Restaurants in Northern Norway
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Flyt
Build your own burger at this friendly restaurant and bar, picking the size of your meat, fish or veggie filling and selecting its extras and trimmings. With an outdoor activities theme, its beer’s ice-cold and the music’s heavy metal and rock. The intimate upstairs cocktail bar fills to capacity after midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
reviewed
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Havfruen
This elegant riverside restaurant specialises in the freshest of fish. The quality, reflected in the prices, is excellent, as are the accompanying wines. The short menu, from which you select between three and eight courses, changes regularly according to what’s hauled from the seas.
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Biffhuset
On two floors, wood-panelled and low-beamed, the Beef House is a seriously meaty place, strictly for ardent carnivores. Just tick/check your menu card, indicating size, cut and accompanying sauce, hand it to the server and sit back.
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Sushi Bar
The name says it all; the house speciality is sushi in multifarious forms. To savour the flavours, go for the 16-item sushi moriawase selection (Nkr198). It also does takeaway.
reviewed
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Emma’s Drømekjøkken
Upstairs from Kaffe Lars, this stylish and highly regarded place pulls in discriminating diners with its imaginative cuisine. Advance booking is essential.
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Gammen
It’s very much reindeer or reindeer, with a token trout dish, at this rustic complex of four large interconnected Sami huts run by the Rica Hotel. Although it may be busy with bus tour groups, it’s an atmospheric place to sample traditional Sami dishes from reindeer stew to fillet of reindeer or simply to drop in for a coffee or beer. And hey, although cigarettes are banned from all Norwegian eateries, tenacious puffers may derive more than cold comfort from this dark, smoky environment.
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Hamnøy Mat Og Vinbu
Hamnøy Mat og Vinbu is a welcoming restaurant run by three generations of the same family (the teenage boys are coopted for washing-up duties). It’s well regarded for local specialities, including whale, bacalao and cod tongues. Grandmother takes care of the traditional dishes – just try her fish cakes – while her son is the main chef. Its fish is of the freshest catch, bought daily from the harbour barely 100m away.
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Circa
Circa (Approximately) and its upstairs neighbour Presis (Precisely), under the same ownership, complement each other. Circa, downstairs, cavernous, both bar and light-meal venue, has free wi-fi. It serves tasty pastas, salads and sandwiches (Nkr90 to Nkr100) until 4pm. Thereafter, its cool jazz and electronic music attracts a 25- to 35-year-old crowd. There’s occasional live music plus, at weekends, a live DJ. Wednesday, wine night, is normally packed.
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Maren Anna
Maren Anna is at once a pub, restaurant and café. Serving its mainstay of fish, portions are generous and hyperfresh (our coley had been hauled out of the sea by the chef herself barely two hours earlier). For a table with views over the fishing boats below and what’s claimed, tongue in cheek, to be Norway’s smallest beach, reserve ahead. The menu’s only in Norwegian but the staff readily translate.
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Aunegården
You can almost lose yourself in this wonderful café-cum-restaurant that’s all intimate crannies and cubby holes. In a 19th-century building that functioned as a butcher’s shop until 1996, it’s rich in character and serves excellent salads (from Nkr117), sandwiches (from Nkr75) and mains. If you don’t fancy a full meal, drop by just to enjoy a coffee and one of its melt-in-the-mouth cakes.
reviewed
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Dromedar, Nørdre gate
Dromedar, Nørdre gate, This longstanding local self-service favourite serves light dishes and very good coffee indeed, in all sizes, squeezes and strengths. Inside is cramped so, if the weather permits, relax on the exterior terrace bordering the cobbled street. There's a second branch (%73 50 25 02; Nedre Bakklandet 3), similar in style, also with a street-side terrace, that serves equally aromatic coffee.
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Dromedar
This longstanding local self-service favourite serves light dishes and very good coffee indeed, in all sizes, squeezes and strengths. Inside is cramped so, if the weather permits, relax on the exterior terrace bordering the cobbled street. There’s a second branch at Nødre gate 2, similar in style, also with a street-side terrace, that serves equally aromatic coffee.
