In Lofoten, Norway, a Table Is Set Between Peaks and Fjords

“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 it into a wobble. We were nearly 2,000 feet up a steep, multi-edged mountain face, and simultaneously getting pelted by rain. If views over picturesque towns and freshwater lakes below are what is typically promised in this part of Northern Norway, today there’d be none. Instead, fog clung to every nook and crevice of the glacial hulks surrounding us.

There was a sense of achievement, certainly. Rain had turned much of our trails into sinking mud, and rock faces to gripless stone. We had used our hands to push past birch and skidded on moss. And we would still have to make our way back down. But for now, we were in the clouds, hiding under rocky overhangs and finding reprieve in reindeer-meat sandwiches, dry fish bites, and chocolate-covered wafers called Kvikk Lunsj that translate to “a quick lunch."

It’s ascents like these, over rock foundations that vastly predate the Jurassic period, that draw close to a million visitors each year to Lofoten Islands. The tiny Norwegian archipelago, 68 degrees north of the Arctic Circle and two flights from Oslo, is a distinctive and dramatic landscape with spiky mountains rising from the Norwegian Sea and sandy beaches fringed by fjords. In summer, buoyed by endless daylight, adventurers arrive from Norway’s mainland to camp, climb, and swim.

But 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 peaks, but on its plates.

In a wind-whipped corner of Sørvågen, a village in the southwestern reaches of the archipelago, a cluster of mustard-colored cabins on stilts juts out into the sea. Once home to a cod factory, these buildings have been transformed into Holmen Lofoten, a unique culinary destination and hotel that has welcomed food lovers and adventurers from around the world since 2007. The traditional fishing cabins, known as rorbuer in Norwegian, are distinguished by their corrugated roofs, some of which are topped with insulating grass. Walkways connect the buildings to each other and to wooden decks facing the sea. Inside the guest rooms, large picture windows frame the shoreline. With its simple local furnishings and hand-hewn charm, everything about this place feels 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 chefs into its kitchen four times a year, and brings guests around the table—and out into the surrounding wild. This, the 30th edition, would be helmed by Matt Orlando, a California-born, Copenhagen-based chef who has worked at some of the world’s most influential kitchens like 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 landscape that nurtures every dish spread out just beyond the 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 with 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 said when she picked me up from the airport. A fisherman's daughter, she grew up around this very site—in fact, one of the cabins still bears her sister’s childhood scribbles on the wall. After a period abroad, Ingunn returned determined to breathe life back into this corner of Lofoten. What followed was a meticulous restoration focused on preserving the original structures and historical details, and eventually, the addition of a couple of new buildings in the same vernacular to accommodate larger suites.

On the first night of the multi-day event, we gathered in the living room above the kitchen. Like all of Holmen’s shared spaces, it is defined by rustic interiors, exposed beams, and raw, sculptural elements—foraged flora, taxidermy, found objects—that echo the weathered landscape outside. That evening’s dinner would be helmed by Holmen’s own chefs, a young and talented assemblage from as far as Sicily and Piauí, in the northeast of Brazil.

Trays circulated with shrimp croustades and cocktails that looked like Negronis but told a more local story: the vermouth was infused with foraged blackcurrant leaves, and the Campari steeped with dried berries and yarrow flowers. Each sip seemed to capture the autumnal palette I’d seen blanketing the hillside on our drive in. The nonalcoholic version was just as heady: an elderflower tonic with a syrup made from freshly picked wild hops from nearby. “Holmen was created because we want to show our guests the Lofoten Islands,” said Ingunn. “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 resident mixologist at Kitchen on the Edge. Shelves around her workstation held glass jars filled with foraged and dried ingredients—cornflower, dandelion, and fireweed—that she was transforming into elixirs. While visiting chefs rarely return, Hansen is an exception: this is her twelfth Kitchen on the Edge. Still, there's been a through-line among the chefs. Whether Ana Roš, the renowned Slovenian chef behind the three-Michelin-starred Hiša Franko, or Simon Rogan, the UK pioneer of the farm-to-table movement, each has shared a commitment to land stewardship. “We take time picking them,” says Ingunn, “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 always designed to be an icebreaker, and Ingunn warned us we’d be surprised by how quickly we’d grow comfortable sharing close quarters over the four days. We were a motley crew, including a geologist from Brunei, a committed adventurer from Dubai, and a Melbourne retiree who travels for intimate food events like this one. Our conversations followed us outside for dessert, onto a deck where we savored ice cream made with black currant leaves and lovage, topped with mascarpone made from Lofoten cream and finished with a meringue charred over binchotan, a Japanese white charcoal. A tracking app suggested the Northern Lights were tantalizingly close, and Holmen kept watch on the skies. It was a taste of what was to come: an intimate experience shaped by live-fire cooking and an embrace of the Arctic elements.

