Poul Andrias Ziska and Karin Visth of KOKS restaurant, in the Faroe Islands.Beinta á Torkilsheyggi
What does fine dining in the middle of the North Atlantic look like?
A mahogany clam with a life expectancy of 500 years resting, raw and thinly sliced, on a bed of rocks. A queen scallop plated on sea snail shells, so fresh it is still moving. Decked with watercress leaves, tartar of halibut looks like a flower, while cod skin, bones, liver, head and roe are grilled, creamed, dehydrated, or fried and recompositioned into a picturesque salad. All served up in what could best be described as a Hobbit house.
“If you want to be treated like a prince, this is not your place,” says Poul Andrias Ziska, the head chef at Koks near Torshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands. Last year, the 26-seat restaurant was awarded a Michelin star – the esteemed food guide praised its “imaginative and intensely flavoured dishes” – and became arguably the most remote acclaimed and gourmet establishment in the world.
“There’s mud outside, no tablecloths, no polished silverware. Maybe the windows are a little dirty. Who cares. We do what we do," Ziska explains. "This is the experience we provide, and you can’t experience this anywhere else.”
Inside the KOKS kitchen.Courtesy of KOKS Restaurant
No kidding.
To say the Faroe Islands are an unlikely epicurean destination is to put it mildly. But Koks is helping put them on the culinary map – even if it’s tough for many people to find them on a real one.
Located roughly midway between Iceland and Norway, a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle, the self-governing nation under the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark is home to 50,000 people. Volcanic eruptions gave birth to the 18-island archipelago 55 million years ago, creating an elemental, fjord-laced, mountain landscape – treeless and craggy, with plunging cliffs, cascading waterfalls and valleys cloaked by grasslands so impossibly green they look like they were coloured by crayons. On average it rains or snows 210 days a year; even during the lengthy, light-filled days of summer, clouds and fog dominate.
The Faroese village of Nólsoy.Debra Weiner
A lighthouse sits among the mountains on the island of Kalsoy.Gregoire Sieuw
Twenty years ago, hardly a handful of restaurants could be found here. Even today, except for potatoes, turnips and rhubarb, local produce is largely non-existent. Ask Faroese their preferred dish and chances are a wind-dried leg of lamb, left hanging for months in an outdoor shed, or hjallur, in a centuries-old fermenting process called raest, tops the list.
In a continuation of the new Nordic food movement started by Rene Redzepi and Claus Meyer of the renowned Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, Koks’s dishes are imaginative reinventions of classic, Faroese recipes and flavours. Ziska, 28, who attended cooking school in Denmark, started working at Koks when it first opened in 2011 in Torshavn’s top-rated Hotel Foroyar, under founding chef Leif Sorensen. When Sorensen departed in 2014 (he recently opened Skeiva Pakkhus – a lovely, reasonably priced restaurant in Torshavn), Ziska took over, creating a contemporary if provocative, ever-changing tasting menu devoted to fresh, regionally procured ingredients, including selections unknown to many palates – lamb tallow, moss, even dried maggots.
The first stop on the way to KOKS is at the restaurant's hjaller shed.Beinta á Torskilsheyggi
Koks moved to its current location last April. Getting there is part of the challenge – and the fun. First comes a 30-minute drive from Torshavn to an unmarked turn-off near Lake Leynavatn. There, greeted by a staff member, guests are welcomed into a small, hjallur-like wooden hut for a Faroese favourite – dried pilot whale meat and salted blubber. Then, guests climb into an old Land Rover for the last gravelly half-mile, skirting the shoreline, bumping across a sheep-mowed pasture, until reaching a turf-roofed farmhouse dating from the 1740s, tucked against the hillside. Though the cost of the 18-course tasting menu – 1,400 Danish krone ($279) – might seem steep, Koks is almost always sold out. Table reservations are a must, the sooner-made the better. Seatings for the 2019 season can be booked starting in January.
Beinta á Torskilsheyggi
The restaurant is located in a turf-roofed farmhouse that dates to the 1740s.Beinta á Torskilsheyggi
But Koks is not the only reason to make the flight to the Faroes. On a crooked lane in a 17th-century timber house near Torshavn’s old town, the restaurant Raest specializes, as the name suggests, in the musky and musty tastes and smells of fermented foods. For travellers craving homemade food, there’s Hemablidni, a home hospitality program in which families across the islands invite guests in for a meal. And over in the seaside village of Gota on the island of Eysturoy, there’s Hoymabit, a series of weekly, summer house concerts with leading Faroese musicians, followed by snacks.
