“Now you know what it’s like to be in the eye of a storm,” said our hiking guide, Audun Rasmussen, with a grin.
I tried to nod, but the wind whipped my head into a wobble. We were nearly 2,000 feet up a steep, multi-edged mountain face in Northern Norway, simultaneously getting pelted by rain. If expansive views over picturesque towns and freshwater lakes below are what is typically promised in this part of the Arctic, today there would be none. Instead, a thick fog clung to every nook and crevice of the ancient glacial hulks surrounding us.
There was a profound sense of achievement, certainly. Rain had turned much of our trails into sinking mud and rock faces into gripless stone. We had used our bare hands to push past birch branches and skidded across treacherous patches of moss, knowing we still had to make our treacherous way back down. But for the moment, we were suspended in the clouds, hiding beneath rocky overhangs and finding reprieve in reindeer-meat sandwiches, dry fish bites, and chocolate-covered wafers called Kvikk Lunsj, which translates simply to “a quick lunch.”
It is ascents like these—conquering rock foundations that vastly predate the Jurassic period—that draw close to a million visitors each year to the Lofoten Islands. Located 68 degrees north of the Arctic Circle and accessible via a couple of flights from Oslo, this tiny Norwegian archipelago features a distinctive and dramatic landscape where spiky mountains rise straight out of the stormy Norwegian Sea and white sandy beaches are abruptly fringed by deep fjords. In the summer, buoyed by endless daylight, adventurers arrive from the Norwegian mainland to camp, climb, and swim.
Yet summer was past its twilight when I arrived in late September, and I had come to discover an entirely different side of Lofoten: one found not on its dizzying peaks, but directly on its plates.
From Cod Factory to Culinary Haven
In a wind-whipped corner of Sørvågen, a village tucked into the southwestern reaches of the archipelago, a cluster of mustard-colored wooden cabins on stilts juts out directly into the sea. Once home to a bustling cod factory, these historic structures have been transformed into Holmen Lofoten, a unique culinary destination and boutique hotel that has welcomed food lovers and adventurers from around the world since 2007.
These traditional fishing cabins, known as rorbuer in Norwegian, are distinguished by their corrugated roofs, some of which are traditionally topped with insulating grass. Elevated wooden walkways connect the buildings to one another and to expansive outdoor decks facing the open sea. Inside the guest rooms, large picture windows frame the raw, craggy shoreline. With simple local furnishings and hand-hewn charm, everything about the property feels elemental and deeply connected to its maritime heritage.
During my four-day stay, Holmen played host to "Kitchen on the Edge of the World," an extraordinary culinary event launched in 2018 that welcomes acclaimed international chefs into its kitchen four times a year. The program brings guests together around communal tables and out into the surrounding wilderness. This particular gathering, marking the 30th edition of the event, was helmed by Matt Orlando, a California-born, Copenhagen-based chef who has previously worked at some of the world’s most influential kitchens, including The Fat Duck in London and Per Se in New York. For our part, we would feast and drink to our hearts’ content, with the very landscape that nurtures every dish spread out just beyond the windowpanes.
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Ingunn Rasmussen, the warm and chatty matriarch behind Kitchen on the Edge—and hiking guide Audun’s sister—took over the property in October 2001 and now runs it alongside her son, Håvar Holmen.
“I wanted to build a space that felt like home, where we could all log off and reconnect with our natural roots,” she told me when she picked me up from the local airport.
As a fisherman’s daughter, Ingunn grew up around this very site. In fact, one of the historic cabins still bears her sister’s childhood scribbles on the wooden wall. After a period spent living abroad, Ingunn returned determined to breathe new life into this remote corner of Lofoten. What followed was a meticulous restoration focused on preserving the original structures and historical details, eventually complemented by the addition of a few new buildings constructed in the same architectural vernacular to accommodate larger suites.
The Art of Foraging and Fermentation
On the first night of the multi-day event, we gathered in the cozy living room situated directly above the kitchen. Like all of Holmen’s shared spaces, it is defined by rustic interiors, exposed wooden beams, and raw, sculptural elements—such as foraged flora, taxidermy, and found objects—that echo the weathered landscape outside. That evening’s opening dinner was led by Holmen’s own resident chefs, a young and talented assemblage hailing from as far away as Sicily and Piauí in northeastern Brazil.
