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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

There’s a word for some ‘traditional’ dishes

Dan Webster

Every culture has dishes that offer a problematic appeal to the human palate. In the U.S., you might put Rocky Mountains oysters on the list. Or rattlesnake. Chef Andrew Zimmern has built a whole career out of eating such things as cow placenta, bull penis and salted tuna sperm.

Iceland, for its part, has built a whole tourist industry around serving a few such dishes. Atop the list would be hákarl, the raw, fermented shark (some would say) delicacy that famously made Gordon Ramsey vomit. You can find it on the menu of virtually any Icelandic restaurant that bills itself as an outlet for traditional Icelandic fare.

So … we stopped into one of those kinds of restaurants earlier today during our stay in Reykjavik, called Prir Frakkar (which Eyewitness Travel guide translates as Three Overcoats). And there it was, hákarl. And I debated for five seconds before deciding … no freaking way. Likewise, we passed on horse tenderloin, whale steak and panfried guillemot (if we can't recognize it, we tend to avoid it). But we did opt for another local dish, which was identified as "reyktur Lundi með sinnepssósu," or smoked puffin breast with mustard sauce.

I mean, a puffin is a bird (as, we later discovered, is a guillemot). How bad can a bird taste? That's a photo of the dish up above there as it arrived at our table.

Well, some people are adventurous. Others have a taste for the exotic. My wife ordered "Heilsteikt Rauðsprettuflök með rækjum 'gratin,' ” which is panfried fillet of plaice with shrimp “gratin,“ without even knowing that plaice is a white flatfish. And even though the sauce made the whole thing a little rich, she did a good job of eating over half.

I ate the other half, along with a bowl of creamy mushroom soup and several pieces of bread. Why? To get the taste of smoked puffin out of my mouth, actually. That stuff tastes like worm sushi.

So glad I passed on the shark.