The world's most remote Michelin starred restaurant is just about to get even more remote.
With two Michelin stars and a jaw-dropping location on its front doorstep, Koks is a bucket list restaurant for any adventurous foodie. That, it seems, isn’t likely to change, but the location is, as Koks will be moving 2000 kilometres north west from the Faroe Islands to the far west coast of Greenland.
Head chef Poul Andrias Ziska put the Faroe Islands on the map when Koks received its first Michelin star in 2017, and tables have been hard to come by since thanks to his unique, artistic interpretation of Faroese cuisine. Like much of Scandinavia, food in the Faroes focuses heavily on methods of preservation - salting, fermentation, pickling and more.
Much traditional cuisine in the Faroe Islands derives its distinctive flavour from mould; the Faroese call this food ræst and the menu at Koks is built around these traditional foods, like dried blood sausage, fermented fish and Skerpikjøt - Faroese wind-dried mutton that is hung in seaside sheds, where it dries, picks up salt from the sea and develops a crust of blue surface mould.
From mid-June 2022 through 2023, Koks on the Faroe Islands will be closed, but the philosophy that made the restaurant such a success will be alive and well at a new site in Ilimanaq Lodge in Ilulissat, Greenland. The original goal of the move was to rehouse the restaurant whilst a new site was found in the Faroes - the original farmhouse was always a temporary measure until a permanent site could be built, but endless red tape has prevented that from happening. The plan is still to reopen Koks on the Faroe Islands, but Ziska and team are still waiting for permission to start construction.
Though the distance between the two countries is great, Ziska believes they share a great deal of heritage. Both islands are inhospitable, with long stretches of beautiful coastline and similar traditions of preservation. ‘As a Faroese person, I’ve always felt like there’s a connection there,’ he told Bloomberg. ‘It’s a place we identify ourselves with, at least when it comes to the raw materials.’ Ziska plans to make Koks an exploration of Greenland’s unique cuisine, from wild ingredients and sea herbs like crowberry and angelica to local game and seals. Hopefully, he says, it’ll change the perception of Greenlandic cuisine. ‘I know that in the Faroe Islands, Danes and others from abroad used to talk down our food culture,’ he tells Bloomberg. ‘When you have people who actually take it seriously and believe that it is something of value, it makes others more open and accepting of it. I hope it will be the same case in Greenland.’
Intrigued? Well, good luck getting a table - it sounds like local hotels are already jam-packed from summer onwards. In the meantime, maybe check out some of London's best Scandinavian restaurants.