The smell hits first. A kind of noxious stench, lingeringly salty with a rancid underpinning. It doesn’t smell like rot exactly – but it’s overwhelming in its depth. As we round the corner into the production area at Lofoten Seafood Centre I encounter the source: hundreds, possibly even thousands, of headless fish carcasses are strung up on 20-foot-high wooden frames, hanging in endless rows. It’s the kind of sight that, with zero context or information, might seem like an omen of death. But here on the Lofoten Islands, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the fish are actually a symbol of life.
Jutting out off the northwest coastline of Norway, the Lofoten Islands have seen a boom in tourism in recent years as the region’s immense beauty has caught the eye of social media users across the globe. A quick search of the destination on TikTok will elicit videos of towering peaks looking down over storybook red fishing villages, hikers making the most of the midnight sun and scaling mountains at 1am, and Caribbean-presenting beaches without another soul in sight. Home to just 24,500 people, the region sees more than 500,000 tourists flock to its shores every year.
Long before tourism came knocking, though, fishing was the primary source of income for residents in these remote isles. The stockfish industry has brought fishermen to Lofoten in droves for thousands of years. Many would live in the now-iconic fisherman’s huts that hug the inlets along the coast; some would sleep beneath their overturned boats, utilising as much time as possible to get out on the water catching skrei.
Lofoten largely has its unique climate to thank for this. The Gulf Stream surges through the waters around the islands, bringing with it not only milder temperatures but also the abundant nutrients that make it a feeding hotspot for fish. Every year, skrei travel thousands of miles from the Barents Sea to Lofoten to take advantage of the warmer temperatures for spawning. Meanwhile, fishermen head out into some of the most extreme conditions on the planet – often facing large swells, driving snowstorms and low clouds – to catch these aquatic giants. They then deliver them back to the mainland, where they are beheaded and hung up to dry to eventually become stockfish, which is exported around the world, anywhere from Portugal to Nigeria.
This is just one of the many food sources that keep residents of this remote corner of the planet fed. Sitting as it does above the Arctic Circle, this section of northern Norway spends many months of the year without properly seeing the sunrise, the ground frozen solid and covered in layers of snow. When snow cover eventually does melt away, the region experiences the, um, polar opposite – endless days that go on forever, the midnight sun causing life to flourish all of a sudden. It’s a curious phenomenon and one that makes food production all the more complicated. And yet, as I discovered over five days exploring the region, food is thriving in northern Norway.
A few days earlier, three flights and 11 hours after I left my house, I finally made it to Til Elise Fra Marius, a restaurant with rooms at the head of Utskarpen Fjord, in a remote section of countryside a short drive from Mo i Rana. A classic red clapboard structure rising like a beacon out of the snowy landscape, Til Elise is the perfect starting point to get a feel for what it means to cook and eat in and around the Arctic Circle. Owned by partners Elise Bratteng Rønning and Marius Martinsen, the former managing front of house and the latter heading up the kitchen, Til Elise Fra Marius saw the duo returning to Elise’s hometown to fulfil their dream of setting up a farm-to-table restaurant.
“The whole idea was to bring the guests to the produce rather than bringing the produce to the guests like I was doing in Oslo,” Marius tells me when we sit down for a chat before dinner. “In Oslo you just order a box of onions, and you don’t know if they’re from this guy or that guy. Here, we can do things like our wagyu project, where we’ve been working with a local farm to breed wagyu cattle to create the meat we would want – we could never do that kind of project in Oslo.”
It is by no means easy work, though. After purchasing the property in 2015, it took the couple three years to finally get it to a stage where they could open in March 2018. The local community were – and still are – a huge support in that, offering up everything from chainsaws and tractors during the renovation, to ongoing gardening assistance as is the case with a retired local couple who have helped them develop their abundant garden and establish a functional greenhouse. From here they can source everything from herbs, turnips and beets to tomatoes, squash and peas – much of which is harvested in the autumn and cured, pickled or fermented to see them through the winter.
