Bizarre Icelandic Foods You Have to Try (and Some You Should Avoid)

Icelandic cuisine was shaped by a thousand years of not being able to grow much. There were no grains to speak of, no orchards, and long winters with no reliable way to keep food cold — so everything was smoked, dried, salted, fermented in whey or buried. That history produced a handful of things that are genuinely excellent, a handful that are an acquired taste, and a couple that exist mostly as a dare.

Worth trying, without hesitation

Skyr is the obvious starting point. It looks like yoghurt and is sold like yoghurt, but technically it is a fresh cheese: skimmed milk is cultured, set with rennet and then strained, which is why it is so thick and so high in protein while being almost fat-free. Icelanders have been making it for over a thousand years. Buy it in any supermarket, eat it plain or with berries, and understand that the version sold abroad is rarely the same thing.

Rúgbrauð is a dense, dark, almost sweet rye bread. The version worth going out of your way for is hverabrauð — "hot spring bread" — baked by burying the dough in geothermally heated ground near Laugarvatn or Mývatn for around 24 hours. It comes out steamed rather than baked, and it is superb with butter and smoked trout.

Icelandic lamb deserves its reputation. Sheep roam free across the highlands all summer eating wild grasses, berries and herbs, and the meat is correspondingly lean and distinctly flavoured. Try it as kjötsúpa, a simple lamb and root vegetable soup that is the national comfort food.

Also excellent: plokkfiskur, a homely mash of cod or haddock with potato, onion and béchamel, served with rye bread; harðfiskur, wind-dried fish torn into strips and eaten with a thick smear of butter, which is the standard Icelandic road-trip snack; and the pastries and cinnamon buns in any Reykjavík bakery, which are a genuine national strength.

The famous hot dog

The pylsa is not a novelty — it is the most reliably good cheap meal in Iceland. Icelandic hot dogs are made largely from lamb, blended with pork and beef, which gives them a smokier and less uniform flavour than the American version.

Order "eina með öllu" — one with everything — and it arrives with raw white onion and crispy fried onion underneath the sausage, then ketchup, remoulade, and pylsusinnep, a sweet brown mustard. The onions going on the bottom is the detail people get wrong. Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, the little stand near the old harbour in Reykjavík, has been selling them since 1937 and there is usually a queue, but every petrol station in the country does a decent one.

The ones people talk about

Hákarl is the famous one. It is Greenland shark, and the reason it needs processing is chemical rather than culinary: the shark has no kidneys or urinary tract and stores urea and trimethylamine oxide in its flesh, which makes it toxic when fresh. The traditional fix is to bury or press the meat for several weeks so the fluids drain and fermentation begins, then hang it to dry for months.

The result smells overwhelmingly of ammonia and tastes of strong cheese and cleaning products. It is served in small cubes with a shot of brennivín, an unsweetened caraway schnapps. Try one cube. It is a real tradition and worth the experience; it is not dinner.

The rest of the challenging list belongs to þorramatur, the platter of preserved foods eaten at Þorrablót midwinter feasts in January and February. This includes svið, a singed and boiled sheep’s head served split down the middle; súrsaðir hrútspungar, rams’ testicles cured in whey and pressed into a cake; blóðmör and lifrarpylsa, blood and liver puddings; and various things in sour whey. Icelanders eat these once a year at a party, largely for the sake of continuity with their grandparents. Nobody is eating sheep’s head on a Tuesday.

What to actually avoid

Two items on tourist menus deserve a firm no: whale and puffin.

Whale meat is not a traditional staple of the modern Icelandic diet. Surveys have consistently found that only a small minority of Icelanders eat it with any regularity, and that tourists account for a substantial share of restaurant consumption — meaning visitor demand props up a hunt that most locals are indifferent to. Campaigns such as "Meet Us, Don’t Eat Us", run with Icelandic whale watching operators, exist for exactly this reason. Puffin is similar, and Iceland’s puffin population has been in decline with repeated breeding failures in the south.

If you want to eat the sea here, eat the fish. Icelandic cod, haddock, arctic char and Höfn langoustine are world-class, sustainably managed, and considerably better than either.

Practical notes

Eating out in Iceland is expensive, and there is no way around it. Mitigate it by shopping at Bónus or Krónan, using the soup-and-bread lunch deals many places run, and treating petrol station grills as a legitimate option — they are, and Icelanders use them.

Tap water is among the best in the world and free everywhere; buying bottled water here is genuinely pointless. Hot tap water is geothermal and smells faintly of sulphur, which is normal and harmless. Alcohol is sold only in state-run Vínbúðin shops and licensed bars, with limited opening hours, so buy in advance. Tipping is not expected — service is included.