Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.06.2017, Side 53

A Boozy Meeting
With the Donkey
Lads
Crickets and cocoa puffs cocktails at the Latin
fusion disco

Words: Ragnar Egillson Photo: Art Bicnick
Burro is a pan-Latin tapas place
from the people who brought us
Public House. My most recent visit
happened to coincide with a special
menu in celebration of the Mexican
holiday of Cinco de Mayo. Cinco de
Mayo is one of those weird cultural
imports that have found more suc-
cess in the US than they have in
their places of origin—alongside
things like denim (Italy), bagels
(Poland) and Newcastle Brown Ale
(Uranus).
At Burro, Mexican food has sim-
ilarly fused with the local culture.
Latin cuisine is used as a jumping-
off point and then customized with
far-flung ingredients and influ-
ences. This results in such gleefully
sacrilegious dishes as “Arctic char
ceviche with beetroot crisps and
avocado purée.”

Tropical Cocktails
I sat down with head chef Theódór
Dreki Árnason and part-owner
Sa múel Þór Her-
mannsson to see
what the big idea
was. “We’ve been try-
ing to do something different,” says
Samúel. “To create a tropical getaway,
to help Icelanders forget that they are
living in a snowstorm.”
The tropical cocktails, courtesy
of upstairs tiki disco Pablo Discobar,
help the escape.
The name is a not-
too-subtle refer-
ence to a popular
Latin American
export and judging
by the cocktails,
they may have been
dipping into the
shipments. At Pab-
lo, you can get any-
thing from “Puff
the Magic Dragon”
(with rum, green
chartreuse, and co-
coa puffs) to Disco
Zombie (a $1000 mega cocktail con-
taining 2-3 bottles of rum and a chal-
ice-worth of absinth). Downstairs,
we stick with our boozy palomas and
a frozen margaritas in honor of the
holiday.
Concerning the menu’s use of
rare ingredients like tonka bean (a
fermented legume banned in the
US), Theódór says
sourcing ingredients
from outside of Ice-
land is getting easi-
er. “With more tourists the overall
customer base in Reykjavík is grow-
ing,” he explains, “which helps jus-
tify some of the stranger imports.
But our customers are 80-90% Ice-
landic, which is unusual.”
Sting in the tail
I wonder if they’ve tried anything
that was too weird for the Iceland-
ers. “Well, we had a maize dessert
which I loved,” says Theódór, “but
when people would choose between
that and the chocolate dessert,
they’d always go with the chocolate,
so we took it off the menu. But we
have been toying with the idea of
adding crickets and scorpion to the
menu. We’ll see if we can convince
the health inspec-
tors.”
The five course
Cinco de Mayo menu
w a s r e a s o n a b l y
priced at 6990 ISK. It
kicked off with a tuna
tiradito with ponzu
and puffed rice. This
was followed by a
soft maize taco with
pul led pork, BBQ
mole, and chipotles.
Next came a baked
cod topped with ed-
ible flowers, red cab-
bage and chicharrón. The main
protein was a grilled beef fillet with
a mild, peruvian aji amarillo paste
and a thin chimichurri. Dessert was
a caramel mousse, skyr sorbet, co-
coa nibs (I think… it was getting a
little hazy at that point).
I ask Samúel what it is about the
tapas/small plates approach that
has proven so popular in Reykjavík
lately. “The tapas approach appeals
to me because it allows me to taste
more dishes,” he explains. “The old-
er people aren’t as wild about it, but
for younger customers eating out is
synonymous with sharing and tast-
ing as many dishes as possible.”
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“We’ve been
toying with the
idea of adding
crickets and
scorpion to the
menu. We’ll see
if we can con-
vince the health
inspectors.”
53The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 09 — 2017
gpv.is/food
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