Servers circulated with trays of delicate shrimp croustades and cocktails that initially looked like classic Negronis but told a much more localized story. The vermouth was infused with foraged blackcurrant leaves, and the Campari was steeped with dried berries and yarrow flowers. Each sip seemed to capture the autumnal palette I had observed blanketing the hillsides during our drive in. A nonalcoholic version proved just as heady: an elderflower tonic spiked with a syrup made from freshly picked wild hops harvested nearby.
“Holmen was created because we want to show our guests the Lofoten Islands,” Ingunn explained. “And food is a critical part of understanding it.”
I wandered over to Mia Hjorth Hansen, co-owner of Gedulgt, a cocktail bar in Aarhus, Denmark, and the resident mixologist for Kitchen on the Edge. Shelves surrounding her workstation held glass jars filled with foraged and dried ingredients—including cornflower, dandelion, and fireweed—that she was actively transforming into elixirs. While visiting guest chefs rarely return for repeat engagements, Hansen is a notable exception, making this her twelfth time participating in Kitchen on the Edge.
Still, a clear through-line unites all the chefs who pass through the doors. Whether it is Ana Roš, the renowned Slovenian chef behind the three-Michelin-starred Hiša Franko, or Simon Rogan, the British pioneer of the farm-to-table movement, each shares an uncompromising commitment to land stewardship.
“We take time picking them,” Ingunn notes, speaking of the vetting process for visiting culinary talents, “because we want chefs who will be considerate about the people and wildlife that make this our home.”
The first night of the event is deliberately designed as an icebreaker. Ingunn warned us we would be surprised by how quickly we grew comfortable sharing close quarters over our four days together. Our group was a motley crew of travelers, including a geologist from Brunei, an adventurous explorer from Dubai, and a Melbourne retiree who travels the globe strictly to attend intimate food events like this one.
Our conversations naturally followed us outside for dessert, onto a chilly deck where we savored ice cream made with blackcurrant leaves and lovage, topped with rich mascarpone crafted from local Lofoten cream, and finished with a meringue charred over binchotan, a traditional Japanese white charcoal. A tracking app on our phones suggested the Northern Lights were tantalizingly close, and the Holmen team kept a watchful eye on the skies. It was an enticing taste of what was to come: an intimate experience deeply shaped by live-fire cooking and an embrace of the unpredictable Arctic elements.
A Visionary Kitchen Rooted in Zero-Waste Philosophy
The next morning, encouraged by Ingunn’s invitation to explore every corner of the property, I wandered into the kitchen to watch Orlando and his sous chef, Tom Siebeler, prepare for their evening service.
“Anything that comes out of that wood-fired oven is going to taste amazing,” Orlando told me as he worked his way through a pile of reindeer ribs sourced from a sustainable farm run by Sámi herders just north of Lofoten. Originally expecting standard chops, he was busy improvising garnishes to suit the cut.
Reindeer is just one of many ingredients Holmen takes care to source locally, alongside regional cheeses, Lofotlam (a Geographical Indication-protected local lamb), and fresh vegetables.
“For us, knowing where things come from matters, even with the objects we use,” Ingunn said.
The exquisite tableware we dined on, for instance, was crafted by local ceramicist Gunvor Tangrand, whose organic forms pay homage to the surrounding terrain and incorporate textured surfaces made from old fishing yarn.
Orlando had arrived in Lofoten a few days prior carrying a case filled with his favorite culinary building blocks—barley, Danish yellow peas, and several varieties of miso—but he was most excited to work with whatever he could find in the immediate surroundings. He invited me to step outside to forage for the evening’s dinner menu, and we returned to the kitchen with fresh chickweed, corn shoots, and sheep sorrel.
“I love cooking in remote places,” he said. “Thinking on the fly and exploring the potential in things you’ve never worked with is where the coolest ideas come from.”
Orlando is something of a culinary visionary. Some years ago, he opened Amass, a circular restaurant in Copenhagen’s industrial Refshaleøen neighborhood, where friendly service and an approachable, low-waste tasting menu were paired with a harborside produce garden that diners could wander through. Although Amass has since closed, Orlando opened Esse last year in a restored Nordhavn warehouse, and the establishment earned its first Michelin star just a few months later. Signature dishes, including his famous fermented potato bread, made the move with him, alongside his unwavering commitment to environmental responsibility. At Holmen, that philosophy proved to be a natural fit.
