HOME COOK

A voyage into Gísli Matthías Auðunsson’s taste of Heimaey

Words by Gréta Sigríður Einarsdóttir Photography by Golli

“WE SERVE COD SKIN AS SNACKS. THE COD SKIN IS SALTED, DRIED, AND POPPED, SPRINKLED WITH ANGELICA.”

Up. Down. Up again. A fleeting moment of calm at the highest point. Down again, tourists whooping as the boat rolls in the waves. I, on the other hand, wasn’t enjoying that lurching feeling in my stomach as the boat dipped with the green-tinged waters. My face was turning a similar hue, and even when we reached solid ground, it took me a moment to recover. The ground in question is part of Heimaey, the largest island of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago just off Iceland’s south coast, and I was here to talk about food.

The ferry ride is only about half an hour on most days and is generally a perfectly pleasant experience. Even the rough weather this morning hadn’t deterred a full boat of day trippers on their way to visit the islands, see the puffins, hear about the 1973 eruption, and, most importantly, taste the food. Vestmannaeyjar have been lauded as the country’s most exciting culinary destination outside the Reykjavík city centre, even though the volcanic island isn’t home to any agriculture. The islands are home to a high percentage of fishermen, though, and a chef called Gísli Matthías Auðunsson.

A FAMILY AFFAIR “It’s way too big, I don’t know what we were thinking,” Gísli tells me as we look over the dining hall of Slippurinn, the popular restaurant he runs with his parents and his sister. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the spacious eatery. “It was really my mother’s dream, to start a restaurant in this building. She always thought the building looked so grand and that it was sad it wasn’t in use,” Gísli explains as we look around the workshop-turned-industrial-chic restaurant. A family gathering turned into a business meeting and overnight, the family became restaurateurs, with Slippurinn opening its doors for the first time less than a year later. “We didn’t really have any capital to speak of and no investors. Each nail and every pipe were hammered and laid by my dad Auðunn and my sister Indíana. She has a master’s degree in visual art, as well as being a carpenter. He’s a jack of all trades, having spent more than 50 years at sea. My mother, Kata, had worked in restaurants before but I was just graduating as a chef.”

On the occasion of the place’s tenth anniversary, Gísli discovered a social media post he wrote on opening the restaurant. Despite all the changes, the ups and the downs, he was surprised at how well the original concept held up. “We wanted to make the locals proud, celebrate ingredients from around here, fully utilise our resources and work with the local flora. From day one, we’ve been using herbs and kelp from the island, and berries, when they’re in season.” His mom still grows the herbs they can’t pick wild in pots on her windowsill. The only thing that has changed, according to Gísli, is that each year, they try to do what they do a little bit better.

AMATEUR BOTANY Slippurinn is very much a Vestmannaeyjar restaurant in the sense that the food they make couldn’t be made anywhere else. It’s only open during the summer season, when the chefs can rely on the fresh bounty of plants growing on the island. Even on a rainy afternoon, the island’s bounty looks luscious, green plants providing a striking contrast to the black sand from the 1973 eruption. “The feeling I want people to leave with is that this is the only place in the world where they can taste exactly this kind of food. We won’t offer a filet mignon with truffles and caviar, we don’t see that as unique.” Instead, Slippurinn focuses on seeing the value of the ingredients that are underutilised. “To me, that’s a real luxury,” Gísli says. “By now, we use over 80 herbs and plants from the islands in the kitchen and the food we make has developed based on the ingredients available.”

When they started out, Gísli really didn’t know too much about herbs. “Mostly we were using angelica, sorrel, and arctic thyme when it was in season. Maybe crowberries in the fall.” For the past decade, Gísli and his team of chefs have studied the plants that grow on the island, tasting them and figuring out which ones they can use. Take angelica, for example. “Early in the season, you can only use its leaves. As it grows, the stalks can be used, pickled and so forth. When the seeds appear, we gather those and make a sort of version of capers, use it for tea, and more. By the end of the season, the root becomes, edible but at that point, the stalks have become too woody.” Gísli doesn’t claim to know every plant on the island. “But we’ve learned a lot. And we’ve had help, we’ve had botanists with us, and an expert in kelp. So we try to gather more knowledge as we go along.”

