We’re in Longyearbyen on Spitzbergen Island of Svalbard, above the 78th parallel. That’s as far north as the northernmost tip of Greenland. To get there, we sailed in the Hurtigruten ship Trollfjord for two days north across the Arctic Ocean from North Cape, Norway, which is the farthest north point of land in continental Europe. When you dock in Svalbard, you’re greeted by a sign warning of the dangers of polar bears.
This wouldn’t seem to be promising territory for fine dining! But Longyearbyen is home to Huset, the northernmost restaurant on Earth. Amazingly, it holds one of the biggest and most extensive wine cellars in Scandinavia.
Huset, which means house, was built in the 1940’s as a community hall for the coal miners and their families who were the only residents of this remote island. By the 1970’s, the building came to house a restaurant to serve the growing population of what was still a one-company mining town. The menu then featured polar bear meat.
In the 1980’s tourists began to visit Svalbard, drawn by its bleak arctic beauty. Hroar Holm, Huset’s manager, came up with the idea of offering fine dining and began to collect wine. He insulated the basement set in the permafrost to provide ideal stable year-round temperature for a cellar. The concept is the same as the Svalbard Global Seed Bank which relies on the permanent cold to preserve samples of all the world’s agricultural seeds.
The collection grew to over 20,000 bottles. Today the list has more than 1000 different wines. I don’t think Michelin has visited Svalbard, but Wine Spectator did recently and awarded Huset their Best of Award of Excellence.
Over the years, Huset’s commitment to serious fine dining grew. Chef Alberto Lozano was recruited by Hurtigruten Svalbard to helm the restaurant. He’s from Albacete, Spain and brings some Spanish elements into his cuisine, but his palette has become first and foremost Arctic. He showcases not just Arctic ingredients, but local methods of preservation and preparation.
We sometimes talk about going to the ends of the earth to dine, but Svalbard is truly the end of the earth. It’s the furthest north land mass on the planet.
More than half of the archipelago is covered with glaciers. Here’s a shot I took on the fjord in which Huset’s town Longyearbyen sits.
The near complete absence of fertile soil and the extreme climate make growing anything here—except for a few herbs in a greenhouse—impossible. But there is much to hunt and forage.
Reindeer, seal, ptarmigan, mushrooms, various kinds of seaweed some herbs and berries—cloudberry, bilberry, mountain sorrel—head the list of indigenous Svalbard foods.
Fish are abundant. I asked one local about the fishing here. “It’s pretty good. We went out last week and I got about four or five hundred.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Four or five hundred kilos,” she explained. On rod and reel. In a couple of hours.
Our dinner at Huset was a fourteen-course tasting menu. We were brought glasses of a California sparkling wine as soon as we sat down. I generally choose standard rather than prestige wine pairings, but interested to see what their famous cellar held, I went for their top-level pairing. I was somewhat disappointed to see that only about half of the selection came from their cellar collection and half were recent acquisitions. But nevertheless, there were a good number of wines in the pairing that I especially enjoyed.
The amuse bouches began with Svalbard Cold Cuts and Bread.
Reindeer heart, smoked and dried, and reindeer chorizo were served with a black shallot paste and a Pan de Aceite, showing the chef’s Spanish roots.
Local beer sourdough bread came with butter cut in the shape of a ptarmigan and infused with that bird’s dried and finely ground meat. I loved the bread but found the butter an unsuccessful attempt to combine a local ingredient with a foreign one. Ptarmigan are native to Svalbard but butter, of course, is not.
The reindeer chorizo, on the other hand, used Spanish paprika that the chef brought from a trip to his home to make an exceptionally flavorful and enjoyable local/foreign sausage.
I’d like to include here the chef’s description of the care they take to use every part of the reindeer they get from a local hunter and trapper:
Once the reindeer arrives in our kitchen, we hang the meat for an additional two weeks, building on the time it spent in the trapper station. We then carefully separate each muscle to ensure the highest quality throughout the process.
The finest cuts are vacuum-sealed and frozen, while some legs undergo a traditional Spanish ham curing method, which takes at least nine months. This involves curing the meat in salt for 14 days before hanging it, covered in Spanish paprika, to develop rich flavours.
We transform the neck into cold cuts, and with the leftovers, we create chorizo, pâté from the liver, smoked heart, and brined air-dried tongue—delicious when fried.
Finally, we roast the whole carcass to produce a rich demi-glace. Any leftover fat is repurposed in our kitchen or shared with our friends at Green Dog [a Svalbard dog sledding service company.]
This meticulous process allows us to honour every part of the reindeer while bringing the authentic taste of Svalbard to the table.
Next among the starters came Rype (the local name for ptarmigan) served two ways: pralines of ptarmigan leg meat prepared confit-style with black currant compote, and “anchovies,” crafted from breast muscle rillettes, preserved in Røros butter, and served with a lacto-fermented tomato sauce on toasted seed bread, replicating the classic anchovy experience. On top of the “anchovies” were seeds found in the bird’s crop, a local traditional practice.