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 first dinner. “Anything that comes out of that wood-fired oven is going to taste amazing,” Orlando told me, working his way through a pile of reindeer ribs from a sustainable farm run by Sámi herders just north of Lofoten. Originally expecting chops, he was improvising garnishes to suit the ribs. Reindeer is one of many ingredients Holmen takes care to source locally, alongside cheeses, Lofotlam (a Geographical Indication-protected local lamb), and vegetables. “For us, knowing where things come from matters, even with the objects we use," Ingunn said. The exquisite tableware we were dining on, for instance, was made by local ceramicist Gunvor Tangrand, whose organic forms pay homage to the surroundings and textured surfaces incorporate old fishing yarn.

Orlando had arrived in Lofoten a few days prior with a case full of his favorite building blocks—barley, Danish yellow peas, several kinds of miso—but was most excited to work with what he could find in the immediate surroundings. He invited me to step outside to forage for his dinner menu, and we returned with 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, like Ingunn, is a bit of a 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 diners could wander through. Amass has since closed, but last year, Orlando opened Esse in a restored Nordhavn warehouse, and it received its first Michelin star just a few months later. Signature dishes, including his fermented potato bread, made the move, along with his commitment to environmental responsibility. At Holmen, that philosophy is a natural fit.

Later that night, as we gathered around communal tables adorned with wildflowers and candlelight, we squealed with delight when the potato bread arrived with allium butter, then again for the fishbone noodles, a masterful creation made by pressure-cooking fish bones and puréeing them until smooth. The collagen-rich mixture gives the noodles their slippery texture, which Orlando complements with smoked chili, sunflower-seed miso, and fermented chili cream. Served family-style, the meal was messy and fun, with utensils set aside so we could savor the main course, the reindeer, with our hands. As a pescatarian, I happily dug into my dish: hedgehog mushrooms grilled with chili-strawberry barbecue sauce and served with Lofoten chimichurri.

Outside, the harvest moon kept watch.

The weather changes quickly in the North. Quiet and calm one minute, then wild and Baroque the next. “Four seasons in an hour,” joked Holmen. It’s this unique confluence of climatic conditions that makes Lofoten such a productive landscape: the interaction between the warmer Gulf Stream and cold Arctic waters supports marine life; the long hours of sunlight send plants into hyperdrive; and the sea spray nourishes lamb grazing pastures. “This land and sea have nourished us for generations,” says Ingunn, who leads guests on foraging walks, returning with fireweed flowers for immune-boosting tea, cloudberries for jam, or lovage for a vibrant, savory butter.

But to really 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 as Lofoten’s mountains; their distinctive frames have dotted the terrain for more than a thousand years. The racks are empty when I visit, but come January they will be stacked with skrei that have been caught at the end of their annual migration, from the Barents Sea to Lofoten’s milder waters where they spawn. Transformed into tørrfisk (wind-dried stockfish), this seasonal bounty has sustained the local economy for centuries. However, like many other coastal societies shaped by the migration and economics of Atlantic cod, Lofoten has been no stranger to ecosystem pressures over the decades, from shifting migration patterns to offshore fishing fleets.

Perhaps, it is no surprise then, that a more diversified agricultural movement is taking root. One rainy afternoon, I departed from the cozy confines of Holmen and drove an hour north to the fishing village of Napp, home to Lofoten Seaweed Company, whose products supply Holmen’s kitchens—and line our bathroom shelves. Co-founded by Angelita Eriksen and Tamara Singer, this entirely women-led team dons their wetsuits and hand-harvests seven types of local seaweed, including sugar kelp and nori, from the strong tidal currents of straits like Nappstraumen, transforming them into prized seasonings, even toiletries. Singer showed us around the processing facility inside a traditional rorbu, where Eriksen once cut out cod tongues—"a common way for kids in this region to make a bit of pocket money," Singer explained—and where they now sort, store, and age seaweed for top kitchens like Noma and Geranium in Copenhagen.

They’re not the only ones. Across the islands, artisanal cheesemakers and farmers growing root vegetables and edible flowers are cultivating the region’s rich ecosystem. Back at Holmen, I spoke with local Bjørg-Elin Kärn, 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.”

Kärn also works to steer tourism toward local food and agriculture, rather than simply encouraging visitors to “hitch tents and climb mountains.” We talked about the growing toll of [the wrong kind of] mountain tourism—a sore point among residents. Holmen’s own mountaineering guide Audun prefers not to share the names or locations of ascents anymore. He fears that overexposure on social media will draw the wrong kind of attention, not least from underprepared climbers who underestimate both the difficulty of the routes and the whims of the weather. A few years ago, Lofoten banned wild camping, restricting campers to designated grounds.

