May 7, 2019 continued
I still arrived at the parking area about 25 minutes early. I parked the car and walked down the hill to the meeting place. Part of eating at KOKS is the whole experience. They have a hjallur (drying shed) located on the banks of the lake where they first serve an appetizer and drink. I had the Ræst Fisk beer and appetizer of chips with flakes of fermented cod. Very salty but good! The other guests started to arrive, a woman from the US and her Scottish friend, a couple from Denmark, an American/Brazilian couple and a woman from Germany. Then the next part of the adventure, we all clambered into the back of a Land Rover Defender and bounced along to the restaurant itself. The restaurant is in a renovated 1700s farmhouse and has a sod roof. Many older houses and buildings in the Faroes have sod roofs due to lack of building materials.
Not a bad view...
Flaked cod and chips, Raest Fisk beer
Guests are driven to the restaurant in an old Defender
I had booked the communal dining table, 8 of us together. All were foodies or travelers. The meal is 17-course tasting menu, then you can get a juice or wine pairing. No one chose the wine pairing surprisingly, but I picked the juice option.
KOKS specializes in dishes made from locally sourced ingredients. The first course was fresh scallops served in their shells... talk about sea-to-table, it was so fresh the barnacles on the shells were still moving! It was served with watercress and a glass of gooseberry juice.
Barnacles were still alive
Fresh scallop
Gooseberry juice
The second course was mahogany clam with crabmeat. The mahogany clam can live for several hundred years, so it is probably the oldest living thing I've ever eaten! Does make you feel a bit guilty though. Following the clam course was halibut with Ossetra caviar. Tiny portions of course but they put a lot of effort into presentation.
Mahogany Clam
Halibut w/ Ossetra caviar
The next juice pairing was black tea kombucha with elderflower. This was served with horse mussel mixed with pickled broccoli and elderflower powder.
Black Tea Kombucha with Horse Mussel
Horse Mussel with pickled broccoli
The conversation had been flowing well and the weather added to the conversation as a blizzard started blowing through. When we came in the landscape had been green and sunny, yet now the snow was blowing and you couldn't see across the valley.
It started snowing!
By the time we started the next course, an alcohol-free gin and tonic served with langoustine, the landscape was now almost complely white! The langoustine were served in two parts.. the first was the head with brains. I was one of the few daring enough to try this! Then the body was served with carrot, over which they poured a sugar kelp with wasabi sauce.
Non-alcoholic G&T
Snow!
Langoustine brains
Langoustine w/ carrot + wasabi
The next course was fried cod skin sandwich, fried cod swim bladder with liver, and whale blubber with pickled beets. The swim bladder was salty but tasted a bit like a puffed rice cake.
Pickled beetroot + whale blubber
Cod skin sandwich
Fried cod swim bladder
The next juice offer was apple juice with lovage (celery flavor). This was served with blue mussels with pickled parsley stems and bacalao (salted cod).
Apple juice w/ lovage Blue mussel w/ bacalao
The skies had cleared and it was amazing to see the difference in the landscape now, as everything was now covered in a half inch of snow.
The courses then switched from seafood to land-based. The juice pairing was warm mushroom juice, though can say I wasn't much of a fan of this. The first lamb course was skerpikjøt, a leg of lamb fermented in drying sheds for 3-12 months. The waiters brought out the a leg to show what it looks like, somewhat similar to an Iberian ham. Locals will take the leg and piece of bread and a knife and that'll be a meal. The slices of lamb were served with a mushroom/lingonberry tartare and fried reindeer lichen. Wrap the lichen and mushrooms with a slice of lamb and pop it in your mouth! The lamb had a strong but not unpleasant taste.
Mushroom juice. Ehh...
Skerpikjot
After the skerpikjøt was a palette cleanser of góðarað, a savory flat cookie served with cream cheese mixed with lamb tallow and fish.
Góðarað
Next there was another fermented lamb dish, this one served with caramelized onions and some sort of naan-like bread. This was delicious and my favorite dish of the evening... tasted like a pot roast. I could have eaten that all night.
Yummy! My favorite dish. Lamb w/ caramelized onions and naan-like bread
The next juice pairing was beetroot with sugar kelp and blackcurrent. Looked just like a merlot but was juice, honest! This was served with smoked pilot whale heart on a heart-shaped lamb-blood sausage wafer (unfortunately pic didn't come out so well).
Beetroot & blackcurrant juice.
Smoked Pilot Whale heart w/ lamb-blood sausage
We had been talking about when we had made our reservations. I had made my reservations about a month in advance. The American/Brazilian couple had plans to go to Sri Lanka but changed them after the bombings to come to the Faroes instead and managed to get a booking only a few days ago. SAS had been on strike the week previously and I had been a bit worried about the flights going out, luckily the strike had been resolved the previous Friday just before they flew over.
The next course was served with a whale knife, a small piece of lamb back with celeriac and fried beetroot. I could have asked for seconds on that one as well!
Lamb back w/ celeriac
It was nearly 10PM before the first dessert course was served, a quenelle of wild thyme ice cream with smoked cream and crowberries. Very good! The juice serving was blueberry, licorice root and dulse (red seaweed).
Wild Thyme ice cream, smoked cream and crowberry
Blueberry, dulse and licorice root
Another dessert was blueberries with dulse gel, quite good as well!
Blueberries w/ dulse
The meal still wasn't over as the final course was waffles and thin cookies with chocolates and rhubarb jelly followed by a coffee. We all sat around talking for almost another 45 minutes, it was now past 11PM and all of the other diners had since left. The snow had started falling again, much thicker this time. The staff asked if anyone needed a taxi. Lucinda and her Scottish friend had come via taxi, and I offered them a lift back into town.
Waffles and chocolates
The waiters gave us gift bags with a copy of the menu and bottles of the Raest Fisk beer. We all climbed back into the Land Rover and they drove us back up the hill to the parking lot. We all had our hugs and goodbyes after an amazing evening I won't soon forget! Luckily the snow had stopped and the roads were clear. I got them to their hotel but got lost trying to get back to my B&B, finally arriving there well after midnight!
Still snowing! Stopped just as we left
Goodbye to KOKS