GOING LOCAL This kind of cooking is relatively new to Iceland, no doubt spurred on by advances in new Nordic cuisine. Older cooking traditions were victims of the rapid urbanisation of the 20th century and much of the old ways of using nature’s resources were lost. “I think Icelanders are only just beginning to scratch the surface of what we could be doing. Restaurants could take another look around and find the value in things that others don’t see. There was a massive awakening when NOMA started, with their new Nordic cuisine. We’re influenced by that, 100%, and people, not only restaurateurs but also customers now see value in local cuisine. People are realising just how huge a part food is of each country’s culture and history.”

PARADISE LOST Gísli has done his part to raise awareness of traditional cooking methods. “When I was involved in [Reykjavík restaurant] Matur og drykkur, we went deep in discovering old references to lost cooking

THIS KIND OF KELP HAS A REALLY INTERESTING FLAVOUR. WHEN IT’S COOKED, IT TASTES METALLIC, ALMOST LIKE BLOOD. WE CAN’T USE IT FOR ANYTHING, BUT IT’S INTERESTING.”

methods, and reawakening them with a modern twist.” With so much knowledge lost, the island’s flora is a constant spring of new discoveries. “So many things have surprised me along the way. There’s a herb known as pineapple weed. It’s a herb that closely resembles sweet chamomile, a plant that’s used for teas and such. When it’s fresh, it smells and tastes like pineapple.” Gísli plucks a fresh bud, crushing it to release the fruity aroma, and I’m surprised to discover that the exotic-tasting plant is familiar, although I’ve only ever viewed it as an intrusive weed. “It’s amazing to taste these exotic flavours in the middle of a lava field in Vestmannaeyjar,” Gísli continues. “This summer, a friend of mine had a cocktail popup with us, he used a type of grass known as bison grass. He made a syrup from it that tastes like vanilla.” Apparently, bison grass is rarely found in Europe, though it’s prized for its aroma, but grows abundantly in Iceland. “And no one realises!” Gísli exclaims.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT “I’ve told this story before, but one time, I was an intern at Eleven Madison Park in New York,” Gísli tells me. “On my first day there, I got an assignment that I hear is set for every new chef in their kitchen. You’re given a timer and told to have a dish ready in 20 minutes. You can use any ingredient in any cooler or cupboard except for foie gras, truffles, and oyster leaves. I knew what foie gras and truffles were but what were oyster leaves? I finished the assignment, it was terrifying and all that, but afterwards, I got curious about the leaves. I looked into it to see what the fuss was about. In the walk-in was a small box of leaves, and I realised, after running Slippurinn for three summer seasons, these leaves grew wild all over Iceland’s coastline.” He hands me a thick blue-ish leaf that tastes fresh and ocean-like. “I was told that they were importing it from Alaska, paying one dollar per leaf. By now, they have figured out ways to cultivate it and the price has gone down, but it was wild, being there, and realising what treasures we have in our backyards.”

In Gísli’s kitchen, they keep the hazing at a minimum. “We decided from the get-go to keep a healthy work environment. We stop all such nonsense that has permeated this industry. It’s a dying culture, luckily. Arrogance isn’t tolerated. It doesn’t lead to good results in the long run.”

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT Another thing they decided from the start and has stuck with them is a sustainable approach to making food. “Although I’ve come to dislike that word, sustainability. It’s so easy to throw around these days,” Gísli scoffs. “The same with ‘local food.’ I like to tell people we’re simply trying to make good food.” In the Slippurinn kitchen, there’s no such thing as food waste. “We buy all fish whole, for

example. We use the heads and the skin and the collar bone.” So many restaurants these days aren’t just going local, but also zerowaste. “We’re always trying to do better, working on fermentation and preservation methods for byproducts, trying to plan for it to get back on the menu. We use the heads of the fish and make stock. And everything that’s leftover, we’ll ferment and use to make our own fish sauce. That’s 100% utilisation. We also use vegetable peels, making all sorts of stock. We’re working with the local brewery, using leftover beer grain to make spent beer grain crackers. We’re not perfect but we’re always getting better.” This is what Gísli means by tweaking their methods a little bit each summer: adding a new herb to their roster, filleting their fish in a chilled environment to ensure maximum freshness, and using fans to improve air circulation when curing fish.

