Signs of the Times

I suppose it may have been Elizabeth David who began the post-war fetishising of food in the more affluent parts of the world. Her intention was probably only to awaken among her fellows a love of fresh, well-cooked dishes, but unintentionally she also spawned a slightly competitive snobbishness about what one ate and how one made one's meals. Later came television cooking shows and super chefs and, eventually, faintly melancholic comedy about "fine dining" in the form of The Trip and its sequels.

I'm not sure when I began to think things were getting out of hand. Certainly when I read an article by Rebecca Mead in the 18 June, 2018 edition of the New Yorker about a restaurant called Koks in the Faroes, I decided the situation was becoming pretty rum.

Koks is half an hour outside the already remote hamlet that is its closest neighbour, (and of course the Faroes themselves are already pretty remote*). Despite its position, the restaurant attracts customers from far distant places - their voyage becomes a kind of modern day pilgrimage, I suppose. Once the customers reach the restaurant, they pay a great deal of money and are served tiny bits of very peculiar things, (worms, food that even the staff remark tastes of ammonia, roasted puffin) which many of them do not seem to actually enjoy.

Here are the passages from the article that I found especially confounding; the word decadent floated across my mind more than once:

"Early last year, Koks received a Michelin star, the first to be awarded in the Faroes. The judges cited “dishes with distinct flavors . . . carefully prepared to a consistently high standard.” When the representative from Michelin paid Koks a visit, the restaurant occupied a modernist house, with large windows, at the base of a mountain that overlooks the coastal hamlet of Kirkjubøur. The village is one of the most picturesque spots on the islands, with a turf-roofed farmhouse that dates to the eleventh century, and the ruins of a cathedral built in 1300. The Michelin citation led to a surge in reservations, especially from international gastronomes who were not deterred—and who sometimes were energized—by the necessity of taking a flight from Copenhagen, Reykjavík, or Edinburgh ...

Last August, Koks’s lease on the house in Kirkjubøur, which is a fifteen-minute cab ride from Tórshavn, ended. The restaurant closed for the winter, and when I arrived in the Faroes, in early April, Koks was about to reopen in an even more remote location, amid forbidding mountains near Lake Leynar, half an hour northwest of Tórshavn. The new Koks doesn’t even have a road leading to it. After you pull off a single-lane highway, you follow a dirt track that peters out along the lake’s shoreline, a ribbon of black volcanic sand. Then you must ford a stream and drive, for several minutes, on a rutted, rocky pathway until you reach a modest turf-roofed farmhouse that was built in 1741. It is a fitting venue for a superlatively perverse dining experience ...

One planned dish was a sushi-like confection: raw fermented lamb served atop a cake of crispy fried reindeer lichen, cemented in place with an emulsion of mushrooms and pickled berries. Diners would be invited to sprinkle the lamb with desiccated seaweed flakes that tasted a bit like truffles. The farmhouse had the usual tables for two and four, an...

Ziska is slender and intense, with a ginger beard and long curly hair, like that of a Romantic poet. He had spent much of the winter researching new flavors and techniques, and was eager to try them out on his guests. “When we first opened, we got maybe the wrong guests—people who expected a lot of food, to get full,” Ziska told me. “But over time we have distilled those people away. People know if they want one dish, one steak, they shouldn’t come here” ...

When he first dared to serve fermented lamb tallow, in 2012, foreign diners compared its strong taste to that of blue cheese. “I have been eating it my whole life, and I never made that connection,” Ziska said. “But once you start thinking of it like that you can work further on it. ‘O.K., what does blue cheese go well with?’ ” He now serves fermented lamb tallow as a paste with dried cod, smeared on a cheesy waffle—a savory twist on a traditional Faroese sweet that is usually served with coffee ...

Some of Koks’s dishes, such as a raw queen scallop served in its shell, are self-explanatory, but others require elucidation. Ziska told me that he had been developing a variation on a traditional method of preparing roasted puffin, a seabird that was once plentiful in the Faroes but whose numbers have diminished drastically because of climate change. A Faroese recipe book from 1902 recommends stuffing the seabird with pancake batter flavored with raisins and cardamom, and then baking it. The result, Ziska told me, is a filling but leaden dish. In his version, a pancake is wrapped around slices of baked razorbill, a more plentiful relative of the puffin. Ziska served a similar dish last year but used fulmar, another seabird. Fulmar has a very strong, fatty flavor, similar to that of cod-liver oil. Razorbill is milder. He said of the dish, “It’s a beef Wellington, but with a batter around this gamy bird, and it tastes a little bit of fish” ....

