Constructed in 1781, the former warehouse that houses Tjöruhúsið in Ísafjörður, Iceland, is cozy but primitive. Massive, rough-cut logs stacked by Danish workmen form the walls while heavy wooden beams hang across the room like low, foreboding clouds over the fjord. A phalanx of rough-hewn tables and benches fills the room, the tables set with water glasses, napkins, silverware, plates, and large soup bowls. Reservations are highly recommended, but ours are lost. Thankfully, showing my email exchange from a month earlier with someone named Haukur gets us shoehorned into a corner with an Icelandic family with no desire to chat with tourists. The Happy Mondays’ “The Factory Singles” spews like champagne from the turntable just behind the counter.
The chef, Magnús Hauksson, emerges from the kitchen armed with a ladle. He proceeds to speak in Icelandic for the next five minutes, eliciting giggles from the dozen or so natives in the room. He finishes and heads back toward the kitchen before suddenly lighting up, turning back to the crowd, and yelping “Perhaps I should say all that in English!”
There are no menus at Tjöruhúsið: you eat what the locals bring in from the sea. Lunch and dinner are prix fixe and all-you-can-eat, with unlimited tea and coffee (wine, beer, and all else for an additional charge). We have no idea what all this will cost, a dangerous proposition in a country where a hamburger can easily mug you for $40. But Tjöruhúsið is widely noted as one of the best restaurants in Iceland, and we are here. We will eat whatever is placed in front of us and pay whatever it costs.
I line up for soup, and Chef Maggi fills my bowl, Jorge Ben now sprouting from the sound system. I carefully carry my bowl back to the table, ducking to avoid concussions. I squeeze my butt back onto the bench and my legs under the table. The soup appears deceptively simple, a toasty brown cream with specks of red and white pieces of fish emerging like icebergs from the thick broth. I carefully pull my first spoonful.
I don’t know what makes me emotional at times like this, perhaps a combination of environment, energy, and anticipation, as well as salty existentialism. We were in Iceland, we were going to experience a solar eclipse in the morrow, the lo-fi/hi-fi combo of dive-n-delicious is a personal sweet spot. There was magic in the moment. And then there was the soup. Soon after the first sip, tears streamed down my cheeks.
The flavor pulled me into the dark depths and whispered of cream and cognac and days without sun and seas without salt. Every bite ignited every part of my tongue and spoke of memories, the sweetness of love, the bitterness of death, and the umami of a shared epic with an undefined ending. In short, that soup was good. Damn good.
The chef describes his cauldron of simmering seafood as a langoustine- and tomato-based fish soup. Langoustine is something like a small, sweet-meated, cold-water lobster. Wine and cognac appear in many attempts to untangle the secret recipe, along with cream and garlic. Some suggest cream cheese as an ingredient since it appears in sauces for other dishes. Whatever it is made of, it is now burned into my mind, as well as The Bride’s, as one of the best things we’ve ever eaten.
It took everything I had to not go up and imbibe another bowl of soup because five fish dishes were soon arriving. Maggi cooks up what comes in from the docks a mere hundred feet away, so the number of dishes depends on the catches of the day. That morning brought salmon, wolffish, cod, redfish, and haddock, so that’s what sizzled on the massive cast-iron pans at the front counter as a line formed for Maggi to serve. Everything was, of course, wonderful. As Maggi said at the beginning, no one will go home hungry, and we certainly did not. Amazingly, the bill amounted to only about $40 a head, a true bargain for such a life-clarifying event.
One reviewer wrote that after experiencing the soup, they returned to Iceland with a trip organized around eating this soup again. We understand. We will do the same..
Tjöruhúsið; 3V9F+78 Ísafjörður, Iceland; www.tjoruhusid.is; full-color review at austinwanderlist.com
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