Later that night, as we gathered around communal tables adorned with wild field flowers and flickering candlelight, we squealed with delight when the warm potato bread arrived alongside rich allium butter, and again when the fishbone noodles were served. This masterful creation was made by pressure-cooking fish bones and puréeing them until completely smooth. The collagen-rich mixture gives the noodles their uniquely slippery texture, which Orlando complemented with smoked chili, sunflower-seed miso, and fermented chili cream.
Served family-style, the meal was messy and fun, with formal utensils largely set aside so we could savor the main course—the reindeer—directly with our hands. As a pescatarian, I happily dug into my own alternative dish: hedgehog mushrooms grilled with a chili-strawberry barbecue sauce and served with a bright Lofoten chimichurri. Outside, the autumn harvest moon kept watch over the dark waters.
The Rhythms of Land and Sea
The weather in the North changes with startling speed. It can be quiet and calm one minute, then wild and dramatic the next—what Holmen jokingly refers to as “four seasons in an hour.” It is this unique confluence of climatic conditions that makes Lofoten such a remarkably productive landscape. The interaction between the warmer Gulf Stream and cold Arctic waters supports a thriving marine ecosystem; the long hours of summer sunlight send plant life into hyperdrive; and the mineral-rich sea spray nourishes the pastures where local sheep graze.
“This land and sea have nourished us for generations,” says Ingunn, who frequently leads guests on foraging walks, returning with fireweed flowers for immune-boosting teas, cloudberries for jams, or lovage for vibrant, savory butters.
Yet to truly understand this landscape is to understand its enduring connection to one particular food source: skrei, or Arctic cod. Here, tepee-style wooden drying racks known as hjeller are as much a visual fixture of the landscape as Lofoten’s jagged mountains; their distinctive wooden frames have dotted the terrain for more than a thousand years. The racks sat empty during my autumn visit, but come January, they will be stacked high with migratory skrei caught at the end of their long journey from the Barents Sea to Lofoten’s milder spawning waters.
Transformed into tørrfisk (wind-dried stockfish), this seasonal bounty has sustained the local economy for centuries. However, like many coastal societies shaped by the migration patterns and economics of Atlantic cod, Lofoten has faced ecosystem pressures over recent decades, ranging from shifting fish routes to the pressures of industrial offshore fishing fleets.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that a more diversified agricultural and artisanal movement is taking root across the islands. One rainy afternoon, I departed from the cozy confines of Holmen and drove an hour north to the fishing village of Napp, home to the Lofoten Seaweed Company. Their products supply Holmen’s kitchens—and line our hotel bathroom shelves.
Co-founded by Angelita Eriksen and Tamara Singer, this entirely women-led team dons wetsuits to hand-harvest seven types of local seaweed, including sugar kelp and nori, directly from the ferocious tidal currents of straits like Nappstraumen, transforming them into prized culinary seasonings and natural toiletries. Singer led us on a tour of their processing facility, housed inside a traditional rorbu where Eriksen once cut out cod tongues as a child—a common way for youngsters in the region to earn pocket money, Singer explained—and where they now sort, store, and age seaweed for top-tier kitchens like Noma and Geranium in Copenhagen.
Across the islands, artisanal cheesemakers and farmers growing root vegetables and edible flowers are actively cultivating the region’s rich ecosystem. Back at Holmen, I spoke with local resident Bjørg-Elin Kjærn, who specializes in food and agriculture systems at Love Food, an organization that connects small-scale producers with local restaurants.
“Lamb, stockfish, and seaweed are all remarkably sustainable ways of producing food,” she said. “But conservation only works when the people living on the land and by the sea can make a good living. When a restaurant chooses these products, it helps keep that whole system alive.”