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Vertshuset Tavern
Once in the heart of Trondheim, this historic (1739) tavern was lifted and transported, every last plank of it, to the Sverresborg Trøndelag Folk Museum. Tuck into its rotating specials of traditional Norwegian fare or just peck at waffles with coffee in one of its 16 tiny rooms, each low-beamed, with sloping floors, candlesticks, cast iron stoves and lacy tablecloths.
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Bryggerikaia
Not long on the Bodø drinking and dining scene, Bryggerikaia is already a firm favourite. You can dine well, snack, enjoy its lunch buffet (Nkr125) or quaff one of its beers, brewed on the premises. Enjoy your choice in its large pub-décor interior, on the street-side terrace or, best of all should you find a seat spare, on the veranda overlooking the harbour.
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Børsen
This Arctic Menu restaurant brims with character. A former fish house, it was called the ‘stock exchange’ after the harbour-front bench outside, where the older men of the town would ruminate endlessly over the state of the world. In its dining room, with its cracked and bowed flooring, you’ll still catch the scent of tar and cod-liver oil.
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Driv
This student-run converted warehouse serves meaty burgers, great salads (Nkr95), focaccias with a variety of fillings (Nkr85) and a vegetarian pasta (Nkr95). It organises musical and cultural events (notably the self-styled Fucking North Pole Festival) and sometimes has a disco. In winter you can steep yourself in good company within its open-air hot tub.
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Bacalao
With its upbeat interior, Bacalao offers leafy, innovative salads (Nkr110 to Nkr130), sandwiches and some equally creative pasta dishes; the hot rekepasta (hot shrimp pasta; Nkr150) will set your taste buds tingling. It also expresses what must be about the best coffee anywhere in Norway, a country that so often settles for watery black brews.
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Kjøkkenet
Kjøkennet, originally a shack for salting fish and nowadays furnished like an old-time kitchen, is a wonderfully cosy place to dine. The cuisine is just as traditional and the recommended menu choice is of course fish – try the kitchen’s signature dish, boknafisk (Nkr270), cured cod with salted fat and vegetables.
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Gallionen
The restaurant of Clarion Collection Hotel Arcticus is an Arctic Menu establishment that also does a tempting daily special (around Nkr150). Fish dishes are its forte, particularly the grilled fillet of wolf-fish (Nkr260). Views, whether through the dining room’s picture windows or from the quayside deck, will have you gasping.
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Ramp
Well off the tourist route and patronised by in-the-know locals, friendly, alternative Ramp, both bar and restaurant, gets its raw materials, organic where possible, from local sources (its veg man, for example, calls by each morning). It’s renowned for its juicy house burgers (Nkr100) filled with lamb, beef, fish or chickpeas.
reviewed
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Baklandet Skydsstasjon
Within what began life as an 18th-century coaching inn are several cosy rooms with poky angles and listing floors. It’s a hyperfriendly place where you can tuck into tasty mains, such as its renowned bacalao (cod stew or fish soup) for Nkr145, while always leaving a cranny for a gooey homemade cake (around Nkr50).
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Ørens Kro
This characterful bar and restaurant was once a boat repair workshop. Tools of its former trade are arranged around the walls while part of the large external terrace straddles a former slipway, its rusting pulleys and hawsers still taut below. The menu’s Norwegian and mainly fish, as befits its long waterside history.
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Pizzakjeller’n
The Radisson SAS Hotel’s popular informal basement eatery is something of a misnomer. Yes, it serves up a long list of pizzas and other snacky and more substantial items, but for something more original, go for the daily special (Nkr110), which indeed changes daily, or its weekly equivalent (Nkr170).
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Da Carlo
This pleasant, frondy place is popular with Bodø’s younger movers and shakers, both as bar and restaurant, where you can down the usual snacks, pizza and burger fare. It partly occupies the sealed bridge above the shopping mall’s main alley so you can snoop upon the shoppers below.
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Hoelstuen
This trim place rivals the 4 Roser for the title of best restaurant in a town of limited eating opportunities. Its cuisine has flair. Dig your fork, for example, into the fillet of stag with chestnuts and thyme-flavoured glaze. It also does a particularly rich and creamy fish soup (Nkr100).
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