Strange flavours from a restaurant at the end of the world

When a restaurant is located in the Arctic and most of its ingredients have to be brought in by boat or plane, fine cuisine requires some pretty inventive thinking – I mean, seals, whales, reindeer and even plankton?

The sommelier warned me about the shotgun: “We double-check in the kitchen, but you never know what’s going to happen,” she added, pointing out that the elaborately plated medal placed before me was made from a ptarmigan shot by a local hunter.

Looking closer, the grouse gravy with pumpkin jam and pickled thyme smells like a childhood memory, like Sunday dinner on steroids, reborn as something new and strange. Outside, under the midnight sun, Arctic winds sweep through the Longyearbyen Valley, casting a white carpet of broken ice.

These contrasts — fine dining with ammunition possibilities, a warm dining room with an otherworldly view — are part of what makes dining at Huset, “the restaurant at the end of the world,” such a special experience. Plus, Longyearbyen, where the restaurant is located, is simply not that easy to get to. The northernmost permanent settlement with over 1,000 inhabitants It is the largest point in the world and is just 800 miles (1,288 km) from the North Pole.

The Svalbard archipelago, with its main settlement of Longyearbyen, floats on the edge of the polar ice. It began as a mining town but is being reborn as an otherworldly experience with the last coal mine due to close next year.

That includes dining at Huset, where the first two dishes on the tasting menu arrive encased in a single piece of reindeer antler and ivory bone. The ruby-colored ribbon bits are slices of salted reindeer heart; the deep purple-and-white swirls are preserved reindeer neck meat. The neck is smoky, with a strong salt flavor and a thin, leathery texture; the heart also smells of campfire and has a delicate, jelly-like moment on the tongue.

With night falling for four months of the year, not much vegetation grows here. But there’s more life here than you’d expect. Seals and walruses glide through the water, while animals like reindeer, polar bears and ptarmigan roam the land. All species are protected, but the law allows permit holders to hunt reindeer, bearded seals and ptarmigan. A specific period of the year.

Huset’s head chef, Alberto Lozano, sources the meat from local hunters and trappers. To create the little towers of waffles, seal meat, rich béarnaise sauce, and pickled blueberries, Huset gets the seal meat that a dog-sled company owner hunts to feed his dogs, the waiter explains.

of Restaurant Instagram account The footage shows Lozano and his team foraging for mushrooms and sorrel, the leaves of which paint Longyearbyen’s hills green in late summer, but these delicacies only appear for a brief period: When they appear before my eyes in late May, just as the polar darkness is lifting, mushrooms are being pickled and dried, and powdered sorrel is being used to make tiny marshmallows with an explosive flavour.

There used to be a lot more life here. At one point, I noticed a beech leaf on my plate; it was literally part of the plate. Much of the food was served on stones from the nearby fossil-rich hills. Until about 2 million years ago, Island Natural History MuseumThere were forests of beeches and sequoias, traces of which remain in the stones broken by the pickaxes of curious enthusiasts and geologists.

A good chunk of the ingredients come from mainland Norway, and sometimes from further afield – the plankton powder sprinkled on the earthy, grassy rice and caramelised onions comes from the Netherlands – but in a place with a long tradition of almost all food being shipped in from warmer climes, it’s surprising, and a great deal of thoughtfulness, to see so many snippets of the landscape on the table.

The ptarmigan has no shotgun. It’s buttery soft, soaking up the gravy and cloudberry sauce beautifully. I watch the light outside fade as the clouds pass in front of the sun. Abandoned mining buildings cling to the hills, relics of a time that perhaps seemed as real and permanent to those who lived there as the present does to us.

Could a warming Arctic mean something different will be on the menu in the future? Already, climate change in Svalbard is happening six times faster than the rest of the world. Recent researchScientists believe that Arctic marine species are moving closer to the poles, and that southern species will likely appear further north.

moreover, Southern relatives of Arctic copepodsTiny sea creatures, auklets, are taking over their territory, a harbinger of changes to come for the larger creatures that feed on them. What this menu, and Svalbard itself, will look like in 10 or 20 years’ time is unclear.

It’s about 9 p.m., and I open the restaurant door and step outside, the sun shining in a blue sky, the wind sharp as a knife, slicing through the only weak spot in my coat: the opening around my face. I cover my mouth and nose with my gloved hands, ghosts of grouse juice sticking to my fingers with every breath.

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