“Now you know what it’s like to be in the eye of a storm,” said our hiking guide, Audun Rasmussen, with a wide, reassuring grin. I tried to nod in agreement, but the fierce Arctic wind whipped my head into an involuntary wobble. We were nearly 2,000 feet up a steep, multi-edged mountain face, simultaneously getting pelted by a relentless sheet of rain. If sweeping views over picturesque towns and calm freshwater lakes below are what is typically promised in this dramatic part of Northern Norway, today there would be none of that. Instead, a thick, atmospheric fog clung tightly to every nook and crevice of the ancient glacial hulks surrounding us.
There was a profound sense of achievement, certainly. The persistent rain had turned much of our ascending trails into sinking mud, and the exposed rock faces into slick, gripless stone. We had used our bare hands to push past resilient birch branches and skidded helplessly on wet patches of moss. And we still had to make our treacherous way back down to sea level. But for now, we were suspended in the clouds, hiding beneath protective rocky overhangs and finding a much-needed reprieve in hearty reindeer-meat sandwiches, dry fish bites, and chocolate-covered wafers called Kvikk Lunsj, which playfully translates to “a quick lunch.”
It is ascents like these, over rock foundations that vastly predate the Jurassic period, that draw close to a million visitors each year to the Lofoten Islands. The tiny Norwegian archipelago, situated 68 degrees north of the Arctic Circle and reached via two flights from Oslo, is a remarkably distinctive and dramatic landscape. Spiky, jagged mountains rise dramatically straight out of the churning Norwegian Sea, while sandy, pristine beaches are uniquely fringed by deep fjords. In the height of summer, buoyed by endless daylight, adventurers arrive from Norway’s mainland in droves to camp, climb, and swim in the icy waters.
However, summer was well 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 on its plates.
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In a wind-whipped corner of Sørvågen, a small 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 buildings have been transformed into Holmen Lofoten, a unique culinary destination and hotel that has welcomed dedicated food lovers and intrepid adventurers from around the world since 2007. The traditional fishing cabins, known locally as rorbuer, are distinguished by their corrugated roofs, some of which are traditionally topped with thick, insulating grass. Raised wooden walkways connect the buildings to each other and to expansive wooden decks facing the open sea. Inside the guest rooms, large picture windows frame the rugged shoreline. With its simple local furnishings and hand-hewn charm, everything about this remote sanctuary feels remarkably elemental.
During my four-day stay, Holmen would play host to Kitchen on the Edge of the World, an extraordinary culinary adventure launched in 2018 that welcomes acclaimed international chefs into its kitchen four times a year, bringing guests together around communal dining tables and out into the surrounding wild. This milestone event, the 30th edition of the series, was helmed by Matt Orlando, a California-born, Copenhagen-based chef who has previously worked at some of the world’s most influential and demanding 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 single dish spread out wide just beyond the dining room windows.
Ingunn Rasmussen, the warm, 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 shared when she picked me up from the local airport. As a traditional fisherman’s daughter, she grew up around this very site—in fact, one of the historic cabins still bears her sister’s childhood scribbles preserved on the wooden wall. After a period spent living and working abroad, Ingunn returned with a fierce determination to breathe new life back into this quiet corner of Lofoten. What followed was a meticulous restoration focused intently on preserving the original structures and historical details, eventually followed by the addition of a couple of new buildings built in the exact same architectural vernacular to comfortably accommodate larger suites.
On the first night of the multi-day event, we gathered in the cozy living room situated just 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 weathered found objects—that directly echo the harsh, beautiful landscape outside. That evening’s welcome dinner was spearheaded by Holmen’s own resident chefs, a young and talented assemblage hailing from as far away as Sicily and Piauí in the northeast of Brazil.
Trays circulated the room laden with delicate shrimp croustades and craft cocktails that initially looked like classic Negronis but told a much more localized story: the vermouth was infused with foraged blackcurrant leaves, while the Campari was steeped with dried local berries and delicate yarrow flowers. Each sip seemed to capture the rich autumnal palette I had witnessed blanketing the hillside on our drive in. The nonalcoholic version was just as heady and complex: an elderflower tonic paired with a homemade syrup crafted from freshly picked wild hops harvested nearby. “Holmen was created because we want to show our guests the true Lofoten Islands,” Ingunn explained. “And food is a critical part of truly understanding it.”
