Icelandic food is not trying to impress you.
It is trying to feed you, and it has been doing so, in conditions of volcanic cold and North Atlantic isolation, for over a thousand years. The traditional food of Iceland is the product of a landscape that gave its people cold, clean water; free-roaming sheep; exceptional fish; and very little else. What grew from those constraints is a cuisine of genuine character: lamb so flavourful it requires no seasoning, fish so fresh it barely needs cooking, dairy so rich and clean that Iceland’s version of yoghurt became a global phenomenon.
This guide covers the essential, the everyday, the celebratory, and the adventurous traditional foods of Iceland.
Key Takeaways
- Icelandic cuisine is built on three pillars: lamb, fish, and dairy. Preservation traditions – smoking, salting, fermenting, drying – gave the cuisine much of its distinctive character.
- Icelandic lamb is considered among the finest in the world, raised wild and free-roaming on open highland pastures, and its flavour reflects that.
- Skyr, which is often described as yoghurt but technically a fresh cheese, has become Iceland’s most internationally recognised food product and is eaten at every meal.
- The traditional foods of Iceland span the genuinely approachable (kjötsúpa, plokkfiskur, pylsur) to the adventurous (hákarl, svið, harðfiskur).
- Most traditional Icelandic food is best eaten in a café or restaurant in Reykjavík or around the Ring Road; many dishes are also widely available in supermarkets.
The Staples
Kjötsúpa – Icelandic Lamb Soup
Kjötsúpa is the oldest and most constant dish in the Icelandic kitchen.
A simple broth of lamb with potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, and herbs, simmered slowly until everything melds into something warming and deeply satisfying, has been eaten in Iceland since the earliest Norse settlers arrived in the 9th century. The sheep they brought with them became the foundation of the Icelandic economy for a thousand years, and kjötsúpa is its most honest expression.
The lamb used in Icelandic kjötsúpa is almost always free-roaming highland sheep. Raised on wild grasses, herbs, and Arctic moss without any supplementary feed, Icelandic lamb has a distinctive, robust flavour that does not need much intervention. The soup is the purest version of that quality: meat, bones, water, root vegetables, and time.
It appears in homes, guesthouses, and rural restaurants across the country throughout the colder months, and it remains the most reliably excellent and comforting thing you can order in Iceland.
Key ingredients: Bone-in lamb or mutton, potatoes, carrots, turnips, leeks, oats (traditional thickener), salt.
Credit: Adamant Kitchen
Plokkfiskur – Icelandic Fish Stew
Plokkfiskur (or “plucked fish”) is Iceland’s most beloved everyday fish dish: a thick, creamy stew of poached white fish and potato, bound in a butter and milk sauce, seasoned simply with salt and pepper.
The dish originated as a practical solution to leftover boiled fish, which was flaked and combined with yesterday’s mashed potato to produce something more cohesive and warming than its components alone. What began as a frugal kitchen habit became a national comfort food. The fish stew that Icelanders return to across a lifetime.
Cod is the traditional fish, though haddock and pollock are equally common. The sauce is enriched with butter, onion, and milk, and the stew is served with dark rye bread and, often, a simple salad. At its best – when made with fresh Icelandic cod and good butter – plokkfiskur is one of the quietly extraordinary things about eating in Iceland.
Key ingredients: White fish (cod or haddock), potatoes, butter, onion, full-fat milk, salt, and white pepper.
Credit: Primal Wellness
Skyr
Skyr is Iceland’s most famous food product. It’s a thick, cultured dairy product that is technically a fresh cheese but behaves like yoghurt, with a clean, faintly sour flavour, a dense and creamy texture, and an exceptional protein content.
It has been made in Iceland for over a thousand years. The Vikings brought dairy traditions with them from Scandinavia, and skyr survived as a daily staple through centuries in which it was often the primary source of protein for Icelandic families through winter.
Today, skyr is eaten at every meal: at breakfast with berries and honey, as a snack at petrol stations and supermarkets, as a dessert with cream, and as an ingredient in cheesecakes and smoothies. Every Icelandic household has it in the refrigerator. International versions exist, but they are different things. The best skyr in Iceland comes from specific Icelandic dairies and has a freshness and thickness that the exported product rarely replicates.
It is available everywhere in Iceland, at every hour, and it is always worth eating.
Credit: HowStuffWorks
Rúgbrauð – Hot Spring Rye Bread
Rúgbrauð is Iceland’s traditional dark rye bread. It’s dense, slightly sweet from the molasses in the dough, and baked in one of two distinctive ways: in a pot suspended above a geothermal vent, or in a tin buried directly in the ground near a hot spring and left for 24 hours.
The geothermal baking method, which produces what is sometimes called hverabrauð, or “hot spring bread”, is one of the most specifically Icelandic cooking traditions in existence. The steam and consistent heat of the earth cook the bread slowly to a perfectly moist, dense, and faintly earthy result that no conventional oven replicates.
