The Ground Up

The Icelandic culinary scene has flourished by starting over completely

- Nicholas Gil

For most of the 1,100 years since Iceland was settled, the island’s food had more to do with surviving the long, sunless winters than it did with making something that was remotely palatable. In order to eat when the ground was frozen and the snow too thick to venture outside, fish was pickled in whey or smoked with a combination of hay and dung. Then there were rank foods like skata, or rotten skate, which would stink up clothes so badly diners would have to toss them out afterward. Throw in 500 years of Danish rule, which did little else but cause mass poverty and suppress traditions, and the occasional volcanic eruption that killed all crops and most livestock, and you have a culinary tradition that was so confused and inefficient it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Fast-forward to 2009, when fine dining in Reykjavík consisted mostly of gimmicky tourist restaurants serving whale and puffin. Then a restaurant called Dill opened and everything changed. Aligned with the emerging New Nordic cuisine movement, it embraced traditional methods like wind-drying catfish and smoking lamb in dung, and reintroduced native barley, dulse, and blue mussels into the Icelandic diet. Dill is still going strong, and this year it earned the country’s first Michelin star, even though founding chef Gunnar Karl Gíslason has relocated to New York to run Noma cofounder Claus Meyer’s Grand Central Station restaurant, Agern (which also boasts a Michelin star).