GREENLAND, ILULLISAT: RESTAURANT MAMARTUT

June 2019

My husband likes to eat, and he especially likes local cuisine with a touch of weird. When he researched dining options in Greenland, Restaurant Mamartut showed up as #1 on a TripAdvisor list. The website notes that "The fishes are from the local fish factory and the sea mammals come almost daily from the ice fjord located closeby. Apart from this, they also have a small vegetables and herbs garden."

He was so excited about going there that he planned for TWO visits.

Our first was dinner on June 17, just before our flight over the Ilulissat ice fjord and Greenland ice sheet.

We opted for something frequently recommended by the reviewers on TripAdvisor, the tapas plate:

Here we are waiting for our food:

It was worth the wait. What an incredible assortment! I liked just about everything on the plate with the exception of the mattaq.

There were more dishes that wouldn't fit on the plate, including smoked mackerel, halibut with licorice and curry, and catfish (aka Atlantic wolffish):

They were all very good as well.

Dessert was crowberry-apple cake. Crowberries are a local berry that look like dark blueberries but are more tart like a blackberry:

The next day, June 18, we returned with our whole group to celebrate one of our member's birthday over lunch. We had some special Icelandic warrior gifts for him:

. . . and we made sure he got to taste some mattaq, or smoked and deep-fried fin whale meat. We figured that was an appropriate rite of passage. The black band is the whale's skin, and the rest is blubber:

We had a delicious lunch that included some of the same items Bob and I had eaten the day before, this time served on a fish-shaped platter:

We also had a bowl of delicious fish soup. Note that they use real crab, not the fake crab we usually see in the States:

Bob and I shared several dishes, including this musk ox burger. They don't raise cattle on the island of Greenland, and musk ox and reindeer are their substitutes for beef:

If you're ever in Ilulissat, we highly recommend Restaurant Mamartut. The menu selections are unusual and organic to the area, and the service is top-notch.