Offbeat Eats

At the end of our first full day exploring the Faroe Islands (including some stunningly awesome sea cliffs), we found ourselves back in Tórshavn for dinner. When trying to figure out which option to try for dinner (unlike most of the rest of the Faroes, Tórshavn has a reasonably good selection of good restaurants), one of the options was “sushi”. And, since one of the ever-present sights while driving through the many fjords of the Faroes is the giant, circular aquaculture pens, I figured this would be a good opportunity to try some of the salmon. With that in mind, we decided to tryout out Etika, the only actual sushi restaurant in the Faroe Islands.

After finally settling into our hostel late at night and having a pleasant nights’ rest despite the still significant light level for 62 degrees of latitude in July, the next morning we awoke and start out exploring the greater Tórshavn area in earnest. We soon found ourselves downtown, exploring the particularly nice harbor area, and, once businesses started opening for the morning, checking out one place located right on the waterfront: Kaffihúsið. (As an aside, I’ll mention that, once you start to learn the translations for various names, you learn that the Faroese seem to like rather simple names for places and businesses. Kaffihúsið means… “Coffee House”).

Continuing the Offbeat Eats tradition of going places that are, well, offbeat, our goal this year was to finally visit the Faroe Islands. Originally coming up on our radar during the trip to Iceland, a few simple google image searches quickly found that, while most Americans had never actually heard of the Faroes, they are a wonderland of hiking and puffin-watching. So after a few years of planning, this year we finally did our trip, so after a short layover in Iceland, we boarded a plane at the Reykjavik Domestic Airport (walking distance from downtown), and, without any customs or immigration, and a very pleasant flight on Atlantic Airways involving two shockingly short runways, we soon found ourselves arriving at Vagar Airport at 8pm local time. The timing of our flight from Reykjavik to Vagar was pretty lousy: by the time we got our luggage, got our rental car, and drove the tunnels and fjords to get to Torshavn, it was 9:55 pm, and pretty much all the dining options in Tórshavn on a Monday night were closed. Except for the restaurant in the adjacent 4 star hotel, Gras, which was nice enough to let two slightly disheveled travelers eat at the dinner buffet that had technically closed at 9:30.

Back in 2012, when we took our two week vacation in Iceland doing the Ring Road, there wasn’t a whole lot of English-language food information on the web, so the various reviews I wrote in my set of Iceland Reviews still get quite a few hits. But, since 2012, the traveling world continues to discover Iceland, indeed, in 2015 almost twice as many tourists visited Iceland as in 2012, and it’s shifted from “terra incognita” into “interesting Transatlantic Stopover”. And heck, in the summer of 2016, no few than 10 of my friends and colleagues visited Iceland, including several visiting at the same time I was passing through.

One of the little details I like about eating in Iceland is that the dairy products are fantastic. On our main visit to Iceland in 2012, we discovered Brynja in Akureyri, which serves up some most splendid and flavorful vanilla soft-serve that’s got a nice, earthy richness of flavor. And probably much to the chagrin of my doctor, most every breakfast had me eating Skyr or schmearing a good half-inch thick layer of Smjor (Iceland’s major brand of butter) over some rye bread. I’m told it’s from the cows eating grass grown on highly volcanic soil that gives the milk and dairy products a lot more flavor. So when we heard that over on the west side of town was a new-ish ice cream place that people were raving out, we had to just set out and find it. Thus, we found ourselves in a weird little industrial area just west of Reykjavik’s harbor, which consists of all sorts of little garage-like bays. Some of these are now art boutiques. A few are restaurants. And one held ice cream: Valdis.

(Closed) Our next stop for refreshment during our layover in Reykjavik was one of the nicer beer bars to show up since our last visit: Mikkeller and Friends. An offshoot of the Danish brewer, it’s quite a nice little beer bar located right next to one of our other Reykjavik favorites, Grái Kötturinn (where we had breakfast that morning: Grái Kötturinn is a godsend for the international traveler arriving before most of Reykjavik wakes up). They’ve got a rather impressive beer list (indeed, including one of the very last kegs of Jack D’Or in existence, from the closed Pretty Thinks brewery in Somerville, MA), but for food, they recommend that you go downstairs and order a pizza from the pizza place with no name.

Those that have been following a while know that every year I try to go someplace interesting, somewhat obscure, and rather, well, offbeat for at least one vacation, like La Reunion or Iceland. Well, after a few years’ incubation, this summer we were finally able to work out the details and have a trip to the Faroe Islands (stay tuned for some reviews). But like a good number of the obscure travel destinations I’ve done, one doesn’t simply hop on a plane from Boston to Vagar (the airport of the Faroes). Only a few places (primarily Norway, Scotland, Denmark, and Iceland) even have flights to the Faroe Islands, so it’s necessary to take an intermediate stop. In our case, this meant a return trip to Reykjavik for an extended layover. Since our visit in 2012, the formerly obscure vacation destination of Iceland continues to be more popular, and as a result, Reykjavik’s tourist, and dining, scene, continues to evolve. Back when I wrote up my reviews in 2012, I was pretty much the English-language source of reviews for Iceland (and I still get a lot of traffic), but it’s definitely shown up on the radar for adventurous tourists. With that in mind, that’s how we found ourselves having beers and dining in a converted biscuit factory on the north side of Reykjavik: KEX.

I rather like a good trip to Portland, Maine, especially since Portland has managed to cultivate quite a beer and food scene, with everything from a good Belgian beer bar, to a good regional pizza chain, to potato donuts, to even Asian fare like dumplings. So when we were looking for a nice variation on our usual joints, we decided to try Mi Sen Noodle Bar, a relative newcomer on the Portland scene (opened in 2013).

Manchester, NH is a funky little town. New Hampshire’s Queen City, it has a lot of character in some of its neighborhoods. Downtown is located in what used to be the mill district (indeed, most of the Millyard is still there, being converted into various offices, industrial lofts, and the like), and there are even a few ethnic neighborhoods. One of these is the West Side, where two of the larger neighborhoods (Notre Dame and Rimmon Heights) are actually Quebecois in heritage. The area had some tough years, with “urban renewal” between the 1960s and 1980s actually razing two decent neighborhoods and turning them into dismal strip malls, but the area has generally rebounded, diversified a bit, and, well, even gentrified a bit. But in addition to the notable large French Catholic Churches, the neighborhood still has a lot of Quebecois heritage, especially in the food scene. There’s probably no better place for this than Chez Vachon.

Lest one think from the previous reviews that the Tysons Corner area is entirely mall-related dining, rest assured, there are a few gems hiding in among the malls and box stores. Nestled a few blocks away from Tysons Corner Center in the first floor of an office building is the surprisingly pleasant Nostos, an upscale Greek restaurant. Since I had a free evening, this was also a good opportunity to get together with some of my DC area friends from TCF, so a group of 8 of us descended up Nostos.