The tomato rules at Iceland’s Fridheimar, a fresh take on farm-to-table restaurants | Canada Voices

In the small village of Reykholt, Iceland, at the leading farm-to-table restaurant Fridheimar, tourists come from around the world for a $39 dish of unlimited tomato soup.

This restaurant, which is an ode to the humble tomato, doesn’t just serve them puréed. Rather, it wallows in them as dinner is served amongst tomato vines, inside the greenhouse where they grow. How do I love thee, beautiful fruit? Let me count the ways. What about a tomato sauce, with a side of pasta? Or a tomato cheesecake? Or a tomato pick-me-up cocktail, if you’re feeling wobbly? Or a tomato ice cream, washed down by a tomato beer?

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Since opening in 2013, the restaurant has led a tomato-centred tourism boom, now attracting 250,000 visitors a year to the south Iceland village of around 100 residents. It moves oodles and oodles of this red crown jewel, close to 40 per cent of Iceland’s total tomato supply, with up to two tonnes produced there a day. And guess what, they taste absolutely brilliant.

One visitor I meet, Michaela Gustaitis, who has come here from Saugatuck, Michigan, on honeymoon with her wife, is drinking the “Healthy Mary” (an Icelandic take on the classic Bloody Mary). “It’s green tomatoes, lime, honey and ginger. It’s super fresh,” she says.

Another visitor, Bhavin Panchal, discovered Fridheimar on YouTube before coming here with his family from Hertfordshire, England. “I’ve never seen such a menu because every dish or every drink, there’s something to do with tomatoes,” Panchal tells me, after trying a tomato latte. “It’s like an iced coffee. It’s got a tomato flavouring. That was amazing.”

What surprises me on my visit is not necessarily that tomato is in every dish on the menu, which is as much a marketing device as anything else. Instead, I’m intrigued how the simplicity of the menu (three appetizers, three mains and three desserts) highlights the complexity of this unassuming fruit. This is the work of Chef Jon Sigfusson, who grew up in Reykholt and then moved to the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik to raise his children, before returning home for a calmer way of life. He has been with the restaurant from the beginning.

In the 1970s, American agriculturalist and author Wendell Berry drew attention to the relationship between taste and the health of the ecosystem that food is grown in. This relationship is front and centre for Fridheimar’s founders, Knutur Rafn Armann and Helena Hermundardottir. It’s apparent once you sit at the table.

At first, you may notice there is no music in the restaurant. Instead, there’s the sound of dripping glacial runoff and the occasional clunk of the geothermal pipes pumping water at 95 C to heat the greenhouse.

There’s also the clatter of cutlery, din of voices and then, an occasional faint buzz: the hum of approximately 6,000 bumblebees that are used throughout the nine greenhouses as tomato pollinators.

Fridheimar uses zero artificial sprays, including pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers. However, organic food is not necessarily sweeter. Many conventional vegetables and fruits are specifically bred to increase their sweetness. But what is apparent – from either the piccolo cherry tomatoes, the deep red plums, or the yellow and purple heirlooms grown on-site – is the depth and subtlety of flavour that can be achieved without chemicals.

There are surprising soft notes of cucumber in the yellow heirloom and a hint of kidney bean to the plum. There are bright, sugary floral layers to the piccolo. The tomato has always defied easy categorization (is it vegetable or fruit, sharp or soft, sour or sweet?) and this restaurant emphasizes that ambiguity in an explosion of flavour.

We had the tomato beer, which was a little sharper than a regular pilsner, and the tomato soup, which was sweeter than expected, with notes of lemon and carrot (these ingredients were not in the soup, but radiated from the tomatoes themselves).

The tomato cheesecake, served in a flowerpot with an edible geranium on top, was intensely sweet and sour, like those childhood candies that promise to knock off your tastebuds. The dessert was a study of contrasts between sharp green tomato jam and creamy, sweet vanilla cream.

The heirloom and burrata dish was comprised of two types of heirloom tomatoes, fresh basil and Icelandic burrata, which was delicious but indistinguishable from the classic southern Italian burrata. What was distinctive throughout were the tomatoes. Some bright and sugary, others mellow and soft, or sharp and citrusy; each bite in contradiction with the other.

In the long-standing argument between which tastes better – organic or conventional – a debate that goes back to at least the 1940s, when the concept of “organic” began to take hold across North America, Fridheimar hits it out of the park.

In his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan puts forward several reasons as to why organics taste better, but one of his most likely explanations might be increased flavonoids, which give fruits or vegetables a distinctive flavour. Flavonoids are nature’s answer to pesticides: they build up inside the plant, including in its skin, and protect it from toxic fungi, bacteria and the like. A plant exposed to artificial pesticides knows that man has done nature’s work, meaning fewer flavonoids and less flavour.

Marcin Jurek, Fridheimar’s restaurant manager, believes several factors are responsible for enhanced flavour, but an important one is the quality of the water. Tomatoes consist of around 94 per cent water. “Iceland is a really good place because then we have clear glacier water,” he says.

The farm and restaurant irrigate the crops with Icelandic glacial runoff, which has higher levels of several minerals, including magnesium (which adds a subtle crispness to the flavour), bicarbonates (which add a softness) and silica (which is found in volcanic rock, and creates a silky feel). “For sure, that makes the tomatoes taste really good,” Jurek says.

However, there is a question of whether Fridheimar is a victim of its own success. It is already booked two or three months in advance in high season, although the wine bar next door, which offers a less tomato-focused menu, handles the excess. Fridheimar doesn’t advertise at all, Jurek says, because it doesn’t need to.

The founders initially looked at the restaurant as a nice side business, says Armann. “Little did we know how rapidly its success would surpass the greenhouse business, as the number of visitors continues to grow every single year.”