The stockfish industry has brought fishermen to Lofoten in droves for thousands of years
Dinner is a ten-course affair, taking place in a quintessentially Scandi room with expansive views out over the water beyond. Name-checking some of the region’s finest seafood – langoustine, arctic char, scallops, brown crab and skrei – each dish is delicately balanced, allowing the natural ingredients to sing through, while still perfectly articulating a sense of place. Delicate white langoustine meat comes flavoured with truffle seaweed – something I would discover more about on Lofoten a few days later – and each dish is rife with those preserved ingredients from the previous summer, be it pickled kohlrabi, elderflower vinegar or pickled apple. The second dish of the evening acted as my introduction to reindeer – one of the major food sources this far north. Served as a tartare in a delicate tartlet, with cabbage emulsion, crispy potato and topped with smoked, shaved reindeer heart, it is elegant yet bold and the perfect way to begin to understand this unique meat.
The following morning, I’m sitting in a trailer attached to the back of a snowmobile, whizzing through the monochromatic landscape that is the Lifjell family reindeer farm. In keeping with the traditionally nomadic lifestyle of the Sami people, reindeer farming is much different to modern farming elsewhere in the Western world. Wholly free range, reindeer are left to roam large swathes of land, rather than being fenced into small fields; around 40% of land in Norway is covered by reindeer herds, although with increasing development this number is going down. After driving for a few minutes we crest a hill to reveal a valley below – one that is full of grazing, downy reindeer. We pull up to a stop and Tom Lifjell grabs some feed from the trailer we’ve been sitting in, dispersing it onto the ground around us. Quickly, the reindeer come, wary of humans but interested in the food – all but one, who Lifjell explains was orphaned at birth and raised by his family in their home until it was old enough to be sent out with the herd. This reindeer nuzzles into Lifjell’s hand playfully, evidently delighted to see him.
The animals gather, munching on a mixture of lichen and moss, the more curious occasionally getting a closer look at us but bounding in the opposite direction at any hint of movement. In the distance, other reindeer lope slowly through the trees, evidently unbothered by the cold. Once the herd are well-fed, we return back to the farmhouse where Tom’s cousin is readying a smoking tent – a small teepee with roof ventilation and a lit fire inside. They hang reindeer meat from a grate above the flames, smoking it slowly to preserve it for the months ahead. The oldest indigenous community in northern Europe, the Sami people are responsible for all reindeer farming in Norway. Traditionally living a nomadic way of life that spread across country borders, Sami people relied upon the high protein content of reindeer to keep them full and fed during the difficult winter months when other food sources were scarce. Tom and his cousin send us off with a perfect example of this – a dried, minced reindeer meat and offal patty wrapped in the reindeer’s stomach lining, a sort of high-protein haggis – as a parting gift for us to eat later.
Anne Berit Sætermo cooks it up for us at Aernie, the traditional Sami hut and dining experience she runs with her Sami husband, Toamma Bientie. Alongside the dried reindeer, we have shaved reindeer meat, salad, flatbread and lingonberry yoghurt, plus little canape-style barley crispbreads with a slice of reindeer ham. During lunch, Toamma tells me more about the nuances of Sami culture, and walks me through a series of clothing items and traditional tools that Sami people would use and wear to survive the winters. I mention that the lingonberries in particular seem full of flavour and Toamma agrees; “The berries and vegetables up here taste so good because they always have sunlight in the summer. They grow slowly but fully with so much light.”
For a true reindeer immersion, though, I head to the Scandic Meyergården hotel in Mo i Rana where Svein Jaeger Hansen, the head chef, has earned himself the nickname ‘the hunter chef’. “I love reindeer,” he tells me. “When I talk about this meat, the hairs pop up on my arms.” It’s a bold statement, but at dinner later I can see why he’s so emphatic. Kicking off with a kind of reindeer tagliata, the meat lightly seared on the outside and a deep red in the middle, I get a full understanding of the depth of flavour of the meat – deeply tender, a whisper of gamey intensity but not overpoweringly so. My main course of seared reindeer tenderloin with parsnip puree, gravy and roast vegetables proves the meat’s versatility.
