Icelandic food

Hákarl, explained rather than dared

It is the most-searched Icelandic food term there is, and almost every page treats it as a challenge — the worst thing you will ever put in your mouth, filmed for the reaction. That framing misses what it actually is.

Hákarl is Greenland shark, and Greenland shark cannot be eaten fresh: the flesh carries enough urea and trimethylamine oxide to make you badly ill. The traditional treatment — burying or pressing the meat for weeks, then hanging it to dry for months, as in the photograph above — is what breaks those compounds down. The curing is not a stunt. It is the only reason the animal is food at all.

It smells powerfully of ammonia and tastes broadly the way it smells. Most Icelanders eat it once a year at Þorrablót, the midwinter feast, alongside the other preserved foods of a country that had no salt to spare and no sun to dry things in — soured ram’s testicles, singed sheep’s head, blood pudding. Þorrablót is a deliberate act of remembering hard winters, not a normal week’s eating, and the old midwinter month it is named for is older than Christianity here.

Try it if you want to. It is sold in tourist shops and at Kolaportið market in Reykjavík, in cubes with a toothpick. But a country’s food is not a dare, and the honest reason to eat hákarl is curiosity about how people survived here — not to film your face.

What people actually eat

• Lamb. The genuinely exceptional one. Icelandic sheep spend the summer loose in the highlands eating wild grass and herbs, and are rounded up in September at the réttir. Roast lamb, lamb soup (kjötsúpa), smoked lamb (hangikjöt) at Christmas. If you eat one thing here, this.
• The hot dog — pylsa. Closer to a national dish than anything on the traditional lists. Mostly lamb, in a soft bun, with raw onion, crispy fried onion, ketchup, sweet brown mustard and remoulade. Say eina með öllu — one with everything. Sold at every petrol station, which on a long drive is frequently the only thing open.
• Skyr. Technically a fresh cheese, eaten like thick yoghurt, made here since the settlement. A whole supermarket wall of it in flavours that never leave the country.
• Fish, unremarkably. Cod, haddock, arctic char, plaice — fresh, cheap by local standards and treated as completely ordinary, which it is. Plokkfiskur, the fish-and-potato mash, is the comfort-food version.
• Rúgbrauð. Dense dark rye, traditionally steamed in the ground by geothermal heat and still baked that way at Laugarvatn. Eaten with butter and smoked fish.
• Coffee, constantly. Iceland drinks a great deal of it and takes it seriously. Refills are usually free.

Where the food actually comes from

This is where the listicles stop and the useful part starts. Restaurants are the expensive part of an Iceland trip, so most visitors end up buying at least some of their meals in a supermarket — and Icelandic supermarkets are not evenly distributed.

We hold 150 grocery shops with coordinates. Of the 33 Bónus stores — the discount chain everyone recommends — 23 are in the capital area, leaving 10 for the entire rest of the country. On the south coast there is no Bónus at all between Selfoss and Egilsstaðir, a gap of 346 km covering Vík, Kirkjubæjarklaustur, Skaftafell, Jökulsárlón and Höfn.

The practical version: shop before you leave the south-west, and know that the village shop at Kirkjubæjarklaustur closes at 14:00 on a Saturday and has nothing recorded for Sunday. All of that, shop by shop with opening hours and coordinates, is on the supermarket page.

We are not going to tell you what a meal costs. Every other page on this subject quotes a figure; we hold no price data, so ours would be invented. What we have is the map — and on a road trip, the shop that is open when you arrive matters more than the one that was slightly cheaper 200 km ago.