And what snacks! The evening I attended, about two-dozen guests squeezed into the art-filled living room of the mother of the Faroes' most famous musician, Eivor, for an hour-long acoustic set before delving into platters of traditional fare: cod fishcakes and blood sausage, whale meat and blubber, thin slices of raest mutton and strips of dried haddock smeared with butter. “Some of this might have a strong taste for foreigners,” said maritime engineer Karl Gregersen, who prepared most everything. “But this is our fast food. This is what we carry in our lunchbox.”
Skerpikjøt, a wind-dried mutton, is a delicacy in the Faroe Islands.Erik Olsson
And on picnics too, I discovered a few days later on a hike with Faroese friend Marjun Svartafoss. After crossing the verdant slopes of Kalsoy Island to the lighthouse at its northern tip, we stopped for a snack and to take in the sweeping views of the ocean and basalt sea stacks. Sure enough, Marjun pulled from her knapsack a container of boiled potatoes, dried cod and a tub of butter.
As we walked on, Marjan shed light on how the Faroese make the most of their scarce, local, edible offerings. What to me resembled a weed, she munched on happily. Tramping past several sheep, she shared a recipe for cooking their heads: “Discard brain – risk of mad cow disease – and ears, too rubbery, and nose, disgusting, then boil with salt and potatoes. Figure half a sheep head per person.”
As we neared the coastline, she pointed out the gull-like fulmars perched atop a boulder. “Their chicks get so fat they’re unable to fly, so men go with nets and scoop them off the sea.” Marjun smiled. “They taste very good.”
Apparently, so do fulmar eggs, a valued ingredient at Koks. Harvested by cliff-climbing islanders, the eggs are literally squeezed out of the ledge-nesting mama birds before they can lay them. “Poul Andrias says they add flavor. I can’t tell the difference,” said Leif Hoj of the seafood company Fofish, which supplies much of the fresh fish found on Koks’s menu. “But he likes things that aren’t that normal; that are difficult to catch. Some of these chefs, they are lunatics.”
The evening I ate at Koks in one of its four cozy dining rooms, lunacy never crossed my mind. It was unusual, yes. Whimsical and wild, certainly. Dizzying even, as course after course emerged from the kitchen to my communal table, a lively group comprising a New York radiologist, a British businessman and his author son, and a family of four from Miami.
Crispy cod bladder.Claes Bech-Poulsen
A chewy sheet of smoked horse-mussel roe and pickled pine.Claes Bech-Poulsen
Everyone agreed the langoustine heads, filled with a mix of creamed brains and chopped up tail, were yummy once you figured out how to suck them out of their shell. The reindeer moss, meanwhile, tasted like I suspect most deep-fried lichen would – crunchy.
“I love to eat things you think can’t be eaten,” the American doctor said. “New tastes you don’t like are always more interesting than old tastes. Now this,” he noted, sampling the dessert of Arctic thyme ice cream and pickled crowberries swimming in a burned cream, “is what I imagine a house fire would taste like.”
Skerpikjøt.Claes Bech-Poulsen
Fresh cheese and meadowsweet granité.Claes Bech-Poulsen
It was close to 1 a.m. by the time we finished our nearly five-hour-long dinner. “What an epic journey,” the British writer said as we stepped outside into the midsummer night. I looked out at the view – the hillside with its tumbling waterfalls, the stream meandering below, visible in a misty, twilight way even at this hour – and nodded my head. Whether he was talking about the meal or the whole Faroe Islands experience, I had to agree.
Crab and seaweed.Claes Bech-Poulsen
Your turn
How to get there
Atlantic Air flies to the Faroe Islands daily from Copenhagen and twice a week from Reykjavik.
Where to eat
Koks’s founding chef and New Nordic Cuisine Manifesto signer Leif Sorensen, recently opened Skeiva Pakkhus, a hip, delightful spot right on Torshavn’s harbourfront.
Reservations are a must at Koks, open March through November. The 18-course tasting menu costs 1,400 ($279) Danish krone and an additional 1,100 Danish krone ($218) with wine pairing.
Where to stay
Hotel Foroyar, perched on the edge of Torshavn, is the Faroes' lone four-star lodging and the only one with a 180-degree-view of city and sea. Rooms start at 900 Danish krone ($179) during the low season, 1,600 ($318) Danish krone for the high season.
Torshavn’s newest stay, 14-room boutique Hotel Havgrim offers rooms in town, at the ocean’s edge, starting at 2,000 Danish krone ($397).
The writer’s travel was partially subsidized by Atlantic Airways and Visit Faroe Islands. They did not review or approve this story.