Rúgbrauð is served with cold butter and smoked lamb, with salted fish, with skyr, or simply eaten on its own as a snack. The version baked in Laugarvatn at the Fontana geothermal baths, where the ground above the hot spring is used directly, is the most visited example of the tradition, and the bread served there is genuinely excellent.
Key ingredients: Rye flour, all-purpose flour, brown sugar or molasses, buttermilk, baking powder, salt.
Credit: Hverabrauð – Gastro Obscura
Pylsur – The Icelandic Hot Dog
The Icelandic hot dog is not a fast food item, or rather, it is a fast food item that transcends the category through the quality of its ingredients.
The sausage is made from a mixture of Icelandic lamb, pork, and beef, giving it a flavour unlike the pure-pork or pure-beef hot dogs found elsewhere. The traditional order (ein með öllu, “one with everything”) specifies: crunchy deep-fried onions, raw white onion, ketchup, sweet brown mustard, and remoulade sauce.
The most famous purveyor is Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, a small kiosk in central Reykjavík that has been operating since 1937 and regularly appears on lists of the world’s best hot dog stands. Bill Clinton famously ordered one without the onion during a 2004 visit, a lapse in judgment that Icelanders have not forgotten.
Hot dogs are everywhere in Iceland. You’ll find it at petrol stations, at ferry ports, and outside supermarkets, and it is always worth ordering.
Credit: Explores Kitchen
Fish & the Sea
Harðfiskur – Dried Fish
Harðfiskur is Iceland’s oldest preserved food and one of the most immediately recognisable snacks you will encounter in any Icelandic supermarket or petrol station: thin strips of dried fish, usually cod, haddock, or catfish, with a pale, leathery texture and a concentrated, intensely savoury flavour.
The drying tradition dates back to the Norse settlement period, when wind-drying fish was the primary method of preservation through winter. The fish is split, cleaned, and hung on wooden drying racks exposed to cold Arctic air for several weeks until reduced to roughly a fifth of its original weight.
It is eaten as a snack and eaten straight, or torn into pieces and dipped in Icelandic butter until the butter melts into the dry surface, and the combination of cold cream and dried fish produces something entirely its own. Harðfiskur is high in protein, low in fat, and deeply polarising: visitors either find it immediately compelling or require multiple attempts to develop a taste for it. Icelanders eat it reflexively, without thinking.
Credit: Nordicstore.net
Humar – Icelandic Langoustine
Iceland’s langoustine, known as humar, though commonly translated as “lobster”, is one of the finest shellfish in the North Atlantic, and the area around Höfn in southeast Iceland is the country’s langoustine capital.
The cold, clean waters of the Atlantic produce exceptionally sweet and firm meat, and the local tradition of serving it simply – grilled in garlic butter, with bread to mop the pan – lets the ingredient make the case for itself entirely. The Langoustine Festival in Höfn each summer celebrates the catch with outdoor grills and a carnival atmosphere that reflects how seriously the town takes its most important product.
Beyond Höfn, humar appears on menus across Iceland in soups, pasta, and tasting menus. It is one of the most genuinely delicious things you can eat in Iceland, and its quality is consistently higher than comparable products available in most of Europe.
Credit: The Kitchen Witch
Þorskur – Icelandic Cod
Cod has sustained Iceland for over a thousand years.
The Icelandic fishing industry was built on cod; the Cod Wars of the 20th century were fought to protect Iceland’s right to its own fishing grounds; and the quality of the cod from Icelandic cold waters is the reason why Icelandic salt cod is exported worldwide.
In contemporary Icelandic cooking, fresh cod is served pan-fried, baked, in fish stew, and in soups. Salt cod is preserved in the traditional method that sustained the country through centuries of isolation and is also still produced and eaten. The specific flavour of fresh cod from the waters around Iceland has a sweetness and a clarity that distinguishes it immediately from farmed or warm-water equivalents.
Credit: Saveur
Lamb Dishes
Hangikjöt – Smoked Lamb
Hangikjöt is Iceland’s most ceremonial meat. It’s smoked lamb, traditionally hung in the rafters of a farm smokehouse (reykur) over a fire of dried sheep dung or birch wood, cured slowly over several days until it develops a deep amber colour and a flavour that is simultaneously smoky, sweet, and intensely savoury.
The sheep dung smoking, which sounds more challenging than it tastes, produces a flavour that has no real parallel in other smoked-meat traditions. The meat emerges mild but complex, with a sweetness that comes from the slow curing rather than any added ingredients.
Hangikjöt is the centrepiece of the Icelandic Christmas table, served hot with peas, white sauce, and potatoes, or cold in thin slices on flatbread. It is available year-round in supermarkets, and the sliced version of fresh Icelandic rye bread is one of the great simple sandwiches of the Nordic world.
Credit: Taste Atlas
Kjöt og Kartöflur – Lamb and Potatoes
The most everyday expression of Icelandic lamb is also its most honest: simply roasted or braised, served with boiled potatoes, root vegetables, and a reduction of the cooking juices.