I wandered over to Mia Hjorth Hansen, co-owner of Gedulgt, a cocktail bar in Aarhus, Denmark, and the resident mixologist at Kitchen on the Edge. Shelves surrounding her workstation held glass jars filled with foraged and dried ingredients—cornflower, dandelion, and fireweed—that she was transforming into botanical elixirs. While visiting guest chefs rarely return for repeat performances, Hansen is a notable exception, marking this as her twelfth time participating in Kitchen on the Edge. Still, there has always been a clear through-line among the participating chefs. Whether it is Ana Roš, the renowned Slovenian chef behind the three-Michelin-starred Hiša Franko, or Simon Rogan, the prominent UK pioneer of the farm-to-table movement, each visiting culinary artist has shared a profound, unwavering commitment to land stewardship. “We take time picking them,” says Ingunn, “because we want chefs who will be deeply considerate about the people and the wildlife that make this our home.”
The first night of the event is deliberately designed to serve as an icebreaker, and Ingunn had warned us we would be surprised by how quickly we grew comfortable sharing close quarters over the course of four days. We were a wonderfully motley crew of travelers, including a geologist from Brunei, a committed adventurer from Dubai, and a retired traveler from Melbourne who journeys specifically for intimate, remote food events like this one. Our lively conversations followed us outside into the crisp air for dessert, onto a wooden deck where we savored rich ice cream made with black currant leaves and lovage, topped with mascarpone whipped from local Lofoten cream, and finished with a delicate meringue charred over binchotan, a specialized Japanese white charcoal. A tracking app suggested the Northern Lights were tantalizingly close, and the Holmen team kept a watchful eye on the clearing skies. It was a tantalizing taste of what was yet to come: an intimate experience shaped entirely by live-fire cooking and an authentic embrace of the raw Arctic elements.
The following morning, encouraged by Ingunn’s open invitation to explore every single corner of the property, I wandered into the heart of the kitchen to watch Orlando and his sous chef, Tom Siebeler, prepare for their upcoming dinner service. “Anything that comes out of that traditional wood-fired oven is going to taste amazing,” Orlando told me, expertly working his way through a large pile of reindeer ribs sourced from a sustainable farm run by Indigenous Sámi herders located just north of Lofoten. Originally expecting standard chops, he was busy improvising creative garnishes to suit the hearty ribs. Reindeer is just one of many distinct ingredients Holmen takes great care to source locally, alongside regional cheeses, Lofotlam (a protected, geographically indicated local lamb), and hardy vegetables. “For us, knowing where things come from matters deeply, even down to the objects we use,” Ingunn noted. The exquisite tableware we were dining on, for instance, was handcrafted by local ceramicist Gunvor Tangrand, whose organic forms pay homage to the surrounding terrain and whose textured surfaces cleverly incorporate recycled old fishing yarn.
Orlando had arrived in Lofoten a few days prior carrying a case filled with his favorite foundational building blocks—barley, Danish yellow peas, and several distinct varieties of miso—but he was most excited to work dynamically with what he could discover in the immediate surroundings. He invited me to step outside with him to forage for ingredients for his dinner menu, and we returned with fresh chickweed, corn shoots, and tangy sheep sorrel. “I love cooking in remote places,” he shared. “Thinking completely on the fly and exploring the hidden potential in things you’ve never worked with before is where the absolute coolest ideas come from.”
Orlando, much like Ingunn, is something of a visionary. Years ago, he opened Amass, a groundbreaking circular restaurant in Copenhagen’s industrial Refshaleøen neighborhood, where warm service and an approachable, low-waste tasting menu were paired with a harborside produce garden that diners could freely wander through. While Amass has since closed, Orlando opened Esse last year inside 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 unyielding commitment to environmental responsibility. At Holmen, that sustainability philosophy proves to be a completely natural fit.
Later that night, as we gathered closely around communal tables adorned with fresh wildflowers and flickering candlelight, we squealed with genuine delight when the warm potato bread arrived alongside rich allium butter, and again when the fishbone noodles were presented—a masterful creation achieved by pressure-cooking fish bones and puréeing them until completely smooth. The collagen-rich mixture gives the noodles their uniquely slippery texture, which Orlando thoughtfully complemented with smoked chili, sunflower-seed miso, and fermented chili cream. Served family-style, the meal was wonderfully messy and fun, with formal utensils set aside so we could savor the main course of tender reindeer with our bare hands. As a pescatarian, I happily dug into my own tailored dish: savory hedgehog mushrooms grilled with a chili-strawberry barbecue sauce and served with a vibrant Lofoten chimichurri.