At the beginning, people were laughing at us for putting a small thing on a big plate, or for serving raw fish,” Ziska told me. “And in the Faroe Islands paying for food is considered crazy. You have the fish in the ocean, and you have a boat, or you know someone who has a boat, and you go out and get it and cook it yourself—that’s the mentality.” ... The menu at Koks aspired to be both firmly rooted in native produce and brashly experimental: raw scallops and horseradish were mixed with milk and liquid nitrogen. Select fermented foods were introduced. A lavishly illustrated book about the restaurant, published in 2012, contains a photograph of what became a signature appetizer: a test tube containing a mouthful of dried-fish crisps, roasted pearl barley, sugar-glazed seaweed, and fragments of roasted fermented lamb. The book includes some unintentionally comic images of Koks’s team—including a younger and considerably more kempt-looking Ziska—foraging on Faroese hillsides for wild thyme or lovage while dressed in kitchen whites. Although Ziska was not yet the head chef, he contributed several dishes to the menu, including beet ice cream and skate and sea sandwort with mussel froth. “Poul Andrias was the crazy guy,” Sørensen told me. “He thought it was important to have a twisted mind.” In 2014, Sørensen left Koks, after disagreements with Jensen about how it should be run. He will soon open an affordable restaurant for locals, on Tórshavn’s harbor, that will not adhere strictly to New Nordic principles. “It is nice that I can use tomatoes again,” Sørensen told me... Under Ziska, Koks gleefully embraces the potentially disgusting aspects of Faroese cuisine. In the nineteenth century, a Danish physician named Peter Ludvig Panum wrote a treatise entitled “Observations Made During the Measles Epidemic on the Faroe Islands in the Year 1846,” which noted that the archipelago’s inhabitants regularly ate meat that was crawling with maggots. Panum’s writings made many Faroese feel embarrassed about their culinary traditions, but Ziska does not doubt the account’s accuracy. “If you ferment the meat and the weather goes wrong, then you get maggots in it,” he noted, cheerfully. “It’s a completely natural thing to happen to any meat. Back then, you couldn’t throw any meat away—it was too valuable. You had to eat it to survive. What we did back then—and still do today—is you cook the meat but add rice.” (Rice has been imported for centuries.) One dish that Ziska has served at Koks is a twist on his ancestors’ starvation-level fare: flatbread filled with cooked fermented lamb and topped with ground mealworms, which Ziska buys from a pet-food supplier on the Internet. “Maggots are a very good source of protein, and could potentially save the planet, but when I give them to diners I don’t present it in that much depth,” he told me. “I just tell that fun little story about the rice.” Diners at Koks tend not to be timid eaters; with rare exceptions, the mealworms go down the hatch. On returning to Tórshavn, I had a meal at a restaurant called Ræst, which is owned by Johannes Jensen, the entrepreneur who founded Koks. Ræst, which occupies one of the oldest buildings in Tórshavn, has small wood-panelled rooms, giving it the feel of a saltbox house on Nantucket, though it is imbued with a distinctive, near-rancid smell. Ræst allows foodies lured to the Faroes by the avant-garde cuisine at Koks to sample native foods in something close to their traditional preparations. For some foreign diners, its pleasures are strictly anthropological. As I sat down, Jensen said, “You will probably dislike everything you eat. Sorry.” The experience of dining at Ræst was like what it might be for an American to consume an extended meal in which Marmite was the central ingredient. The set menu began with an appetizer of dried cod, whale blubber, and dried whale meat (which was black and tasted of seawater, blood, and iron). The first main course featured stewed whale cooked in a risotto-like mess of barley and seaweed. It was served with a glass of sherry, which, Jensen explained, is a better accompaniment to fermented dishes than more insipid wines. More ræst dishes followed, including a version of the islands’ most common fish dish: fermented cod served with puréed potatoes and leeks and topped with fermented lamb tallow. The tallow was vividly rank. The fish was toothsome and chewy—a bit like bacalao—but unsalted. “It tastes a little bit of ammonia, doesn’t it?” Jensen inquired, solicitously. What Koks offered its diners wasn’t culinary perfection: it was uniqueness. In an era when matcha macarons and eel ceviche are available across the globe, its patrons were thrilled to spend an evening eating things that nobody they knew had ever eaten. The presentation had been simultaneously theatrical and artisanal, and imbued with a spirit of luxurious severity: diners got only a few bites of courses that had taken hours of effort to prepare. Above all, there was a strange satisfaction in how hard it had been to get to the restaurant. Fäviken, the Michelin two-star restaurant in the snowy hinterlands of northern Sweden, was positively metropolitan by comparison; it was on the European mainland, after all. At Koks, we were getting not just extreme cuisine but an experience that was, quite literally, outlandish. A bunch of foreigners had gone to absurd lengths to eat food that even the natives didn’t fully expect us to like. Looking around the table, I calculated that, collectively, we would be burning through roughly thirty-two thousand air miles to enjoy a fanatically locavore, ecologically pristine meal."

I recommend the full version of the article, which can be found here.


*if it isn't culturally superior to regard anywhere as being remote from anywhere else, since the implication such an assumption carries is that one place is higher in the pecking order than another,  and I imagine that that implication could be contestable in these testy times when everything seems to be contestable.