It is clear that tourism has come knocking on Lofoten’s door. In 2025, inbound visitor growth in Northern Norway as a whole, and Lofoten in particular, outpaced the rest of the country, bringing with it a familiar tension: how to welcome visitors while 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 an anchor to how people travel, offers a way to bridge that gap, inviting visitors in while helping them understand the place they’ve come to experience. “Here, you can’t separate food production and landscape,” said Kärn. “Much of what visitors come to see, whether they know it or not, is shaped by food.”

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 into the fields isn’t a new concept, but here it’s more than a perk: it’s a way of life.

One morning, when the weather cleared just enough, we piled into inflatable boats that cut through choppy waters over to an uninhabited island. Once a thriving fishing village, the island was abandoned when motorboats became commonplace in the mid-20th century, and fishing communities no longer needed to live close to spawning grounds. Today, nature has reclaimed this idyllic spot—where Ingunn spent childhood summer days picking berries and swimming—with waterfalls and carpets of reindeer moss.

While others traced the shore on foot, I sat by the jetty and took it all in: the mountains disappearing into the sea, the pair of white-tailed eagles circling overhead, the tiny berries and subarctic flora underfoot. There’s something that happens to your brain when you’re constantly zooming out to take in the big picture, then narrowing your focus to the smallest details. I later learned there’s a name for it: attentional elasticity, a psychological framework that helps you anchor yourself in the present moment. It might be why I felt such a stillness, despite the fog of jet lag and the pull of the action around me.

The hotel crew built a campfire around which we ate fish soup, taking turns making pinnebrød by winding dough around birch sticks and cooking it over the flames. A flask of aquavit—holy water around these parts—made an appearance.

At Holmen, encounters with nature became part of the daily rhythm. We foraged not just for food but for art, too, gathering moss, mushrooms, and branches heavy with berries to create wild tablescapes with Becky Hindley, a British botanical artist. In a woodworking cabin into which the sunlight poked through optimistically, we spent hours with Lee John Phillips, a woodcarver from Wales, fashioning spoons out of local birch. It’s a particular kind of luxury that’s rooted in knowing how to build a life from what the land gives you.

As in any home, the kitchen here is the heart of the house, so we kept returning to it: to watch chefs pry open Icelandic queen scallops and slice basketfuls of chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms. Orlando was always within reach, sharing recipes and starting conversations about food systems. Unlike other modern culinary festivals, there was no peeking behind the curtain, because, in fact, there is no curtain. “This is my dream for a restaurant,” Orlando said on the night of his final presentation, as we savored grilled pollock with chard shishito butter and sipped a remarkable oat milk drink flavored with green cardamom, rose, and spiced apple. “To be able to have diners weave in and out and chat as I cook.”

As it happened, the clear blue skies we were hoping for never showed for the four days I was there. But the astonishing dishes served beside a crackling oven, the easy camaraderie around the dinner table, and the ever-present possibility of the Northern Lights left me more awake to the world than I’d felt in months.

Discovering Lofoten’s foodways

• Kitchen on the Edge of the World books up fast, so reserve your spot early. You can find the 2027 lineup here, which features a varied cast of chefs, including Toni Toivanen of Copenhagen restaurant Barr and Irish chef and photojournalist James Gabriel Martin. Events are centered around the equinoxes and solstices, and last four nights.
• Lofoten Seaweed's colorful shops in Napp and Henningsvær are a must-visit for anyone interested in the future of food systems. Seaweed is now globally recognized as a superfood that can help tackle food security and climate emissions, and co-founders Angelita and Tamara, who are often around, are great resources to understand what's at stake. There are also complimentary in-store tastings of hand-harvested Arctic seaweed products (including a tea made from wakame, licorice root, and lemongrass) as well as salts and sprinkles to take home.
• Lofoten Gardsysteri is a biodynamic, organic dairy farm that aims to make the best possible use of local resources and distinct flavors. With over 144 goats producing 350 liters of milk under their roof and a vegetable farm at the back (that is open to local schoolchildren for food education classes), expect to find the freshest offerings at the farm shop, where you can linger awhile and enjoy a cheese plate while warming up against sheepskin rugs. Whatever you do, leave with some Brunost, or brown cheese, a local specialty.
• Aalan Gård is a traditional farm renowned for its goat’s milk cheeses. In addition to cheese production, it features a herb garden, farm animals, and a small shop where visitors can explore and sample locally made products. A visit to Aalan Gård is also a great family excursion; note that farm experiences are by appointment only.
• Technically not in Lofoten, but well worth extending your trip for, Kvitnes Gard is a historic estate in Hadsel, Vesterålen, that operates as a 15-room farm hotel. It is also home to one of Norway's best restaurants, under the same name, and serves as a great example of regenerative farming in the region. Happily, Kvitnes chef Halvar Ellingsen will be joining Kitchen on The Edge in the fall of 2027 from September 30 to November 4—a collab worth bookmarking.