Kjærn also works to steer modern tourism toward local food and agriculture, rather than simply encouraging visitors to pitch tents and climb mountains indiscriminately. We discussed the growing toll of poorly managed mountain tourism, a sore point among permanent residents. Holmen’s mountaineering guide Audun prefers not to share the names or exact locations of his favorite ascents anymore, fearing that overexposure on social media will draw the wrong kind of attention, particularly from underprepared climbers who underestimate both the difficulty of the routes and the whims of Arctic weather. Just a few years ago, Lofoten implemented strict bans on wild camping, restricting overnight stays to designated campgrounds.
It is clear that mass tourism has come knocking on Lofoten’s door. Inbound visitor growth in Northern Norway, and Lofoten in particular, has outpaced the rest of the country, bringing with it a familiar modern tension: how to warmly welcome travelers while actively protecting what makes a place worth visiting in the first place.
“Our hope is that people come to Lofoten for the right reasons,” Ingunn told me. “Ultimately, that will be what helps us protect the islands and our way of life.”
Food, increasingly acting as an anchor for how people travel, offers a way to bridge that gap, inviting visitors in while helping them deeply understand the environment they have come to experience.
“Here, you can’t separate food production and landscape,” Kjærn noted. “Much of what visitors come to see, whether they know it or not, is fundamentally shaped by food.”
Attentional Elasticity and the Comfort of the Hearth
In this way, Kitchen on the Edge hopes to sound a call for travelers to rethink why and how they visit places like Lofoten. Hospitality that takes guests beyond the plate and directly into the fields and fjords is not an entirely new concept, but here it is more than a luxury perk—it is a sustainable way of life.
One morning, when the weather cleared just enough, we piled into inflatable Zodiac boats that cut through choppy waters toward an uninhabited island nearby. Once a thriving fishing village, the settlement was abandoned when motorboats became commonplace in the mid-20th century, rendering it unnecessary for fishing families to live right next to the spawning grounds. Today, nature has reclaimed this idyllic spot—where Ingunn spent childhood summer days picking berries and swimming—with rushing waterfalls and thick carpets of reindeer moss.
While others traced the rocky shoreline on foot, I sat quietly by the old wooden jetty and took it all in: the towering mountains disappearing into the churning sea, a pair of white-tailed eagles circling effortlessly overhead, and the tiny subarctic flora blooming underfoot. There is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when you are constantly forced to zoom out to take in a vast, epic landscape, and then immediately narrow your focus to the smallest botanical details. I later learned there is a specific term for it: attentional elasticity, a cognitive framework that helps anchor human consciousness firmly in the present moment. It is likely why I felt such a profound sense of stillness, despite the lingering fog of jet lag and the constant activity swirling around me.
Later, the hotel crew built a beachside campfire around which we ate hot fish soup, taking turns making pinnebrød by winding dough around birch sticks and cooking it directly over the open flames. A flask of aquavit—referred to locally as "holy water"—made a welcome appearance as the afternoon waned.
At Holmen, encounters with the natural world became an organic part of the daily rhythm. We foraged not just for ingredients, but for artistic inspiration as well, gathering moss, wild mushrooms, and branches heavy with berries to create wild tablescapes alongside Becky Hindley, a visiting British botanical artist. In a rustic woodworking cabin where the sunlight poked through the windows, we spent hours with Lee John Phillips, a woodcarver from Wales, carefully fashioning spoons out of local birch wood. It is a specific kind of luxury that is rooted entirely in knowing how to build a meaningful life from what the land generously provides.
As in any home, the kitchen remained the beating heart of the house, drawing us back repeatedly to watch chefs pry open Icelandic queen queens and slice basketfuls of chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. Chef Orlando was always within arm’s reach, enthusiastically sharing recipes and sparking conversations about sustainable food systems. Unlike many modern culinary festivals featuring rigid schedules and roped-off preparation areas, there was no curtain to peer behind because, in practice, there simply is no curtain.
“This is my dream for a restaurant,” Orlando reflected on the night of his final presentation, as we savored grilled pollock with chard and shishito butter while sipping an innovative oat milk drink flavored with green cardamom, rose, and spiced apple. “To be able to have diners weave in and out and chat casually as I cook.”
As it happened, the clear blue skies we had hoped for never quite materialized during the four days of my stay. Yet the astonishing dishes served beside a crackling wood oven, the easy camaraderie shared around the dinner table, and the ever-present, electric possibility of catching the Northern Lights left me far more awake to the world than I had felt in months.