My protein levels suitably topped up for the foreseeable, I hop on a plane bright and early to Leknes airport, towards the southern point of the Lofoten islands. The journey itself must be up there with one of the world’s most beautiful; white-capped peaks so close you can almost touch them seem to soar just metres from the windows of the 40-seater propellor plane, giving way, all of a sudden, to water so clear you can see the undulations of the rock formations as it reaches the shore of islands and then – Lofoten, stretching into the water with its blood-red fisherman’s cottages, striking mountains and vast emptiness. The small plane picks up on every minor undulation in the atmosphere, and I spend the duration of the journey white-knuckled, my nose glued to the window.
From one vehicular challenge to another, arriving in Lofoten brings with it my first experience of driving on the opposite side of the road, while navigating tight, rural lanes. There is also the added hazard of the sheer beauty of the islands, which draws my eyes away from the road. Each corner I drive around seems to have me whooping in delight, and there are more than a few occasions where I end up talking to myself in the car. “Oh my god, that MOUNTAIN!” I exclaim at one point. “No bloody WAY,” on another, when the sun breaks through the clouds as I make it through a particularly tight turn only to see the mountain in front of me perfectly mirrored in the placid water below. Against the odds, and in double the time quoted to me by Google Maps, I make it to my destination, the quintessentially Lofoten fishing hamlet of Reine. Cracking open a Lofotpils Pilsner – the local brewery in Svolvaer – I toast to not getting myself killed on a mountain road as the setting sun turns the craggy peaks around me a salmon hue.
It is hardly the most exciting atmospheric activity I see that evening, though. After a meal that runs the gamut of Lofoten oceanic highlights – scallops, stockfish, and cod – I retire to the bar next door for a nightcap, only to immediately leave it behind as my Aurora tracking app sets my phone alight. Running out the door of the bar, I shout at the barman that I’ll be back to pay my bill, his nonchalance at my disappearance implying that, given the population of Reine sits around 300, he’s not too bothered about how difficult a lone New Zealander will be to find. Turning my head up to the sky, the late night depths suddenly seem to crack open as a flicker of green dances through the ether, stretching behind the imposing peaks that surround the village. The colour flits around the sky, ebbing and flowing in its intensity before it finally seems like the whole world is pulsating with the electromagnetic show. Out here, with such a dearth of artificial light, these solar shows are a regular occurrence, adding wonder and brightness to the otherwise perpetual night.
I make it through a tight turn only to see the mountain perfectly mirrored in the placid water below
I’m staying in a rorbuer – a converted former fisherman’s cabin – directly on the harbour. My window looks out over the still-very-active fishing production facility, and I wake early in the morning to watch boats come and go, quietly idling through the water and out into the ocean. Making my way to my car, I face my third hazard of the last 24 hours. While it may have seemed that spring was rolling in the day before, it has dumped with snow again overnight – and there is a thick layer of it entombing my car. Growing up as I did in a subtropical climate, I’m hardly familiar with freeing up a vehicle from the sticky clutches of a squall. Brandishing the brush that came with the rental car, I eventually scrape it free and set out with trepidation along the squeaky, slippery roads, quietly thanking the rental car gods for the studs on the wheels of my Suzuki. It’s a good reminder of the ever-changing brutality of the weather out here.
My next destination is Lofoten Gårdsysteri, a farm which occupies an enviable position secreted between the mountains and the fjord near the famous Unstad surf beach. Here, Dutch nationals Marielle de Roos and Hugo Vink operate a herd of goats and make cheese which has quickly gained numerous awards and national attention. It’s winter now, so the goats are kept safe and warm in their barns, but in the summertime they are left to roam freely across the mountains during the seemingly endless days, grazing on wild plants and scaling the precipitous heights. It’s this peculiar lifestyle of the animals that I feel like I can taste when I sit down to feast on the cheese after a tour of the facility.
Marielle and Hugo’s flagship cheese is Steinfjording, a firm, creamy, deeply flavoured hard cheese which is exceptional in its most basic iteration but is phenomenal in the two other additions I tried as well, one made with seaweed and the other with fenugreek. It is, however, the second round of cheese that is truly mind-bending. Sitting in their restaurant looking out across the white hills, having navigated mounds of snow and icy roads to get here, I try their feta and halloumi. Two cheeses that are synonymous with the warm, sunbaked landscapes of Greece are somehow being not only made but made phenomenally well in the Arctic Circle on an island where the sun doesn’t rise for half the year.
