| Eats 'n' Drinks |
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| Iceland is a great place to eat, especially if you like seafood, lamb and, it has to be said, puffin. Vegetarian? Pack a lunch (although there are felafel stands and a couple of vegetarian restaurants, including a pioneering salad bar in downtown Reykjav�k called, confusingly, Salatbarinn.). There's also Subway and Domino's as a last resort. Eating in Iceland isn't cheap (nothing is), but snack bars and coffee shops serve relatively inexpensive food that should keep you going. You can also try your luck in a supermarket. |
| And Now, the Drinks We had a couple, yeah. Beer is the tipple of choice, but by no means a budget choice. One of the bars hosting bands for the festival, Gaukur � St�ng (man, am I getting tired of using the character map to cut and paste the funny letters), served half liter glasses for 550 kr. Outrageous by Chapel Hill standards, but not too bad for a major city. Viking lager became our favorite, but Tuborg is also widely available and good. And if you're wondering if they have Budweiser, stop reading right now and go away. Spirits-wise, my find of the trip was Eldur�s, an Icelandic vodka that has a creamy finish like Grey Goose, but the bite of Stoli. You can buy it, along with Viking beer and hot dogs, among other things, from www.buyicelandic.com. I also brought back a bottle of Karl Orlov vodka, which is also very nice. You also need to try brenniv�n, the traditional carraway (yes, carraway) schnapps served as a chaser for h�karl, although it's certainly not the first thing I would choose to settle my stomach. Kill the taste, sure. Of anything. I'm the only person in our group who didn't immediately grimace after tasting it, but I can't exactly say I developed a taste for it. Still, you have to try it, just so you can bring home the souvenir T-shirt that says, "Go Native" above the logo. Brenniv�n led to one of our many side-splitting moments of laughter, when we were discussing it with Artie from the band Error Type 11 and his friend Kevin. We asked them if they'd tried it, and they said no, and asked where we got it. We told them it was in the mini-bar. They responded, "Oh yeah, then we did have it." |
| And Finally, a Word About Siggi Hall Siggi Hall is Iceland's top chef and runs an award winning restaurant named, not surprisingly, Siggi Hall, in the Hotel �dinsv� (I think the "d" in �dinsv� should be a funny character too, but I cut and pasted that straight off their web site, so the hell with it.) His was recently voted one of the world's top 100 "Hot Tables" by Cond� Nast Traveller, which called his restaurant "one of the newest, hottest, best places to eat." He also hosts a cooking show on Icelandic TV, and is every bit as charismatic as that would indicate. Mike met him at the Icelandic Embassy in DC, and later worked with him on a spot for Icelandair in which Siggi, dressed in a shiny purple coat and feathered hat, shows how to crack open a puffin while two English vegetarian models in swimsuits watch with disgusted looks on their faces. He likes to have a good time, but he's very serious about his cooking, and it shows. The menu features seafood, lamb, beef and other fine-dining staples, but also offers traditional Icelandic game, including puffin, ptarmigan and reindeer. Tony and I had dinner there on our last night, and it was one of the best meals I've ever had. The restaurant is spare and stylish in the Scandinavian fashion (and so is the wait staff). After an amuse bouche of fried plaice topped with celery puree, I started with a wild goose and green apple soup drizzled with basil oil, followed by the above-mentioned lamb. Tony, the fishatarian, had a dish of langoustines in broth followed by the bacalao. Everything was fresh and flavorful, and presented very beautifully. We drank a bottle of a very good St. Emillon (I wish I had written it down), and in the spirit of the meal and the trip, ordered a second one. That helped to push the cost of the meal over $250 USD, but it was well worth it. (If you steer clear of the $67 bottles of wine, you can do it for less.) Despite the fact that the restaurant only had a few diners (it was 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday, and Icelanders, like Europeans, tend to eat late) Siggi made the rounds. Since he knows Mike (since everyone knows Mike), he stayed and chatted with us for a while, but I definitely think he would have stayed even if we didn't have that connection. In how many other cities could you enjoy a world-class meal and then have a leisurely chat with the country's top chef? Not many. Needless to say, I highly recommend adding Siggi Hall to your Iceland itinerary. |
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| Hot Dogs Boy, they love their hot dogs (called pylsur, but everybody knows what you mean when you say hot dog). I assumed, possibly because we'd only been to a hot dog stand at five o'clock in the morning, that they were merely drunk food, but we saw a line of locals waiting to buy one on Sunday afternoon. They have a distinct taste which may be lamb, although I couldn't get anyone to confirm that. They also have a crunchy skin which is probably due to the fact that the casings are made in the, ahem, traditional manner. Hot dogs are served with onions and a sauce they call rem�ladi, which doesn't taste like any remoulade I've ever had. Here's what I have to say about the hot dogs: on the first day, they're great. On the second day, they're okay. By the third, I'd rather have eaten the little paper tray. But you should try one. |
| Fish that you're likely to find on menus include char, catfish, halibut, skate, turbot, haddock and cod. Magnus's mom served us a really interesting dish made from potatoes and haddock ("Hey, these mashed potatoes taste like fish"), and Ryan and I wish we had asked for the recipe. Icelanders also eat a lot of dried fish snacks, which puts the country right up there with Japan when it comes to dangerous convenience store shopping. On the high end of the fish spectrum, Tony had fried bacalao (salt-crusted cod) at Siggi Hall's restaurant (more on him below) that was amazing. We also ate something at a sushi restaurant that I'm not going to admit to, but let's just say that the potential cast list for "Free Willy 4" is a little shorter. Call me Ishmael. |
| Seafood Yes, please. Not surprisingly, it's fresh and plentiful. At Keflavik Airport on our way home, my lunch consisted of a pile of smoked salmon the size of a fourth-grader which cost 660 kr�nur (exactly $6.60 USD, thanks to the extremely inebriate-friendly exchange rate). That much salmon alone would have cost close to ten dollars even in a US supermarket. Contrast this meal with the breakfast we had on our way out of Raleigh-Durham Airport: a stale ham biscuit and orange juice for pretty much the same price. |
| all food and drink photos below (except Orka) yoinked from www.buyicelandic.com |
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| Lamb Also very good, served either roasted or smoked. At Siggi's I had the rack of lamb with wild blueberry sauce and rosemary. Very fresh and very good. I've only had lamb close to that good in Yorkshire, England, another sheep-rich environment. |
| H�karl H�karl is putrefied shark meat. They bury it in sand and gravel for six months, and then dig it up. Really. I don't even need to make this stuff up. I went over swearing I would try it, but didn't see any until the flea market on our next-to-last day. By then I wasn't feeling quite so gustatorily adventurous. (One guide book writer said the smell alone made him drive the porcelain snowmobile.) I asked Siggi about it, and he told me it smells like really old cheese, but the taste isn't that memorable. He also gave me permission not to try it. One of the many reasons I liked him. |
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| Non-Alcoholic Drinks Hmm? Oh, right. They have those, too. Their version of the tall, thin-canned energy drink is called Magic (very useful for helping you wake up at the crack of noon). Compared to Red Bull, it has the same effect, but tastes a lot less like it was cooked up in a meth lab. Magic led to another bout of laughter, after Tony read the label and announced, "This has 180 kilojoules of orka." Of course. There's also a drink called Malt Extrakt, which was originally given as a nutrional supplement to patients in hospital, presumably because they couldn't run away. It's kind of sweet and syrupy, but with a beery taste, which is of course what you want in a soft drink. Try it, but don't expect to finish it. |
| Even the hot dogs are sexy. |
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