Trondheim’s Culinary Renaissance: The Heart of Sustainable Dining
France-based writer Nicola Williams is no stranger to excellent cuisine. So it was with a curious appetite that she traveled to Norway’s unlikely food capital to meet some of the women making it happen.
Urban hotels with their own 4000-tree fruit orchards. Restaurants that buy a single cow from a local farmer to hang, butcher, and serve in minute portions that skillfully incorporate every nose-to-tail morsel. Food alchemists who substitute imported flavors with wild flowers, berries, mushrooms, and insects (wood ants instead of lemons!) foraged in their city’s forested backyard.
Unearthing New Tastes
“Taste this!” Elin Østland tells me earnestly, plucking a lime-green shoot from a blackcurrant sapling and handing it to me. The flavor is eye-wateringly intense and punchy, lingering well after we’ve walked the length of the heated greenhouse at biodynamic farm Skjølberg Søndre, where 80-odd varieties of vegetables, fruit, herbs, and a rainbow of delicate edible flowers grow from seed.
This small-scale farmer is the gardener for produce-driven chef Heidi Bjerkan, known for her work in Trondheim. Accordingly, Østland can scold the Michelin-starred celebrity should she forget to water the restaurant’s own sizable kitchen garden and share new, experimental raw tastes that might find their way onto the renowned zero-waste tasting menu.
Thrilling guided cellar tours of the farm – an hour’s drive south of Trondheim, it’s been in the family of Carl Erik, Østland’s husband, since 1860 – waltz visiting foodies through the local tradition of storing and fermenting vegetables and conserving meat before consuming every part. As we sit down to a Saturday lunch, I eye several Mangalitsa pork legs – salted for two months, air-dried for three – dangling from the wood-beamed ceiling. Carl Erik shares his ancient family recipe for smoked pig’s heart.
Ost-most: Reinventing Food and Drink Pairings
Hopping between farms that display a “Host & Producer” sign is the best way to navigate the Golden Road, a food-themed driving itinerary from Trondheim that leads through apple orchards, cider distilleries, artisan cheese dairies, and farmsteads selling Aquavit infused with local caraway. At the restaurant of Inderøy’s hilltop Øyna Hotel, overlooking the Trondheim fjord and snow-capped mountains beyond, we swirl and sniff apple juice in tall-stemmed, wide-bottomed tasting glasses.
“This one lingers on the palate like honey. We can taste gooseberry, lemon, even pineapple – it’s super sweet,” the sommelier explains, directing us to the local blue cheese paired by head chef Maren Myrvold. In their farm shop, they sell organic, cold-pressed juices in slim glass Bordeaux bottles, complete with a château-styled label indicating the varietal. Road-trippers can stop, talk apples, and taste or head up to the hotel-restaurant for ost-most, the local alternative to cheese and wine.
Shaking Up the Drinks Scene
In Trondheim, Norway’s only master tea blender is working on a cold-brew pairing menu for Sanoi, the new fusion bistro of chef Jonas Naavik. Hanne Charlotte Heggberget’s tea atelier and boutique graces a backstreet in Bakklandet, the oldest part of Trondheim, where locals fish for wild salmon between June and August.
“Customers always ask me: what do you recommend? But this is a sensory trip that is individual. I guide them through a journey of aromas and tastes,” explains Heggberget, passing me a tin of marigold- and rosebay willow-laced Black Viking tea to smell. Its notes are fruity and malty.
My final stop is Britannia Bar, inside the landmark Trondheim hotel where English aristocrats and afternoon-tea lovers hobnobbed in the 19th century. Here, the feminine inspiration for signature cocktails draws from Trondheim’s bold history, including daring pioneers who revolutionized the local food and drink scene.
How to Make It Happen
Norwegian operates direct flights up to five times weekly from London Gatwick and Manchester to Trondheim. Female-led B-corp Up Norway connects travelers with local producers, creatives, and green thinkers on tailor-made, regenerative journeys throughout Norway.
