The Best Restaurants in Reykjavik (Four We've Eaten At, and the Honest Catch on Each)
The Best Restaurants in Reykjavik (Four We've Eaten At, and the Honest Catch on Each)
We only went to Iceland because of a photo. We came across a picture of the Blue Lagoon on Pinterest, booked flights to Reykjavik two days later, and landed in January in the middle of the long Icelandic winter. We went for the hot springs. We came home talking about the dinners.
The food Iceland gets known for from the outside is the adventurous end of it — fermented shark, sheep’s head, sour rams’ testicles. What we actually ate was a run of kitchens taking the island’s wild game, seafood and local produce and rebuilding Icelandic cooking around them.
“Icelandic cuisine is many things, but one thing it isn’t? Boring.
Here are the four, and the honest catch on each. Three are in Reykjavik; the fourth is 45 minutes out at the Blue Lagoon, which changes how you plan that day. We first put these in a short list years ago — our original top five — and this is that list with the detail we left out, minus one that has since closed. Fair warning: we ate them all on one winter trip in 2015, so where money matters we compare them to each other rather than quote decade-old numbers. One of the four, Perlan, has changed a lot since — its own section says how.
Perlan: the dining room that turned
Perlan sat in a revolving glass dome on a hill above the city. We only knew about it because of my dad, who ate there around 1998 and never stopped bringing it up. His advice: go even just for a cocktail at the bar, to watch the view turn. He was right about the room. It was classic luxury: white tablecloths, waiters in proper suits, the kind of formality that has quietly gone out of newer restaurants. I sat there imagining him in my chair with a whiskey, getting excited about the meat options, wishing someone would put Sinatra on.
The four courses were a warm winter salad of Jerusalem artichokes and arugula; ling fish under shiitake mushrooms, fennel and an onion foam; lamb filet and lamb shank with hazelnut and celeriac purée; then coffee meringue, chocolate mousse, cherry sauce and the most delicate marshmallows I’ve eaten. The sous chef told us the kitchen’s idea was simple dishes carried by the ingredients — a humble way to describe the place celebrated chefs and locals told us was the best restaurant in the country. Vegetables got equal billing with the meat and the seafood, and the cooking was international, built on Icelandic ingredients rather than a tour of Iceland. It was also the cheapest four courses we ate on that trip.
That was February 2015, and it is the one meal on this page you cannot book today. The dome is the Perlan nature museum now, and the restaurant under the glass is a casual daytime one — no dinner service and no tasting menu. We have not eaten the new version, so we are not going to tell you what it is like. The section stays because the room, and the meal we had in it, are worth reading before you go up for the view.
The Grill Market: eight courses, cooked over fire
Ask a concierge or a local in Reykjavik where to eat and a lot of them point you at The Grill Market, or Grillmarkaðurinn in Icelandic. The decor is chic, the bar is where the in-crowd drinks, and the food is genuinely good. The cooking is Icelandic with distinctly Asian flavors running through it, and the kitchen’s closest relationship is with local farmers, who they work with directly for the freshest ingredients.
The eight-course tasting menu is served family style and cooked with nothing but fire, smoke, logs and coal. What stayed with us: grilled chicken wings marinated in oyster sauce with home-made peanut butter and “popcorn”, an Icelandic filet of cod with bits of chorizo, and a spinach and mandarin salad with slow-cooked duck confit, which was my favorite thing on the table. Then a huge dessert tray with melted caramel and home-made ice cream.
Two honest notes. Come hungry and pace yourself — eight family-style courses is a lot of food, and the dessert course is a meal on its own. And one of the dishes this kitchen is known for is mink whale sashimi with a Thai dipping sauce, worth knowing in advance if whale is not something you want on the table.
The Fish Company: Icelandic food taken apart and put back together
A glowing moose head watches the room. Candlelight picks out wood carvings of Icelandic daily life along the walls, Kama Sutra scenes included. The Fish Company, or Fiskfélagið if you’re feeling linguistically adventurous, is intimate and funny at the same time, and relaxed enough that the kitchen can get away with what it does.
The “Around Iceland” tasting menu takes traditional dishes from different regions and rebuilds them. It opens with cod, shrimp, apple slices and celery carpaccio held together by dill mayonnaise and apple vinaigrette. Then salmon with egg yolk cream, pickled onions and fennel salad, a wisp of herb foam folded through. Even the bread arrives with a house-made lava salt butter. Dessert is a soft spruce sponge cake with Icelandic skyr sorbet, salted caramel and whey cream, lemon meringue and oatmeal crumble, finished with what they call spruce “snow” — pine notes in a dessert, which shouldn’t work and completely does.
The catch is that this one asks something of you. Our own review said it straight: the menu requires an open mind and trust in culinary alchemy, and in less capable hands the approach could feel gimmicky. If you want a good piece of fish cooked plainly, book one of the others. If you want to understand what Icelandic cooking is doing, this is the one — and the service explains each course without lecturing you.
“You leave satisfied and a little smarter about Iceland — tradition revealed by taking it apart.
Lava: the one that isn’t in Reykjavik
Straight up: Lava is not in the city. It is the Blue Lagoon’s own restaurant, 45 minutes out of Reykjavik, built into the side of a lava cliff with lava rock up the walls and floor-to-ceiling windows onto the steaming water. Book it as the end of a lagoon day, which is exactly how we did it — a couple of hours in the water, back to the changing room to get ready, then dinner while the snow came down and the lights around the lagoon came on.
Four courses with wine. Sous-vide arctic char with dill, green apples and fennel to open. Then pan-roasted cod with goat cheese, cauliflower and langoustine in a creamy langoustine sauce — the cod was good, but the langoustine and that sauce stole it. The main was beef tenderloin with pickled onions, wild mushrooms and Icelandic organic carrots, cooked rare edge to edge, no charred crust, no well-done rim. Everything the kitchen uses is Icelandic: the fish, the lamb, the skyr. The kitchen was run by Viktor Örn Andrésson when we ate there — he won the Nordic Chef of the Year competition in 2014 and has since left the Blue Lagoon.
Two honest notes. Dessert is Icelandic skyr mousse with licorice-chocolate toffee, chervil swamp cake and licorice ice cream, so if licorice is not your thing, your last course is gone. And the location cuts both ways — the tasting menu was well worth what we paid, but not worth a 45-minute drive each way for dinner alone. Do the lagoon first, then eat. The only regret from that night was not keeping the bathrobe on for the meal.
How we’d pick between them
One dinner in Reykjavik, and you want to eat something you can’t eat at home: The Fish Company. It is the one doing the most with Icelandic ingredients, and it is the meal we still describe to people.
Two dinners: add the Grill Market, for a long, hungry night with eight courses coming off the fire. Perlan used to be the easy third — the room, the view going round, the smallest bill of the trip — and that dinner is not served any more, so give the third night to the Blue Lagoon instead.
And if the Blue Lagoon is already on your list — it was the reason we booked the trip — put Lava on the same day and don’t make that drive twice.
