From the BBC, July 29:
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....
....MUCH MORE