THE PRICE OF PRESTIGE Gísli is making a name for himself in Iceland’s culinary scene for his homegrown expertise, so much so that he is the guy that the President calls when he hosts dinners at the Bessastaðir presidential residence (“His wife is a real foodie, and very interested in serving great local food.”) With a book on Slippurinn out by distinguished publisher Phaidon, and media coverage all over the world, including a recent appearance on the BBC, Vestmannaeyjar has become a food destination. “There’s a lot of people that travel all the way to Iceland to be able to visit Vestmannaeyjar, just to have some good food.” Some days, Gísli can feel the pressure. “You want to be able to give people the perfect experience. And with such a large place, that can be hard work sometimes. We’re pretty much booked full every night. The restaurant opens at 5:00 PM and by that time, we have to be done filleting 120 kg [285 lbs] of fish and picking all the herbs we need. Picking fresh herbs sounds romantic, but the reality is that we have maybe an hour to pick sufficient quantities of the seven herbs we need that day. We want everyone who visits us to have a wonderful memory of spending a summer evening in Vestmannaeyjar.”

PLAYING IT UNSAFE While business hasn’t always been easy, the lack of external investors does allow Gísli and his family full creative control. “We used to have a burger on the menu,” Gísli gives as an example. “But in the second or third summer, we realised we weren’t getting our message of the local food experience across. It was so easy to point to the burger, order something familiar.” So they took their most popular dish off the menu. “When you’re struggling financially, that’s a hard decision.” Another such dilemma occurred the following year. “By that point, the most popular menu item was the minke

“WE USE PINEAPPLE WEED, AN ANGELICA LIQUEUR, AND CREAM TO MAKE A SORT OF NORDIC PINA COLADA.”

steak. We bought that from whalers who only caught minke whales. But when they quit, we could only source minke from one other company, one we didn’t have as much trust in. That was another hard decision, we used to have groups come here just to order the whale. But we knew that if we wanted to stick to our ethics, we had to.” Staying true to his principles, Gísli didn’t hesitate to stop serving chicken when the country’s only sustainable poultry farm went out of business and replace it with seafood plates he can serve with a good conscience. “The only meat dish currently on the menu is lamb from a farm just across the water.” There hasn’t been livestock in Vestmannaeyjar since the eruption. “In the eyes of the locals, we might be becoming weirder and weirder as we keep pulling the safe choices off the menu, but in order to strengthen Slippurinn as a restaurant, we have to.”

GETTING POLITICAL While Gísli’s food has been successful, it’s hard to run a restaurant, source quality sustainable ingredients, and feel good about those choices under these conditions. “Everyone is always trying to cut costs. There are fewer and fewer organic farmers. This may be getting a bit too political but food is culture. We need to provide incentives for people to create a healthy food community. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.” And it’s not just farmers, but food production as a whole. “As we’re seeing the resources in the seafood industry gather in fewer and larger companies, it means cutting costs, and it means killing diversity.” In recent years, the government has started taking steps to incentivise food production in Iceland, establishing a fund intended to encourage small producers. “But then there are so many rules and regulations counteracting these initiatives and small producers. They just published the government’s food production policy for the next fifteen years and they didn’t include one chef in the process. And no farmers.” In the ten years Gísli has been cooking in Vestmannaeyjar, he’s seen how things can change. “At this point, the large companies here want to cooperate with us. We get our fish directly from the fish market and cooperate with smaller start-ups on the islands and farmers on the other side of the water.”

Preparing myself for the ferry ride back, the taste of halibut, birch, and angelica lingers on my taste buds as I breathe in the fresh scent of the ocean, a summer day in Vestmannaeyjar filling up all my senses. I really wouldn’t want to lose this lunch.