Before leaving for Reykjavik, I compiled a list of restaurants others had liked and reccomended as documented on Chowhound and the Trip Advisor-Iceland websites. Those lists compared somewhat favorably with the restaurants reccomended by the irreverent Lonely Planet guide, and here kudos are in order. I would not normally trust a guide book for advice on where to get the best food, but after dining at several of those listed have to say the Lonely Planet take on each was uncommonly astute. So much so that I regret not getting to a few of the other places they liked, and in particular a modern Indian-Icelandic fusion of a place called Indian Mango.
Most of the restaurants on our list were seafood oriented, and though it's true that we hoped to eat a lot of seafood there this was actually more about the fact that seafood is the primary bent of Reykjavik's higher end restaurants. Otherwise, best we could tell, one eats Italian or goes to an Argentinian steakhouse, or goes more casual at a Turkish Swarma place of the type you see all over the Netherlands and, I presume, the rest of Scandinavia.
The fast food category was rather interesting. Familiar American names exist in Iceland, but in an unfamiliar way. Taco Bell, Quiznos, Pizza Hut, Subway and KFC were all over the place, but they're not stand-alone enterprises; rather, they're located in gas stations and often paired with each other. Perhaps what was most striking, though, was what/who wasn't there: McDonalds and Starbucks. However, none of these serve the most popular fast food in Iceland. No no, the most popular food in Iceland is: the hot dog. And what's more, the most popular restaurant in ALL of Iceland is a hot dog stand! We investigated:
Tucked away in a corner of old town and operating in the same nominal 48 square foot tin shack since 1943, Baejrarin's Betzu is THE place to grab a meal on the run. The menu consists of one item, the hot dog, or pylsur in Icelandic, of which the standard version comes with stripes of sweet brown mustard and mayonnaise. Chopped onions is the optional condiment. America's most famous fast-food lover got there before we did, though:
It's the only picture on the wall, and the very same lady served us. So, was it special? I almost hate to admit it, but yes it was (we had ours plain). It was revelation-level good: a very good bun that looked like an American bun but with more flavor and substance held a frankfurter whose skin was so snappy crisp it just popped when you bit into it, and whose interior was luxuriously light and melting-soft unlike any other I've ever had. The flavor was exceptional too: subtly spiced and with lower salt than American dogs, and noticeably absent preservatives. It was so good that we each had to have another, which caused the proud proprietess who mans this shack all day alone to tell us about the secret ingredient: lamb. Never would have guessed, but it's the best hot dog I've ever had, and before we left Iceland we indulged two more times.
The day we arrived we had our first dinner at Reykjavik's currently trendiest restaurant, Fish Market. It's chef/owner, we were told, is Iceland's most famous because she has a TV show, and a Friday night reservation was impossible to get unless, the hotel concierge said apologetically, phone in hand, we were willing to take seats at the bar. Fine, we said gratefully, unaware that the "bar" didn't mean drinks bar but was in fact a pair of the six stools that ringed the tiny, busy downstairs kitchen in which one guy just did sushi while two others prepared everything else. Exactly the seat I'd have most wished for had I known it was there for the asking.
The menu was primarily seafood, plus one beef and one lamb dish. The seafoods included minka whale and several other "exotics", which we passed on in favor of salmon sashimi, a sushi platter, the best (sweetest, tenderest) calamari I've ever had and monk fish. I've never had good monk fish in the States for some reason, but in Europe monk fish is some of the best fish I've ever had and this dish was excellent. Do note that I was a little late in taking a picture of this--the dish when first put down in front of us was better looking.
Bread was also served with the meal, as it was at every restaurant we went to, but at each place it was served with a dipping sauce and each dipping sauce was wildly different. At Fish Market, it was improbably the mayo-ketchup-sweet pickle blend that Americans would recognize as Thousand Island salad dressing. Funny, and a tad humbling, that something considered so mundane by my culture can be so special in someone else's.
