On Icelandic Restaurants: Truth That’s Hard To Stomach

A few days ago, I sat in an unnamed restaurant. Around me were all the requisite references to lava moss, turf roof houses and columnar basalt that you’d expect. I was clutching a 17 EUR glass of cork taint, sighing at the 70 EUR hunk of uncooked and yet, somehow, bloodless hunk of meat, and I swear that the meat sighed back at me.

I knew this meal was a disappointment, but I had been in this exact same situation so many times in the past 18 years of reviewing, and there’s a question that’s been gnawing at me. Is there such a thing as Icelandic cuisine? Will there ever be? Do we have anything we can honestly call a restaurant culture?

When God closes a door…

The recent closures in the Icelandic restaurant scene — Slippurinn, Brút, Nebraska — have been shocking, and I feel for the people trying to make something interesting and decent in the Icelandic restaurant world. I’m lucky enough to have known a lot of talented people in the local scene, and I know for a fact that no one is backing a dump truck full of money into their driveway. This is a brutal business in Iceland, same as elsewhere, and the past five years have been especially punishing (the pandemic being only one of several culprits).

“The recent closures in the Icelandic restaurant scene — Slippurinn, Brút, Nebraska — have been shocking, and I feel for the people trying to make something interesting and decent in the Icelandic restaurant world.”

But the fact remains: I write for the readers. The restaurant-goers. I work for the average consumer, not the restaurateurs. On the rare occasion that I have to choose between the two, I will always choose the consumer. For the past year, I’ve found that increasingly difficult as restaurant prices have soared out of reach for the average local — without any noticeable increase in quality or consistency. For people in the industry, the situation is oppressive. For customers, it’s downright untenable.

The result is that locals have little interest in or access to fine dining. What remains of the scene is now a shadow of its former self, with no meaningful dialogue or cultural exchange between restaurants and locals. Icelandic cuisine, already critically endangered, now risks extinction in the wild.

Many wonderful restaurants may have shut their doors, but the locals have been sneaking out the back window for years.

How did we get here?

There’s a lot to unpack. Let’s go back to where it all started, the beginning of the 20th century, when Icelanders were looking to unburden themselves of the colonial yoke (or at least open up their marriage with Denmark). This meant that we needed to acquire those “nation things.” We had a strong head start with a decent cultural identity, propped up by the sagas and a common tongue. Jón Árnason had helpfully pulled a Brothers Grimm and compiled Icelandic folklore into a compendium a few decades earlier. All we needed was a flag! Oh, and the cuisine. Shit! We needed an official cuisine.

This was easier said than done. Icelanders had the highest rate of indentured servitude in Europe until the late 19th century, and slaves aren’t typically in a position to curate national gastronomy. Elsewhere, enslaved peoples transformed hardship into brilliance: Brazil gave us feijoada; Mauritius, rougaille; Peranakan, laksa. Iceland had the harsher draw: a barren climate, meagre ingredients, and cultural suspicion of flavour itself.

What emerged was a patchwork cuisine, derived from Denmark (such as kleinur and gravlax) and other improvised and substituted versions of continental classics. Sheep heads. A passable but uninspired blood pudding. Icelanders had decided that this had to be that “nation thing,” and, while some of those dishes were once an important part of the national diet, they had already started to fall out of favour and never stood a chance against the changing tides of history. We were left with a moribund cuisine presented to the world, and to ourselves, as a vital and quirky part of our identity.

“Icelandic cuisine, already critically endangered, now risks extinction in the wild.”

The 20th century saw the world open up to Icelanders like an oyster. They would never touch a mollusc in 1910, as per the expression “lepja dauðan úr skel” which translates as “lapping up death from a shell,” but by the 2010s they would happily shell out 1.000 ISK for a single oyster.

From the 1960s onward, however, the day-to-day diet leaned heavily toward fried chicken, pineapple pizzas, rice, and pasta, but the “heritage” cuisine stayed frozen in amber: the rictus grin of a Hirst-like shark on a pedestal rather than a part of a living tradition.

Iceland’s restaurant scene didn’t expand because locals were clamoring for a renaissance. It expanded because 2.3 million tourists needed to be fed every year, and they wanted a taste of something “authentic.” The economics followed: menus padded with lamb and fish, dressed up in New Nordic chic, at prices designed to match the wallets of Berliners, Bostonians, and Beijingers on long weekends.

Priced to exhaustion

I sit in this unnamed restaurant. I find myself staring down the barrel of a cash point loaded with more zeros than I dare to count — for having the audacity to order two courses and a glass of house wine. A 12 EUR bowl of marinated Garri olives mocks me openly, dripping gelatinised fat with each guffaw. Servers, either flown in to pacify tourists or drafted from a dwindling local pool of 20-somethings, buckling under the strain of having to communicate verbally.

Wherever I look, the only people I see dining out are tourists. It’s not surprising that tourist services would take up a lot of real estate, but I see little left with which the locals are truly engaging on any meaningful level. If this is all pantomime for tourists, what does that mean for Icelandic restaurant culture and Icelandic cuisine as a whole?

Some dishes are recognisably Icelandic, like plokkfiskur, and yet others are a twist on Icelandic ingredients and cuisine like, I don’t know, a licorice plokkfiskur or something. But the unifying factor is that Icelanders aren’t eating it. Not at home and not in the restaurants. The Icelandic dine-out experience simply doesn’t reflect Icelandic culture, nor is it part of the tapestry of daily life in Iceland.

You will find many dishes with ingredients Icelanders eat regularly, like beef tenderloin, but those ingredients aren’t uniquely Icelandic and often pale in comparison to what you would find in the same price bracket elsewhere. And that’s what it comes down to — price. It’s impossible to ignore the role price plays in all of this. Restaurants feel the pressure to raise prices, but it’s a vicious cycle — as the demands of the savvier locals grow with each price hike — with expectations rising to a point the local scene can’t hope to sustain.

Running out of rope

Even in the most tourist-swamped corners of Spain, with their bastardised versions of local delicacies, those dishes will still be something the locals eat. Spanish people will go out to a restaurant and eat a damn paella all the damn time. Can you say that about anything in Iceland? Maybe the hot dog? It’s hard to say.

This has left me exhausted. I’m deeply worried about how this “thing” of ours, this cuisine of ours, is meant to breathe and evolve. Some may think of me as a curmudgeon, but I’ve voraciously defended the local scene for a decade, and I’m tired of cutting it slack. I’m simply running out of rope.

When tourists ask me where to get real Icelandic cuisine, I don’t know what to tell them. When locals ask me where to eat, I first need to ask if they’ve passed a credit check. And this needs to change. Until then, I don’t see the point in continuing to review the scene.