Á Næstu Grösum

I just found some scraps of paper with notes from our trip to Iceland when we were moving to Boston.  I wanted to note down this place with more permanence.  We just had a few days in Midwinter, based in Reykjavik, on an Icelandair stop-off with all our belongings...  So we knew it'd be cold and we wouldn't be able to travel much.  I looked up some stuff to do before we went, and one thing I found was this vegetarian restaurant.  As far as I could tell it was the only veggie restaurant in the city if not the country, and considering this is a country with cuisine known for dried fish, whale meat and no vegetables, I thought the whereabouts of a veggie restaurant might be valuable information for us.

When we arrived to our hotel, struggling through the snow with our massive suitcases, I realised we seemed to be just around the corner from Á Næstu Grösum.  It took us a while to find it though - it is tucked away upstairs above the street, with a subtle entrance up the stairs from a side street.  We found it after a thorough hunt on our second day, and it was so good we kept going back!

It was a counter service set-up, serving generous plates of your choices of salads and hot meals, with interesting dressings too.  There were specials every day of hot food and soup, and everything was different each day, making it easy to eat with great variety.  Everything I tried was tasty and interesting, and since you could choose as much or as little of everything it never got dull or bad.  There was help-yourself water and an unpretentious ambience.  The best thing of all was the help-yourself bread (robust and seedy), hummus, date spread and toasted coconut.  Seriously, I could have eaten just that stuff and been happy as could be.  I wasn't vegan then, but I'm pretty sure we tried a vegan dessert and it was pretty good.

We hardly ever go to places more than once when on holiday - this place was such a veggie haven, everywhere else we looked with just one or two un-fresh sounding veggie options seemed so unappealing next to what we knew was waiting right by our hotel...

www.anaestugrosum.is