Outside, the bright harvest moon kept quiet watch over the fjord.
The weather changes with astonishing speed in the far North—quiet and calm one minute, then wild and dramatic the next. “Four seasons in an hour,” joked Håvar Holmen. It is this unique confluence of harsh climatic conditions that makes Lofoten such a surprisingly productive landscape: the interaction between the warmer Gulf Stream and the cold Arctic waters robustly supports marine life; the seemingly endless hours of summer sunlight send local plants into biological hyperdrive; and the mineral-rich sea spray actively nourishes the pastures where local lamb graze. “This land and sea have successfully nourished us for generations,” says Ingunn, who frequently leads guests on coastal foraging walks, returning triumphantly with fireweed flowers for immune-boosting teas, tart cloudberries for sweet jams, or pungent lovage for a vibrant, savory compound butter.
However, to truly understand this landscape is to understand its enduring, centuries-old connection to one particular food source: skrei, or migratory Arctic cod. Here, traditional tepee-style wooden drying racks known as hjeller are as much a defining visual fixture of the landscape as Lofoten’s jagged mountains; their distinctive A-frame wooden structures have dotted the coastal terrain for more than a thousand years. The racks were completely empty during my visit, but come January, they will be heavily stacked with skrei caught at the very end of their annual migration from the Barents Sea down to Lofoten’s milder, protected waters where they spawn. Transformed into tørrfisk (wind-dried stockfish), this seasonal bounty has sustained the local coastal economy for centuries. Yet, like many other coastal societies historically shaped by the migration patterns and economics of Atlantic cod, Lofoten has faced considerable ecosystem pressures over recent decades, ranging from shifting fish migration patterns to the pressures of large commercial offshore fishing fleets.
Perhaps it is little surprise, then, that a more diversified agricultural and artisanal movement is steadily 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, whose marine products supply both Holmen’s demanding kitchens and line our bathroom shelves. Co-founded by Angelita Eriksen and Tamara Singer, this entirely women-led team regularly dons thick wetsuits to hand-harvest seven distinct types of local seaweed, including sugar kelp and nori, directly from the powerful tidal currents of local straits like Nappstraumen, transforming them into prized culinary seasonings and natural toiletries. Singer guided us through their processing facility, housed inside a traditional rorbu where Eriksen once cut out cod tongues as a child—“a common way for kids in this region to make a bit of pocket money,” Singer explained with a smile—and where they now carefully sort, store, and age seaweed for top-tier Michelin-starred restaurants like Noma and Geranium in Copenhagen.
They are far from alone in this localized renaissance. Across the islands, artisanal cheesemakers and small-scale farmers growing hardy root vegetables and edible flowers are actively cultivating the region’s rich, resilient ecosystem. Back at Holmen, I spoke with local resident Bjørg-Elin Kjærn, who specializes in food and agriculture systems at Love Food, an organization dedicated to connecting small-scale regional producers with local restaurants. “Lamb, stockfish, and seaweed are all remarkably sustainable ways of producing food,” she noted. “But conservation only truly works when the people living on the land and by the sea can make a good, viable living. When a restaurant actively chooses these local products, it helps keep that entire cultural and economic system alive.”
Kjærn also works diligently to steer incoming tourism toward authentic local food and agriculture experiences, rather than simply encouraging visitors to pitch tents haphazardly and climb mountains without preparation. We talked openly about the growing, mounting toll of poorly managed mountain tourism—a distinct sore point among many local residents. Holmen’s own mountaineering guide, Audun, often prefers not to publicly share the specific names or exact locations of certain climbing ascents anymore. He genuinely fears that overexposure on social media will draw the wrong kind of attention, particularly from underprepared climbers who drastically underestimate both the technical difficulty of the routes and the sudden, dangerous whims of Arctic weather. Just a few years ago, Lofoten implemented strict bans on wild camping, successfully restricting campers to designated, managed grounds.
