If you’re old enough to remember the double rainbow guy from the early days of YouTube you would have appreciated the rapturous whoops coming from my car last summer as I rounded the Nordadalsskard mountain pass in the Faroe Islands en route to Torshavn, the capital, and made out two distinct luminous arches framing the shamrock-green mountains. The only other witnesses were three black sheep that had wandered into my lane and stopped cold as if equally enchanted.
Already, the Faroes had been quite a ride, from the moment my flight made its lurching approach between jagged mountains and delivered me to this mossy Camelot in the northeast Atlantic Ocean. (It’ll be the same view for passengers on the new Atlantic Airways route from Gatwick that resumes in June after 11 years.) In the hour since, the road had climbed up into the mist, nosedived back into spongy pleats of land and swooped around iridescent fjords. So as the clouds cleared again I gripped my phone, thrust my arm out of the window of my electric Peugeot hire car and hoped for the best.
In motion the panorama was highly photogenic — the kind of photogenic that distracts from everything else, including eating, the reason I was here. There’s a foodie revolution happening across these 18 sheep-dotted volcanic islands — a reappraisal of native ingredients and an inundation of creative talent to rival the restaurants of Denmark (the country which took control of the islands in 1814 but no longer governs them). New faces are using old techniques to popularise “brutal dining”: seafood and lamb served raw and rough. The two-Michelin-star restaurant Koks will reopen its hinterland location in January 2025 after a sojourn in Greenland, with a £368, 18-course tasting menu highlighting the islands’ ancient culinary traditions (koks.fo).
But who can think of food when an alpine vista or striking Arctic mesa awaits around every bend? Later, bombing past a family of grazing ponies an hour late for my first dinner, it struck me that my original plan — to eat my way across the archipelago — was looking more like an epic road trip with the odd break for food.
Early the next morning I grabbed a heart-shaped waffle from the buffet at Hotel Foroyar and hit the road. Seconds outside Torshavn the busy harbour had disappeared, and signs of life were scarce. I might have glimpsed a log house in a valley — Faroese turf roofs tend to blend with the grass, maintaining the dreamscape. The road rippled between treeless hills textured like shar pei puppies.
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Still, I was relishing my journey alone in the fog. I’ve driven through Iceland to the west and Norway to the east, and to the far reaches of Scotland, 250 miles south. Refreshingly surreal as they were, none had the Faroes’ exquisite fusion of scenery and functionality: the silky-smooth tarmac, the gentle curves that spread uninterrupted for miles, those vertiginous heights and funfair descents. And it seemed I was practically the only one taking advantage of it all.
Smooth travel is something of a mission for the Faroes. After snaking through the main island of Streymoy to a fjord known for bottlenose whale sightings (none today), I detoured to check out the seven-mile tunnel to Eysturoy, the tentacled island next door. Built a few years ago, 72m underwater, the passage forks into a wishbone at the world’s first undersea roundabout. It’s remarkable for having some of the only traffic in the Faroes — namely, not much — and for its attention to detail. About a third of the way along, stage lights cast trippy blue waves across the walls, and signs directed me to switch on the local radio station for a whale-music symphony.
I emerged into a new landscape of country roads and red, Lego-like houses. Approaching tiny Elduvik, where creases in the mountains resembled rice paddies, I watched a brave villager dash into the sea. Across the inlet I pulled over in Funningur to see its charming one-room church, a squat white steeple poking out from the grassy roof.
That I’d made it this far before most Faroese had eaten breakfast was a miracle of engineering. Along with the so-called jellyfish roundabout are 18 other underwater tunnels, each connecting islands and new, fantastical scenes — a mountain shaped like the ice cream in a soft-serve cone, or a reef that could pass for the Loch Ness monster. The most recent, opened in December last year, runs six miles underwater from Gamlaraett on the main island to Sandoy, a sheer-cut island of puffins and pebble beaches. It replaced an unreliable ferry that prioritised cargo over cars (something I learnt the hard way).
But now I was due back near Vagar airport, which struck me as inauspicious, until I arrived on Vagar island to big, clear skies and an open road. I’d booked lunch at Fiskastykkid, an old fisherman’s hut restored with polished concrete and statement lights made out of cod skin. A century ago the fish farm out back exported cod and cuttlefish to Bilbao. Today it stands as a symbol of Faroese “preservalution”, a tourism “solution” with preservation, sustainability and slow hospitality at its core. Visitors use Fiskastykkid as a sock-drying base for hikes up the undulating Witches Finger Trail to a dramatic outcrop.
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The home-baked bread and fisherman’s fusion make Fiskastykkid a destination in its own right. I ordered beetroot blini with salt cod and créme fraîche, presented with ramekins of Basque pil pil garlic sauce and pickled vegetables, loved by foodies and jarred here for centuries. I downed my sparkling rhubarb juice in one go, even as dozens of garrulous patrons — where did they all come from? — nursed gin cocktails (plates from £30; fiskastykkid.fo).
I bought a cinnamon bun for the road and drove Vagar’s western edge, tracing the cliff face as though I was starring in a car advert. At Bour I pulled over by a grass-roofed beach hut and kicked off my shoes to feel the black sand between my toes. The reef offshore looked like a shark’s fin.
• Faroe Islands guide
• Things to know before visiting the Faroe Islands
Further along I followed a fellow tourist into Gasadalur’s tiny village square and walked a flinty path to a deep V in the coastline. From one vantage point I watched a narrow chute of water plummet into the frothing inlet. Then I spotted some excited fluttering (avian and human) on the facing clifftop. Rushing over, I could just make out the distinctive orange beaks of countless puffins, flapping in the spray. It seemed unfathomable that we were seven miles from the airport.
Over four days the mise-en-scène lost none of its drama. One outing began in Torshavn, at a lichen-coated tombstone dedicated to a young Shetlands sailor, and continued 30 miles north in Fossa, at a waterfall that cascades down craggy steps like a slinky. The trip ended with rhubarb compote at Aarstova, where at the next table diners knitted between courses (three courses from £69; aarstova.fo).
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Eventually I made it to Raest, Torshavn’s showpiece restaurant, and it was an apt culmination to the trip: a four-hour saga of local delicacies that had been foraged, dug up and fermented (14-course tasting menu from £172; raest.fo). Fermentation is the Faroese MO, and at Raest few ingredients escape the primitive process — not even the kombucha champagne and pungent whale blubber amuse-bouche. This was brutal dining in its purest sense, spotlighting super-aged lamb leg and air-fermented haddock, dishes devised centuries ago to nourish fishermen at sea. Tall, chiselled staff ducked through 16th-century doorways to serve me Château d’Yquem, a sauternes perfected with noble rot, and horse mussels collected by divers. As one told me, there are no natural forests on the Faroe Islands but there’s a forest in the sea.
That some dishes reeked, or bore no resemblance to food, is par for the course in the Faroes. Yet not unlike the spectacular driving, the elements merged to produce a deliciously wholesome — and stimulating — payoff.
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Ellen Himelfarb was a guest of Visit Faroe Islands (visitfaroeislands.com). Hotel Foroyar has room-only doubles from £110 (hotelforoyar.com). Four nights’ B&B from £1,988pp, including flights, transfers and guiding (fiftydegreesnorth.com)
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