Gróa: The Long Road To A Good Salad

In the last issue, I wrote a eulogy for Iceland’s vegan boom. Trend came, trend went, true believers survived. And then I kept thinking about vegetables.

Why is eating vegetables so difficult in Iceland? Why is it so hard to buy good produce? And why, in a country where kale has been growing since the Viking settlement, can you not get a decent kale salad?

Then last week I ate such a salad at Gróa, the new vegetable deli on Tryggvagata. Kale, beetroot, Icelandic barley. Every ingredient something that grows here or has deep roots in Icelandic cuisine. It was a revelation. And there’s more to this story than just a new storefront.

Raised on protein (and canned peas)

If you’ve spent a holiday in an Icelandic household, you know the peas. Ora Grænar baunir.

Bright green spheres next to the lamb, boiled to oblivion, beloved beyond rational explanation. Some families pour them straight from the can onto the plate. They’re tradition. And they’re the perfect symbol of how this country relates to vegetables. The poor quality has become a kind of national identity.

Vegetables in Iceland are a recent development. The first confirmed potato crop wasn’t until 1758, at Bessastaðir, where the president lives today. Gardens didn’t become common until the early 1800s, and even then it was mostly resident Danes who bothered. As the Matarauður Íslands food heritage project has noted, Icelanders “belatedly took to eating vegetables despite knowledge of their utility and nutritiousness.”

The Vikings who settled here knew kale and turnips from Scandinavia. But the Little Ice Age devastated farming from the 14th century onward, and what survived was a protein culture built around preservation. Smoked lamb, fermented shark, dried fish, skyr.

By the mid-20th century, Icelanders were learning to eat salads. Though often that just meant grated cabbage with mayonnaise. Or anything with mayonnaise, really, even if it’s just cheese.

Fresh vegetables became a serious presence only in the last few decades. Today Iceland produces only a few thousand tonnes of vegetables a year, and the vast majority is potatoes.

Vegetables were never cuisine here. They were filler. And food cultures built on filler don’t become vegetable-forward because a trend arrives.

A country that forgot its own kale

Kale grows exceptionally well in Iceland, as do most brassicas, the family that includes broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and cabbage. Frost converts starches to sugars, making it particularly tender and sweet. Kale was a key Viking-era crop. Iceland had kale before it had the word for potato, and it still survives in some gardens. And yet the salad places in Reykjavík don’t stock it. The supermarkets barely acknowledge it. A country that could produce some of the finest kale in Europe decided it wasn’t worth the shelf space.

The supermarkets have improved in recent years, but quality remains a coin flip. You learn which Bónus has the better produce, which Krónan restocks on which day. You still might have to hit two or three shops to get what you were looking for. Brussels sprouts appear around the holidays and then often vanish. Kale shows up intermittently, usually tired. The good stuff exists. Finding it consistently is the problem.

Every Reykjavík neighbourhood used to have a fiskbúð where you’d stop on the way home and have dinner sorted. Vegetables never got their version. They arrived too late.

Geothermal greenhouses helped. They began to propagate around the island in the 1920s. Iceland now grows most of its cucumbers and tomatoes domestically. But the ambition largely stopped there.

The technology solved the climate problem. Nobody solved the cultural one.

Vegetable hackers

The people trying to change this tend to come from somewhere else.

At Reykjalundur, a farm in Grímsnesi about 80 kilometres from the capital, Californian Nicholas Robinson has spent the last decade working out what Icelandic soil and geothermal heat can actually do. He’s trialled over 100 varieties and the farm now produces eggplant, fennel, broccolini, summer squash, multiple kale varieties, heirloom tomatoes with actual flavour, sweet peppers. Unthinkable here a generation ago. They run a CSA delivered to Pikkoló points and supply some of the premier restaurants around the capital.

Austurlands Food Coop, started by New Yorker Jonathan Moto Bisagni and his Danish partner Ida Feltendal out of Seyðisfjörður in 2019, comes at it from the import side. They bring organic produce from European farms on the ferry and deliver a few hundred boxes a week around Iceland. Years ago, Bisagni put it plainly to the Grapevine: eating good is a right, not a privilege.

None of this exists because Iceland built a vegetable infrastructure. It exists because individuals hacked around the absence of one. Subscribe to a box, drive to a farm, pick up at a warehouse in Grandi on Fridays. People don’t do this much work for food they don’t care about.

Gróa Sælkeraverslun

Belinda Navi from California and Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir from Iceland co-founded Gróa around a simple idea. Belinda told Morgunblaðið she’d always wished for something like a fishmonger or a butcher, but for vegetables. That’s exactly what Reykjavík had for fish and never built for produce.

It’s not a vegan restaurant. Not a health food shop. Not a café with a token salad. It’s the first place in Reykjavík built around vegetables as food, not as compromise, substitute or side dish. Counter service, prepared meals, deli products, shelves with Spanish olive oils, Colombian chocolate, freshly roasted coffee. Basalt Architects designed the space, with walls by Eysteinn Þórðarson of Icelandic vegetables and edible plants. The menu rotates with whatever’s available and in season, which in Iceland means working with constraints most restaurants would consider absurd. You don’t plan a fixed menu when your best ingredient might not exist next week.

When it opened on February 12 the place was packed from the jump. Locals squeezed into Gróa while tourists waited in line for hot dogs nearby.

Finally, kale

The menu is small. A handful of sandwiches, salads and soups, all of which can be made vegan, most gluten-free. The plan is to rotate based on what’s available and what people actually order, which raises a question they are already wrestling with: what does seasonality mean in Iceland when the greenhouses grow year-round?

Back to that kale salad. After a thousand or so words about how nobody in this country knows what to do with kale, I’ll be direct: Gróa figured it out. Their kale salad is a knockout.

Their kimchi grilled cheese is unreasonably good. The vegan version, made with house-made vegan cheese and vegemite, might actually be better than the regular. The vegan egg salad sandwich is also great, better than most egg salad sandwiches I’ve had in Iceland. The soups are delicious and fresh, particularly the mushroom soup.

Most dishes come in half portions for little more than 1.000 ISK. A half salad or sandwich and a soup for a downtown lunch, under 3.000 ISK. Fresh, vegetable-forward food for less than the price of a burger. Downtown Reykjavík has a lunch problem, particularly at a reasonable price, and Gróa just became the best answer to it.

For dinner, the vegan lentil lasagna with house-made vegan cheese is a solid family take-home option, and they say the take-home menu will keep evolving and expanding depending on what’s fresh and available. Everything is packaged well enough to carry out.

The shop side deserves attention. Olive oil, chocolate, and speciality goods are organised so that dietary restrictions are immediately clear. There are also fresh lettuces, with plans to expand into dinner-ready vegetables. The coffee is drip-only for now, but it’s particularly good.

Open weekdays from 11 to 18, which is a bit limiting for some. The current family take-home options are also limited now, but I’m told that’s meant to expand.

Ultimately, Gróa is designed to fold into daily life, not to be an occasion.

No hashtags

Nobody is calling this a movement. The climate is shifting, the soil is warming, and the people paying attention are quietly expanding what this country can produce.

The vegan gold rush was loud and briefly profitable. Most importantly, it forced the question of whether vegetables could be more than filler, even if most of the businesses that asked it went under. The conversation outlasted the restaurants.

A thousand years after the Vikings brought kale and centuries after most lost interest, it’s coming back. It took a Californian to replant it, and another Californian to put it in a salad and charge you for it. It’s Icelandic food culture catching up with what the land, the heat and the climate have quietly made possible for years. Let’s hope it sticks.

Gróa is located at Tryggvagata 26, Reykjavík.