It is abundantly clear that modern tourism has well and truly come knocking on Lofoten’s door. Inbound visitor growth in Northern Norway as a whole, and Lofoten in particular, has outpaced the rest of the country, bringing with it a familiar and pressing tension: how to warmly welcome eager travelers while fiercely protecting the very qualities that make a place worth visiting in the first place. “Our hope is that people come to Lofoten for all the right reasons,” Ingunn told me. “Ultimately, that mindset will be what helps us protect these fragile islands and our traditional way of life.” Food, increasingly serving as a meaningful anchor for how people travel today, offers a vital way to bridge that gap, inviting respectful visitors in while deeply helping them understand the complex place they have come to experience. “Here, you simply cannot separate food production from the surrounding landscape,” said Kjærn. “Much of what visitors come to see, whether they consciously know it or not, is fundamentally shaped by food.”
In this thoughtful way, Kitchen on the Edge hopes to sound a much-needed call for modern travelers to rethink both why and how they visit remote places like Lofoten. Hospitality that successfully takes guests far beyond the plate and directly into the fields and fjords isn’t just a clever new travel concept—here, it is a deeply rooted way of life.
One morning, when the coastal weather cleared just enough, we piled into inflatable Zodiac boats that cut rapidly through choppy turquoise waters to reach an uninhabited island. Once a thriving, populated fishing village, the remote settlement was largely abandoned when motorized fishing boats became commonplace in the mid-20th century, rendering it unnecessary for fishing communities to live immediately adjacent to the spawning grounds. Today, raw nature has completely reclaimed this idyllic spot—where Ingunn spent her own childhood summer days picking wild berries and swimming—with cascading waterfalls and thick carpets of soft reindeer moss.
While other members of our group traced the rocky shoreline carefully on foot, I sat quietly by the old wooden jetty and took it all in: the majestic mountains gracefully disappearing straight into the sea, a pair of powerful white-tailed eagles circling effortlessly overhead, and the tiny, vibrant berries and subarctic flora carpeting the ground underfoot. There is a distinct neurological shift that occurs when your brain is forced to constantly zoom out to take in a vast, epic landscape, and then suddenly narrow your focus down to the smallest, intricate details. I later learned there is a formal psychological term for it: attentional elasticity, a cognitive framework that helps ground you firmly in the present moment. It is likely the primary reason I felt such a profound sense of stillness, despite the lingering fog of jet lag and the constant pull of the group activity all around me.
The hotel crew built a warm campfire on the shore around which we ate steaming fish soup, taking turns making traditional pinnebrød by winding simple bread dough carefully around long birch sticks and cooking it directly over the open flames. A flask of aquavit—affectionately referred to around these parts as holy water—made a welcome appearance, passed warmly from hand to hand.
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Back at Holmen, immersive encounters with nature quickly became an intrinsic part of our daily rhythm. We foraged not just for edible sustenance but for art as well, gathering wild moss, forest mushrooms, and branches heavy with autumn berries to create striking wild tablescapes alongside Becky Hindley, a visiting British botanical artist. In a rustic woodworking cabin where the autumn sunlight poked through the windows quite optimistically, we spent hours with Lee John Phillips, a skilled woodcarver from Wales, patiently fashioning functional spoons out of local birch wood. It represents a particular kind of quiet luxury that is fundamentally rooted in knowing how to build a comfortable, meaningful life directly from what the land naturally provides.
True to the spirit of any real home, the kitchen here remained the vibrant heart of the house, drawing us back repeatedly throughout the day: to watch the talented chefs pry open fresh Icelandic queen scallops and expertly slice basketfuls of earthy chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. Chef Orlando was always within easy reach, enthusiastically sharing recipes and sparking lively conversations about sustainable food systems. Unlike many modern culinary festivals where a strict boundary separates the diners from the production, there was no peeking behind a curtain here, because, in truth, there simply was no curtain at all. “This is my ultimate dream for a restaurant,” Orlando reflected on the night of his final multi-course presentation, as we savored grilled pollock smothered in chard and shishito butter while sipping a remarkable oat milk drink flavored with green cardamom, rose, and spiced apple. “To be able to have diners weave effortlessly in and out and chat casually as I cook.”
As it happened, the clear, bright blue skies we were all hoping for never truly showed their face during the four days I spent on the islands. Yet the astonishing, deeply thoughtful dishes served beside a crackling oven, the easy and genuine camaraderie shared around the communal dinner table, and the ever-present, electric possibility of catching the Northern Lights left me far more awake to the natural world than I had felt in months.
