The strange tastes of a restaurant at the end of the world (2024)

When your restaurant is high in the Arctic Circle, and most ingredients have to come in on a boat or a plane, you have to get pretty creative with your fine dining. That means seal, whale, reindeer – and plankton?

The sommelier warns me about the buckshot. "The kitchen is double-checking, but you never know," she adds, pointing out that a ptarmigan shot by a local hunter yielded the exquisitely plated medallions before me.

I lean closer to take a look. The ptarmigan gravy, flanked by dots of pumpkin jam and pickled thyme, smells like Sunday dinner on steroids, like a childhood memory reincarnated as something new and strange. Outside, under the midnight Sun, Arctic winds gust down the Longyearbyen valley, making a white carpet from shards of ice.

These kinds of contrasts – fine dining with the chance of ammunition, a warm dining room with an unearthly view – are part of what makes eating at Huset, the "restaurant at the end of the world", such an unusual experience. That, and the fact that it is just plain hard to get to: Longyearbyen, on whose outskirts it sits, is the northernmost permanent settlement of more than 1,000 people in the world, a mere 800 miles (1,288 km) from the North Pole.

The archipelago of Svalbard, where Longyearbyen is the main settlement, floats up on the edge of the polar ice. Longyearbyen began as a coal mining town, and now, with the last mine due to close next year, it is reinventing itself as a place to experience the otherworldly.

That includes eating at Huset, where the first two dishes of the tasting menu come out draped over a reindeer antler and a single ivory bone. A fragment of ruby ribbon is a slice of cured reindeer heart. A whorl of dark purple and white is the preserved neck meat of the creature. The neck is smoky, a high flavour of salt and the texture of thin leather. The heart has a whiff of the campfire as well, a moment of delicate jelly on the tongue.

Up here, where there is night for four months of the year, not much grows. But there is more living here than you might think. Seals and walrus glide through the water, while reindeer, polar bears, white ptarmigan and other creatures roam the land. All species are protected, but the law allows those with permits to hunt reindeer, bearded seal, ptarmigan, and others during certain periods of the year.

Local hunters and trappers are how the head chef of Huset, Alberto Lozano, gets his hands on the meat. To make a tiny tower of waffle, seal meat, thick béarnaise sauce, and pickled blueberry, the server explains, Huset gets a cut of seals the owners of a dog-sledding company hunt to feed the dogs.

The restaurant's Instagram account shows Lozano and his team foraging for mushrooms and mountain sorrel, whose lobed leaves turn the hills above Longyearbyen green in the late summer. There is only a brief window when these delicacies emerge, however. When they appear in front of me in late May, not long after the polar darkness has lifted, the mushrooms are pickled and dried, and powdered sorrel has been used to make a tiny marshmallow of explosive flavour.

Once there was far more alive here. At one point, I realise there is a beech leaf in my plate. It's literally part of the plate – many of the dishes are served on stones collected from the nearby hills, which are thick with fossils. Until about two million years ago, according the natural history museum on the island, there were forests of beech and dawn sequoia. They left their imprints in the stones that curious hobbyists and geologists crack open with picks.

A not-insignificant portion of the ingredients come from the Norwegian mainland, and occasionally farther afield – the plankton powder sprinkled over an earthy, grassy knob of rice and caramelised onion came from the Netherlands. But in a place where there is a long tradition of almost all food arriving by boat from warmer climes, to see this many fragments of the landscape on the dining table is remarkable, and the product of considerable forethought.

There is no buckshot in the ptarmigan, which is soft as butter and picks up the gravy and cloudberry sauce beautifully. I watch the light outside shift between bright and dark as clouds pass before the Sun. An abandoned coal mine structure clings to the hill, a remnant of an earlier time, an era that probably seemed as real and permanent to its denizens as ours does to us.

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Will there be different things on the menu in the future, as the Arctic warms? Already, climate change in Svalbard is happening six times as fast as elsewhere on the globe, recent studies suggest. Arctic marine species are being pushed closer to the pole, while species from the south will appear further and further north, scientists believe.

On top of this, the southern cousins of Arctic copepods, tiny sea creatures, are taking over their turf. This is presaging changes in larger creatures that feed on them, like little auks. It's hard to say what this menu, and Svalbard itself, will look like in 10 or 20 years.

When I push open the restaurant door and head out, at around 9pm, the Sun blazes in a blue sky and the wind is knife-sharp, cutting through the one weakness in my coat– the opening around my face. I cover my mouth and nose with gloved hands, catching, as I breathe, the ghost of ptarmigan gravy on my fingers.

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