Chef Poul Andrias Ziska is leading a culinary revolution in
the Faroe Islands.

What was your childhood experience of food at home? Did you
learn to forage or to cook with local ingredients?

It depends a lot on where you are from. If you are from the
capital then food is influenced by modern industries. You can have
everything you want from all over the world because it is in the
supermarkets. However, if you are living in smaller villages then
food is much more locally sourced, people eat more traditional
foods and are more self-sufficient. For me it has been a little bit
of both. My grandfather had his own farm – we slaughtered our own
sheep, ate our own geese at Christmas and my mother used to forage
sorrel and make soup with it. I have been close to the traditional
ways of life in the Faroe Islands, but I have also experienced
living like people in the capital Tórshavn, and being exposed to
all the temptations that cities have to offer.

This seems to be part of the struggle of maintaining the old,
yet knowing the new, and finding ways to combine the two. KOKS is
located in the capital city of the Faroe Islands, you attract many
people from all over the world who you want to share the Faroese
food culture with, yet you have to find a modern way to be able to
do so.

Exactly. Our traditional food culture is such a big part of our
identity. I am not afraid that it is going to die, but it is
getting less and less present in the capital. It is amazing to be
able to have a restaurant like this, where we are proud of our
traditional foods and share this. I hope that it will provoke local
people to start appreciating it for what it is – not only the
people in the villages, but also the people in the city.

The Faroe Islands are incredibly beautiful, but also have a
climate that can be complicated to work with – has this been
limiting?

The climate is a big part of the food culture. We dry and
ferment without salt. We have a very cold summer and a warm winter,
which gives us more or less fridge temperatures outside all year
round and causes the air to have specific bacteria. We have little
houses outside with wooden bars and gaps in between that make for
an unregulated, natural fermenting process. It is all about the
climate, which makes the food what it is – both for the
preservation methods that we have used for centuries and in terms
of the vegetables. The season is later than usual, and we are very
limited when it comes to growing vegetables, but the few that we do
have here are very flavoursome and concentrated.

Foraging seems to be at the heart of your restaurant. What
would you say are the basic rules to becoming a good forager?

Why are you particularly drawn to working with ingredients from
the ocean?

I thought the Faroe Islands in general lacked produce from the
ocean. About 94 per cent of the Faroes is water, and we have been
living off the sea for centuries, yet this was not known or shared
anywhere. Our menu is almost entirely based on produce from the
ocean, and I think that this is something that makes KOKS unique.
There are very few places in the world where you get seafood as
fresh as here. We get our langoustines, sea urchins and clams
delivered to the restaurant only a couple of hours before we open.
So when you eat them the fish has been living in its natural
environment only a few hours earlier.

Do you want to be provocative with your dishes, and if so, how
does this align with the idea of letting people experience the
Faroese food culture?

A menu should be a combination of surprising, provoking and
pleasing. I want people to think about what they experience, and
there needs to be a balance between safe and challenging. To tell
people about our food culture by serving them dishes, we need to
present them things that they know in order to make them realise
that there are things that they don’t know – the modern and
traditional that we were talking about earlier. It also feels as
though provoking people can sometimes be necessary to make them
understand the intense wilderness that these islands have.