Bidding Marielle and Hugo goodbye, I continue onto Lofoten Seaweed, to meet Tamara Singer, a fellow New Zealander who married a Norwegian and moved halfway around the world to Lofoten. Here, she set up the seaweed business with her good friend, fisherman’s daughter Angelita Eriksen. Combining Singer’s Japanese heritage and understanding of the ways in which seaweed can be utilised in food and Eriksen’s knowledge of fishing and the ocean around Lofoten, the two began foraging in the frigid waters for seaweed, quickly realising they had stumbled upon a bounty. Singer attributes the plant’s immense growth around the islands to the same thing that makes it such a hotspot for cod – the clear, nutrient-rich water unsurprisingly creates abundant growing conditions for sea plants too. Now, the duo’s products are exported around the world, and supplied to restaurants everywhere from Oslo, to the place where my journey started – Til Elise Fra Marius, just a short flight away.
The author Frank A. Jenssen once wrote, “The cod – the fish that created Norway.” While the country has inevitably diversified its exports in line with modernisation of daily life, a few days driving around Lofoten demonstrates that this heritage industry shows no signs of giving up the ghost. On my last day in the archipelago I find myself on a boat with fisherman Kato and his intern, Espen, a young guy from Bergen who is studying fishing at college. As we chug out of Ballstad harbour, the houses still slick with early morning frost, I chat to them both about the modern face of fishing both in Lofoten and further afield. “The fishing around here tends to work on seven-year cycles of luck,” Kato tells me, as he maneouvres out to sea. “The last few years have been great for skrei, but it has been a struggle this year.”
Nevertheless, we are surrounded by other boats as we come to a stop at a spot Kato knows to be good for fishing. Some have nets out, others longlines. Some are simply line fishing, like us. I drop my lure and settle in, my toes already going numb despite the thick, woollen socks I’m wearing. I entertain myself by soaking up the view – the morning sun brings the surrounding mountains into high definition, stretching as far as the eye can see. Suddenly, though, the rod in my hand leaps, bucking under an unseen pressure on the end of the line. “Oh my god!” I yell. “I’ve caught something!” Kato checks his watch. “It’s only been five minutes,” he exclaims. “How on earth did you manage that?”
The late night depths suddenly seem to crack open as a flicker of green dances through the ether
I reel it in slowly, my arms burning with lactic acid. It’s tougher than it seems – a legitimate arm workout – and I’m panting by the time I finally bring the fish to the surface. It is not, unfortunately, the famed skrei. Rather, it’s a sizable coalfish – better known as pollock on British shores. It measures at least five feet, and weighs around 26 pounds. I’m not sure I have ever been more delighted with myself in all 26 years of my life.
The rest of the boat trip is unexciting, with Espen catching just one other fish – one the Norwegians nickname “shit fish” thanks to its less-than-attractive face which resembles a melting blob of wax – and Kato not having any luck at all, perhaps proving his earlier comments right. I leave my monster with them with promises that they’ll send me pictures of what they cook, and ride the high all the way back to London that evening, the frenetic nature of the city feeling especially grating after starting the day bobbing silently on Vestfjord, looking up at mountains.
I set out to this rural stretch of Norway to find out more about what it means to cook and eat in such a remote, extreme corner of the world. While these days residents can usually pop out to the local Kiwi or Mix supermarkets to grab the ingredients that they require for dinner, it’s encouraging to see that the industries that have kept hardy locals fed for centuries are still in rude health. Reindeer meat finds its way onto Michelin-starred menus in Oslo and beyond, and stockfish is considered to be a delicacy as far afield as Nigeria. And yet, it’s in these icy, rural communities, fighting against snowstorms, howling winds and endless nights, that these products are grown, raised and caught, alongside some of the country’s finest cheese, groundbreaking seaweed products and world-class fine dining. So, what are people eating and making in the Arctic Circle? Everything, as it turns out. But a hell of a lot of fish, too.
