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Cuisine Norwegian a fine dining experience Longyearbyen, detail of one of the seven menu courses at the Huset restaurant

Longyearbyen, detail of one of the seven menu courses at the Huset restaurant In the evening, back in Longyearbyen, it comes
as a surprise—in such a remote, isolated pla-
ce—to realize how many options there are for
a high-level gastronomic experience. One of
the most popular addresses is undoubtedly the
Funktionaermessen, the in-house restaurant of
the nostalgic Spitsbergen Hotel, where the fun-
ctionaries of the local mining industry used to
have dinner, enjoying the best views of the bay.
Here the two chefs, Súsanna Puttanen and Jan
Robert Ekeblad, reinterpret the most typical
ingredients of Scandinavian cuisine in a French
tone, including skrei, the fillet of cod fished in the
waters of the Barents Sea. They do not hesitate
to use the most modern techniques, including
some borrowed from molecular cuisine (check
out the fillet mignon cooked sous-vide at low
temperature for twelve hours). The seven-cour-
se tasting menu at the restaurant Huset (200
euros with wine pairing) is also superlative, of-
fering a fine dining experience honed down to
the smallest details and enhanced here and
there by typical Svalbard ingredients that can
be found nowhere else: like the famous local
reindeer meat, which has a more delicate flavor
than that of the mainland, dried for four months
by the chef in the restaurant’s attic, or bearded
Longyearbyen, Huset restaurant interior sement contains one of Europe’s best stocked
seal “capocollo” marinated in vinegar. The ba-
wine cellars, with about 2,000 different labels
for a total of 20,000 bottles, accumulated by
the previous owner over a span of twenty years.
Even the most jaded connoisseurs will enjoy
sampling the exceptional rare wines.

70 Travel Protagonist