The amuse bouches concluded with Svalbard ingredients in three examples of preservation:
- Svalbard cod marinated in escabeche and topped with its foam
- Local pickled fjellridderhatt mushrooms, hand-picked by the kitchen team
- Lacto- fermented radish.
All three preparations were fascinating and tasty.
These opening dishes did a fine job of introducing us to local ingredients and preparation methods, increasing our curiosity of what the rest of the menu held in store.
To conclude the amuse bouches, we were served this “umami shot,” a dill and sea buckthorn cocktail with cloudberry foam in a miniature guksi, the traditional Sami drinking cup.
Then our server ushered us from the lounge where we were first seated to the downstairs dining room.
The first of the main courses was Seal Mojama in ajobianco with fermented tomato water, almond and parsley oil.
I found this dish to be a hodge-podge of ingredients that, while enjoyable individually, didn’t enhance one another. Mojama is the Spanish technique of preserving meat or fish by salting, pressing, soaking and drying. It makes tuna into “ham of the sea.” Our Spanish-born chef used this method to cure the seal meat. The seal was tender and had a pleasant saltiness. On its own, it would have been interesting, but why was it floating on the ajobianco, and what were the almonds doing there?
As an aside here, I want to note that I am holding Chef Alberto Lozano to the same standard that I would a top restaurant in mainland Europe. I recognize that he faces challenges that a chef in Paris would never dream of having to deal with. Almost everything has to come across the Arctic Ocean, often ordered weeks in advance. The pool of competent help is tiny or nonexistent on Svalbard. The availability of locally foraged ingredients is subject to the unpredictability that the extreme arctic environment imposes. And the arrival of customers is far harder to forecast than on the mainland. But he aspires to world-class excellence, and I hope that my critiques will be taken for what they are: suggestions that a well-wisher hopes will be helpful.
To accompany the seal – there’s a phrase I’ve never used before! – the sommelier brought a Louis Michel Chablis Vaudesir 2004. A promising start to the journey ahead of us.
Next came a dish called King Crab Art.
Finely sliced Norwegian king crab was combined with local flowers, fermented red cabbage, pickled cloudberries and dill to make an abstract impressionistic painting on the plate. I found this combination of ingredients somewhat more successful than the previous dish. The fine slicing of the crab meat gave it a pleasingly delicate texture, and the fermented cabbage and pickled berries enhanced it in an interesting way. But honestly, I found the attempt at artwork off-putting and would have preferred a more straightforward presentation of these ingredients.
With the crab, we were brought a Marcel Diess Engelgarten 2020, a simple and pleasant wine, but surely there were more interesting single-grape Alsace wines in their thousand-bottle collection that would have done a better job.
The next dish was the best so far: Scallop and Sea Urchin. It’s hard to go too far wrong with those two ingredients, but here the creativity of the chef shone through, enhancing them both in surprising ways. The scallop was cured with amazake, a sweet thick sake in which the rice starch is fermented into sugar instead of alcohol. This gave the already excellent local scallop a unique creamy texture and sweetness. But where is the urchin, I asked? The urchin is the sauce, I learned. It was emulsified with black apple into a thick sauce that combined the deliciousness of the roe of local urchins with the concentrated flavor of apples fermented at controlled high temperature. Atsina, an anise-flavored green grown in Huset’s greenhouse, added just a subtle additional flavor. This was an excellent dish.
Accompanying the scallop/urchin dish was a 2009 Reichgraff von Kesselstatt Nies’chen GG, a creamy and floral Riesling, just off-dry. It complemented the dish well, but again I wondered if this is the best that Huset’s storied cellar has to offer.
Next came Arctic seafood rice with langoustine tempura.
The rice was cooked with squid ink, giving it a sweetness, and topped with dabs of mayonnaise, some seasoned with piquillo peppers (no doubt from the chef’s native Spain) and some with locally harvested plankton.
The chef came over to our table to tell us about this dish. The Norwegian langoustine was not cooked in the usual tempura method, he explained. The shell of the langoustine was dried and ground into a fine powder. This powder, instead of conventional tempura batter, coated pieces of langoustine tail before it was fried. He wants this to give the experience of the entire shellfish in each bite.
Alberto was charming. His enthusiastic sincerity made it clear he is on a mission that he cares deeply about. He loves the extremes of Svalbard and passionately wants to share the flavors this environment produces.
To accompany the seafood rice dish, the sommelier brought an Anne Amie Prisme 2008 from Oregon, a pinot noir blanc.
