A Culinary Cult Classic Riding the bus back to home-style cooking in <strong>Iceland</strong> by Alda Kravec Photos by Páll stefánsson 22 atlantica
It is perhaps the first thing that meets you as you disembark the Flybus at BSÍ: the strange scent of singed and boiled sheep’s head mixed together with the more familiar fragrance of deep fried fare. BSÍ is not only <strong>Iceland</strong>’s transportation hub for national coach travel, it also houses Fljótt og Gott (Fast and Good), a cafeteria that specializes in quintessential national dishes such as sheep’s head, fish pudding (plokkfiskur), fish balls (fiskibollur), meat stew, lamb cutlets and, of course, hamburgers and French fries. However, you might just be too excited or exhausted from travel to bother to stop and ponder the aromas let alone sit down for a bite to eat, in which case you risk hurrying by a legendary establishment with a false sense of having been there and done that. Although BSÍ has long housed dining facilities of some kind, father and daughter team, Bjarni Geir Alfredsson and Katrín Ösp Bjarnadóttir, took over the place in 1996 when they founded Fljótt og Gott. While his daughter manages the place, Alfredsson is the head chef. Alfredsson (b.1951) began his cooking career at the age of thirteen in the kitchen of a fishing boat, and has been working in the restaurant industry since 1969. He explains how BSÍ’s dining hall has served traditional <strong>Iceland</strong>ic food for fifty years and he plans to keep it that way despite continual changes in local culinary practices: “<strong>Iceland</strong>ic restaurants changed between 1970-80 as we began importing different ingredients and looking more abroad. For example, in the late 70s, I opened up a restaurant in the French style in Kópavogur and we served steaks with pepper sauce and wine, but then these kinds of cutting-edge restaurants started popping up all over the place…But as one ages, one begins to long for the food one grew up on, and so I started serving sheep’s head here, and people laughed at first.” However, fewer people laugh nowadays, especially as a return focus on local ingredients and traditions has become the new cutting-edge trend. Still, Alfredsson distinguishes his traditional fare from the “New Nordic Food” currently pioneered by higher-end trend setters such as the Nordic House’s Dill restaurant, and he admits his version is more in the vein of home-style cooking. To be sure, the atmosphere in Fljótt og Gott is unapologetically dated yet invitingly unpretentious, more like a cult classic than a new hit sensation. In addition to the daily special and the hot buffet, there is a salad bar which includes at least three kinds of herring salad, and a cooler filled with Danish-style, open-faced sandwiches on rye while the heads of sheep—served on plastic-wrapped plates alongside two individual scoops of potato and turnip mash—are sprinkled throughout this variegated food arrangement like trophies in a glass cabinet. It is a stunning presentation that brings to life pictures out of cookbooks from the 1950s. Like any cult classic, Fljótt og Gott has its cult following. Although it attracts both tourists and locals, Alfredsson claims that the larger share of his customers are <strong>Iceland</strong>ers—“a peculiar bunch”, as he affectionately describes his regulars. “Those who we might consider different, they flock here, and it may well be because I’m so strange myself. But I like these people, they always speak their mind; if the food is not up to par, I get to hear about it.” It is for the sake of his regulars that Alfredsson maintains the same weekly specials. For example, there is always salted lamb and split peas (saltkjöt og baunir) on Wednesdays and a rack of pork (grísahryggur) on Sundays. The sheep’s head (svid or kjammi) is available daily and it stands as the second most popular traditional dish on the menu, after lamb cutlets (kótilettur): “I sell between nine and ten thousand servings of head per year,” estimates. While it’s the traditional menu of Fljótt og Gott that particularly attracts tourists and an older generation of <strong>Iceland</strong>ers, Alfredsson worries about the younger generation, who hardly go in for the fish and potatoes or kjammi unless on a wager. “They generally eat with one hand, while the other hand is holding a phone or working a computer, and food is prepared for them accordingly; a slice of pizza, a hamburger, a sandwich.” Fljótt og Gott concedes to the younger demand for hamburgers, pizza and French fries, which are also made available at a drive-through window. It may sound like a strange twist of fate, but according to Alfredsson, Christmas day is by far the busiest day of the year at the drive-through window: “The children sit at home in front of all that traditional food out of politeness, but they don’t like it, and so we open the drive-through window and sell pizzas and hamburgers non-stop, all day long.” In order to encourage people, not least young people, to eat local and traditional food, Alfredsson is presently opening a new store or deli in the centre of Reykjavík, where he aims to make his fare more readily available and affordable. “The store will be called Mamma Steina Matbúd after my mother who was named Steinunn and had a great appreciation for food.” In addition to the familiar ready-made fish and lamb dishes and various sandwiches of Fljótt og Gott, Mamma Steina will also sell food products that come direct from the farmer, such as “meat preserves (sultur), salted cod from Hauganes, smoked trout from Mývatn, and a new kind of sheep’s head that has never been sold on the market before, smoked sheep’s head.” So if you missed your stop for <strong>Iceland</strong>ic home-cooking at BSÍ, there is no need to fret for Mamma Steina is just around the corner at no. 23 Skólavördustígur. a atlantica 23
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