,” he tells me, “is to create our own food culture, like the French and the Italians.”

Gíslason’s cured puffin breast sauced in a veal glaze with Icelandic beets provides a stellar example. It’s all woodsy and winey, at once ancient and upscale. There’s sautéed reindeer with walnuts and slow-cooked wild goose served with dried juniper berries. Then he has me try something “extra special” that his niece has just brought into the restaurant. “She and her husband smoke Arctic char up north,” he explains. “They smoke it using, um, how do you say… sheep’s dung?”

“We all ate fish six days a week and then eventually got tired of it for 20 years,” explains Erna Kaaber, the chef/owner of Icelandic Fish & Chips, an organic bistro that uses locally caught fish prepared in healthier ways. I’m digging into a lunch of her shatteringly crunchy spelt-and-barley-battered haddock, sided by oven-roasted fries drizzled with an amazing garlicky dressing, as she tells me that not only are her countrymen eating fish again, they’re using new species. Kaaber says Icelanders are also starting to re-embrace the foods of the past, such as kelp, salt cod and gravlax. Then there are the bilberries, stone brambles and crowberries, not to mention the emerald carpets of Icelandic moss, long used as a tincture for coughs, now transformed in mountain-to-table breads and soups. In other words, the foods that surround them reimagined in modern ways.

While her compatriots are picking moss and mushrooms and canning again, like in the good old days, Kaaber agrees that not all Icelandic treats are owed a comeback. “My mother used to try to pass whale off as beef. Meanwhile, we’d all seen it in the fridge steeping in milk for three days.”

When we arrive at the Reyka distillery, a new small-batch phenom set in the volcanic landscape on the outskirts of Reykjavik, they’re running the last drops of vodka for the day, so we try some straight off the still. “Can you taste the sweetness?” asks Kristmar Ólafsson, Reyka’s master distiller, as I suffer a sudden coughing fit from the high-octane spirits. He goes on to explain it’s the distillery’s raw materials that make it so: the clean water from Grábrók Spring, located in the surrounding 4,000-year-old lava field; the lava rock filtration; the pure air, with remarkably low CO_² emission levels. And there’s the clean geothermal energy used to power the process, which is why Reyka was named the world’s most environmentally friendly distillery by the Financial Times.

The ingenuity of this icy, smooth vodka is a lot like Iceland’s food scene. “I like to drink it neat, on the rocks,” suggests Ólafsson. “Wait two minutes and then it’s perfect.”

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net