Chef Lozano introduced the next dish, cod kokotxas with ramps pil pil. Cod is one of the only ingredients that is common in both Norway and Spain, he explained. I was eager to try this Norwegian version of kokotxas, but it fell short of expectations. These cod cheeks should be gelatinously tender, but they were not. They were quite tough, probably because while the chef was chatting with us, his sous chef cooked them at too high a temperature. This was an avoidable mistake and made me sympathize with the chef, whose enthusiasm was undiminished in the face of the challenges of running a world-class restaurant near the North Pole. The pil pil sauce was excellent but it couldn’t make up for the toughness of the kokotxas.
What did ease my disappointment at the texture of the cod was the 1996 Savennieres Becherelle from Nicholas Joly, the first wine that seemed likely to be from their cellar collection rather than a new acquisition. This was a serious wine with complexity of taste and aroma and a unique personality.
We were served next a palate cleanser, an ice of fermented yellow beetroot with locally foraged mountain sorrel. It was excellent. Fermentation is a necessary method of preservation on Svalbard, and it also gave a zing to the beet.
The next dish was an unqualified success: Rype and sea buckthorn. Rype is the Norwegian name for ptarmigan, the only fowl that overwinters on Svalbard. Its winter coat is white, letting it camouflage in the snow. It tastes much like the pheasants I used to hunt when I lived in the Midwest. Rype breast came with a sea buckthorn sauce and a fermented chanterelle.
What pleased me most about this dish is that it combined local ingredients prepared simply and in familiar and necessary ways for the arctic. Without trying to be overly fancy, it shared some true Svalbard taste experiences.
Sea buckthorn is a common plant along the arctic coasts, where its salt tolerance allows it to thrive. It is an important source of vitamin C in the local diet. Its orange berries have a distinctive bright and sharp flavor.
A 2014 François Mitjaville Roc de Cambes accompanied the rype dish, probably another recent addition to the cellar but nonetheless an enjoyable Bordeaux, predominantly merlot, with a complex and lingering finish.
We were then served these lovely house-made brioches with smoked butter, black garlic and local seaweed. The server pointed out that the rock on which she presented them was found locally by the chef and contained fossilized tropical plants, showing that Svalbard was once located much closer to the equator. The tropical forest that grew here gave rise to the coal that was the reason for the island’s being settled and for Huset originally having been built.
Next came an entirely mushroom-based dish. We were there in peak mushroom season, mid-September. Since all of Svalbard is above the tree line, mushrooms that grow in association with tree roots—and that includes most of the mushrooms we eat in temperate climates—cannot grow there. But there are a number of varieties that thrive there, and people avidly forage them.
Common finds include Agaricus aristocratus (known as the polar mushroom or aristocratic agaric), which is large, fleshy, and thrives in areas with coal residue in the soil. Another favorite is Lepista multiformis (fjellridderhatt or clustered bonnet), which had been served to us in the amuse bouches.
I don’t know which species we were served in this dish, but they were tasty. The centerpiece was a mushroom “fiskboller,” or fish ball, a common Norwegian dish, accompanied by a pickled mushroom over rye bread “soil” and herbs from Huset’s little greenhouse. The server poured a mushroom broth and garum sauce around the composition. Garum, or fermented fish sauce, brought depth and umami to the dish.
To accompany the mushrooms, the sommelier brought a Barolo, Anselma Vignarionda Riserva 2011. Its tar and smoked meat bouquet worked well with the dish.
The next dish was one of my favorites: reindeer with a cherry glaze and a Jerusalem artichoke. The reindeer loin was tender and gamey, but in a good way. I suspect it was dry aged for a good long time. The cherry glaze was darkly sweet and perfectly made. It enhanced the meat nicely. The Jerusalem artichoke held a surprise: when I cut into it, out came a Jerusalem artichoke puree.
A 2000 Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle accompanied the reindeer. Its age had mellowed its intensity but not its complexity. It was a fine match for the dish.
We were next served popsicles of fermented honey with sea buckthorn heart and flowers, and a glass of Mark Angeli Bonnezeaux Coteau du Houet 2004, sweet and floral.
Chef Alberto came out to serve the dessert, a beetroot filled with beet and rhubarb cream and a sorbet of Norwegian strawberries. Pickled rhubarb was fashioned into a stem for the beet. He explained that nothing could be more Norwegian than these three ingredients. I thought it was delicious–tart/sweet and refreshing.
With the dessert came a glass of Niepoort vintage port, 2003.
Petit fours were polar bear gummies of black koji and elderflower, and in the whale’s mouth, pralines of plankton, cloudberries and lavender. The swirling colors of the pralines were said to represent the northern lights that we saw that night.
The refined setting amid the harsh arctic landscape, the warmth of each of the staff and the passionate commitment of the chef to honor Svalbard’s environment and flavors all combined to make our dinner at Huset an unforgettable experience. I’ve pointed out a few shortcomings, but my overall impression was extremely positive. Is it worth going to remote Svalbard for? Absolutely, but don’t go only for that meal. Chef Alberto Lozano would be the first to agree that Svalbard itself is a fascinating destination, worthy of a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
