Reykjavík Grapevine - 22.05.2015, Síða 48

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K-Bar is a gastro pub with a Korean, Japa-
nese, Icelandic inspired kitchen and quirky
cocktails. We have eight icelandic craft
beers on tap and over 100 types in bottles.
Open all day from breakfast to late night
snacks. K-Bar is located at Laugavegur 74.
Ask your reception how to find us or find us
on facebook.com/kbarreykjavik
FOOD
FOR THE SOUL
We were eventually dragged out of the
ditch by a tow truck semi-trailer that
had gotten stranded further up ahead
and ended up paying it forward by pull-
ing two other cars out of ditches that
weekend. Despite the inauspicious start,
my belief that West Iceland should be
the nexus of Icelandic food tourism
was unshaken. West Iceland (not to be
confused with the Westfjords) has been
growing into a foodie’s paradise. High-
end restaurants are in short supply, but
the region boasts the only heritage goat
farm; several farm-to-table operations
with organic mutton and beef; year-
round vegetable markets; excellent
creameries; and Iceland’s most famous
fermented shark purveyor, Hildibrandur
Bjarnason of Bjarnarhöfn, the man I had
risked my life to find. The literal trans-
lation of his name and farm is “Battles-
word Son of Bears from Bear Harbour.”
Blind seal-eaters from the
cold abyss
Being considered the face of rotten shark
may not be everyone’s idea of a presti-
gious title, but Hildibrandur wears it
with pride. A rosy-cheeked and erudite
man with a playful glint in his eyes, Hil-
dibrandur speaks with the breathy and
elevated tone you sometimes get with
older gents in the rural areas. When we
arrived, he was in the midst of discuss-
ing local politics with a visiting farmer
over milksop biscuits and black coffee.
However, he happily got up to give us a
private tour of his shark museum.
“The shark we use is caught off the
coast of Iceland and Greenland. It seems
the ones caught off the northern coast
of Norway can’t be processed as well.
And processing the fish elsewhere is
simply not possible—the Faroe Islands
are too dry and Greenland is too wet,”
Hildibrandur tells us. “There are a few
places that seem to work best for the
processing here in Iceland. I will get into
trouble if I say that Bjarnarhöfn is the
best place to process shark… So I won’t
say that,” he laughs.
He tells us that the sharks aren’t
caught near Bjarnarhöfn, as it’s too shal-
low for them. “The Greenland shark is a
deep-sea fish, living in cold, dark waters,
as deep as 3,000 feet, and has evolved
some of the most acute electroreceptors
on the planet,” Hildibrandur says with
unbridled admiration for his prey. “They
don’t rely on their eyesight much and
many of them suffer from a parasite that
eats at their corneal tissue, leaving them
almost completely blind. But the upside
is that the parasite glows in the dark and
the shark’s prey is attracted to it.”
Poisoning the magistrate
The traditional Icelandic fermented
shark, known locally as “kæstur hákarl”
after it has been processed, is made ex-
clusively from the flesh of the Greenland
shark. It is one of the largest species of
shark, growing up to 2,000 pounds and
24 feet in length. The Greenland shark
can live to be 200 years old, meaning
that you might have eaten a fish that re-
members the battle of Waterloo (there
were fighting sharks there, right?).
Their mouths contain rows of interlock-
ing teeth, an upper row used to lock into
place and a lower row to saw through the
flesh of its prey. This is why Hildibran-
dur has to bait the shark using chains as
opposed to line. “We mostly use chunks
of seal,” he says when I ask him how they
catch them. “The bait needs to be fat be-
cause it leaves an oil slick in the water
that attracts the sharks.”
The Greenland shark is a cartilagi-
nous fish and doesn’t have kidneys as
we’d know them, which causes a build-
up of urea and other toxins in the flesh,
which can’t be extracted using tradition-
al cooking methods. Thus, the method of
fermentation.
“The tradition is said to have begun
in Asparvík up north in the year 1601,”
he says. “It was discovered by accident,
as the shark had always been consid-
ered poisonous. A shark was pulled to
land and left to rot, and then someone
thought to hang it up to dry but no one
was brave enough to taste it. The story
goes that the county magistrate and his
cronies would demand food wherever
they went, even from peasants unable to
feed their kin. So the farmer invited him
to the wooden shed to try the shark as no
one would care if it turned out to be poi-
sonous. Quite the contrary, the magis-
trate and his men, who all suffered from
scurvy and dysentery, found themselves
in robust health after a week of eating
fermented shark.”
The fermented Greenland shark has
not been fully researched, but there is
some evidence to suggest that it is rich
in omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamins A
and D, and it may also strengthen the
immune system by increasing white
blood cell and platelet counts. In par-
I had been stubbornly ploughing through mounds of snow overlaying a sheet of ice one Sun-
day morning when a blind turn greeted me with a wall of snow the height of my Grand Cher-
okee. Everything went white and the SUV licked the edge of the sheer 200-foot drop into the
portion of the North Atlantic known as Breiðafjörður before it slid back to the rock wall and
stranded us in a ditch. I learned that my last words will probably be a protracted “fuck.”
Words Ragnar Egilsson
Photo Ragnar Egilsson
Meeting
The Shark Man