Icelanders do not over-complicate their lamb. The quality of the meat is such that adding elaborate sauces or preparations would be a distraction. Roast leg of lamb with potatoes, carrots, and brown sauce is what a Sunday in Iceland has always tasted like, and it remains one of the most satisfying meals the country offers.
Credit: Olive & Mango
The Adventurous
Hákarl – Fermented Greenland Shark
Hákarl is Iceland’s most famous culinary challenge, and its most honest cultural test.
Greenland shark, which cannot be eaten fresh due to high concentrations of urea and trimethylamine oxide in its flesh, is made safe through a months-long fermentation and drying process. The shark is buried in gravel with weights pressing out the toxins, fermented for six to twelve weeks, then cut into strips and hung to dry for four to five months. The result is a pungent, ammoniac cube of cured shark meat with a flavour that most visitors describe with words not usually applied to food.
Icelanders eat it with a shot of Brennivín. It’s Iceland’s signature caraway-flavoured aquavit, nicknamed “Black Death”, which is the only honest accompaniment. It is considered a test of character, and first-timers are strongly encouraged not to smell it before eating it.
Hákarl is served at Þorrablót – the midwinter Norse festival celebrated in January and February – alongside other traditional preserved foods. It is available to try at Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur and at the Bjarnarhöfn Shark Museum on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula.
Credit: Hákarl – Wikipedia
Svið – Boiled Sheep’s Head
Svið is exactly what it sounds like: the singed and boiled head of a sheep, split in two, with the brain removed, but everything else, like the eye, the tongue, or the cheek meat, is present and edible.
It emerged from the same preservation logic as most Icelandic traditional food: nothing was wasted, and every part of the animal was used. The cheek meat and tongue are the most readily approachable parts, with a tender, mild flavour that belies the presentation. The eye is optional and widely skipped by visiting diners.
Svið is served at Þorrablót alongside hákarl and other traditional foods, and at a handful of Reykjavík restaurants that specialise in the older Icelandic culinary tradition.
Credit: Svið – Gastro Obscura
Bread, Pastry & the Kaffi Table
Skúffukaka – Icelandic Chocolate Cake
Iceland’s most beloved café cake is not complicated.
Skúffukaka is a sheet cake made from a simple chocolate batter baked in a tray (skúffa means “drawer”), topped with a thick layer of chocolate icing and scattered with coconut flakes. It is found in every Icelandic bakery and café, warm or cold, cut into thick squares and served with strong coffee. The combination of dense, moist chocolate cake and coconut is one of those things that tastes better in Iceland than any reproduction of the recipe elsewhere – partly because of the butter and dairy, partly because of the context.
Credit: Brambleberry Meadow
Kleina – Twisted Doughnuts
Kleina are Iceland’s traditional twisted pastries. It’s a simple fried dough cut into diamond shapes, twisted, and deep-fried in oil until they puff and turn golden. They are mildly spiced with cardamom and not particularly sweet, which makes them a natural accompaniment to coffee rather than a standalone dessert.
Kleina are found across Iceland in bakeries and supermarkets and are one of the oldest foods in the Icelandic baking tradition, with roots in the Nordic preserving-fat tradition of frying bread in animal fat. Modern Kleina use vegetable oil, but the shape, spice, and flavour remain exactly what they were centuries ago.
Credit: ICELAND FOOD CENTER
Conclusion
The traditional food of Iceland reflects the landscape that produced it – clean, straightforward, and built to sustain people through conditions that required ingenuity and respect for every ingredient available.
From the lamb soup that has warmed Icelanders through a thousand winters to the skyr that sat on every breakfast table for a millennium, from the smoked lamb at Christmas to the fermented shark that tests every visitor’s nerve, Icelandic food is one of the most honest and characterful culinary traditions in Europe.
To experience Iceland’s food culture alongside its extraordinary natural landscapes, explore our bespoke Iceland tours.
FAQ
What is the national dish of Iceland?
The national dish of Iceland is often considered Hákarl, though many locals also view lamb dishes as more commonly eaten traditional food. Icelandic cuisine focuses heavily on seafood, lamb, and preserved foods adapted to harsh climates.
What is Iceland’s famous food?
Iceland is famous for seafood, Icelandic lamb, skyr yoghurt, hot dogs, and Hákarl. Fresh fish dishes and geothermal-baked rye bread are also popular parts of Icelandic food culture.
Why is McDonald’s no longer in Iceland?
McDonald’s left Iceland in 2009 during the financial crisis. Import costs became too expensive, making it difficult to keep menu prices competitive compared to local fast-food restaurants.
Are Americans still welcome in Iceland?
Yes, Americans are widely welcomed in Iceland. Tourism is a major industry, and Iceland is generally considered safe, friendly, and easy for American travellers to visit, with strong English-speaking accessibility.
What is the main meal in Iceland?
The main meal in Iceland is usually dinner, often centred around fish, lamb, potatoes, and vegetables. Traditional Icelandic meals tend to be hearty and simple, reflecting the country’s cold climate and fishing heritage.
