We had a wonderful time. Iceland's climate is surprisingly mild thanks to the gulf stream that is now ferrying ash all over Europe, on average Reykjavik has a warmer winter than New York City. And since temperatures there right now were just about the same as here, we experienced no climate shock but for the way the unimpeded arctic wind there blows cold moisture straight through your clothes. In fact, about the only time we were outside AND warm was when we were on top of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano the night before it blew--seriously, we were there, but more about that in the F & F post.
Our days were spent driving the countryside after a big, hearty buffet breakfast at the Hilton to get us through the day, and nights were spent taking in meals at the city's finest restaurants, with the occasional cocktail at the hotel bar or beer in an old Icelandic pub where we acquired a preference for a lager called Viking. We also tried Tuborg and liked it, but it was a bit hoppier than the Viking. If they drink ales there, I never saw a one. Wine is popular, and every single by-the-glass wine I ordered turned out to be South American. I asked for chardonnay each time, but only on one occasion did I believe I was actually poured chardonnay. One "chardonnay" that tasted of ginger and grapefruit turned out, not surprisingly, to be a Torrontes which I think was a completely unmalicious substitution based on the naive belief that all white wines pretty much taste the same, at least at the prices most there can afford to pay. Wine is not inexpensive in Iceland. I did see some California wines on menus, though it pained me to see low-enders like Clay Station floating about amongst the Beringers and Drouhins.
Since we believe in having the most local experience possible when we travel, we expected to mostly be eating seafood and lamb which is the primary red meat there owing to the fact that sheep fare well in Iceland's harsh and lonely landscape and are also needed to provide the renewable raw material for their beautiful wool garments. I didn't quite expect, though, the extent to which these two categories dominated all things food.
One thing I love to do when travelling is touring the grocery stores. It gives a real honest sense of a people's everyday life that hanging out in Hiltons and dining in better restaurants shields you from. So we went into several small urban markets of the quick-stop 7-11 type where you can also pick up an item or two to fashion a dinner out of, and the offerings at each were the same for food you'd prepare from scratch: dried saltfish, legs of lamb, and hot dogs. One gets the impression, in fact, that dried saltfish is THE staple of their diet: here's the end cap display at one of those little markets. Clearly, they blow through a lot of it.
In a regular supermarket, the saltfish display was 2-3 times that size. I was also impressed with how much lamb there was for sale vs. beef, chicken and pork. Lamb outnumbers all other meats combined by at least 9:1, and most of the meat is sold pre-marinated. In fact, at the market I took these pictures at below, there were six flavors of marinated leg of lamb, and no unmarinated legs at all. Judging by what was on the shelf, whole saddles (envy!) would be another popular cut. They also eat horse, the meat of their spectacularly sweet and playful ponies, but I didn't see any at the market. Oh, and note that the shelves under the legs of lamb hold hot dogs.
The produce section was an interesting visit, but unfortunately for the wrong reasons. That is, there was so little to see: just the most basic of winter vegetables such as cabbage, leeks, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower. Oh, potatoes too, but only one variety, the yukon gold/yellow finn type. There were also some salad ingredients, but basically tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers and some greenhouse lettuces were the extent of it. Salad must be fairly uncommon--as a stand-alone, first course item, 'salad' didn't figure on any of the menus of the restaurants we dined at. At best, small amounts were included as garnishes to other featured items. But you have to hand it to the Icelanders all the same: they are a tiny nation of just 300,000 people, and they grow nearly everything they need themselves in long greenhouses, even bananas. In fact, the town where most of the greenhouses are is called Eden.
The cracker and fresh flatbread aisles were, in contrast, rich with interesting choices and I brought a number of them home with me. Cheeses were few, and what I saw in the supermarket looked exactly like the cheeses at our hotel buffet, suggesting that the offerings really are that limited. Each was a small round, about 4" in diameter, consisting of a heavily yellowed white cheese the color of old paper, and each was coated with something different of the dried vegetable variety and yet not exactly recognizable as being this or that. Not sure what the dairy base was, but the cheeses were more rubbery than creamy, did not taste familiar, and neither of us liked them. Cured meats were also fairly basic and limited in variety as experienced in the hotel buffet and confirmed at the supermarket, but we did like what we tried--pork ham, a kind of smokey lamb ham, and a fatty salami.
Oh, and before I close this one, I must add the following picture which will probably not amuse anyone as much as it amused me at the time and which depicts the non-food "everything else" department at the big grocery store we were at (in Eden, as a matter of fact). Not even tangentially have I ever thought about bras and charcoal at the same time before.
