A Restaurant High in the Arctic Circle

©iStock/kjekol

When a restaurant is high in the Arctic Circle, and most ingredients have to come in on a boat or a plane, you have to get pretty creative with your fine dining. That means seal, whale, reindeer – and plankton?

Many of the dishes at Huset – established October, 1951 – are served on stones collected from the nearby hills, which are thick with fossils.

Longyearbyen, on whose outskirts Huset sits, is the northernmost permanent settlement of more than 1,000 people in the world, a mere 800 miles (1,288 km) from the North Pole.

Up here, where there is night for four months of the year, not much grows. But there is more living here than you might think.