Come September, the weather in Iceland is cool enough that you wear a down coat and moisturize your lips constantly. But walk into the restaurant at Friðheimar, a farm one hour east of Reykjavík, and the first thing you'll notice is the air: Inside, it's warm, humid, almost subtropical—and this is on purpose. Friðheimar, a tomato farm with a restaurant inside a greenhouse, is nearly 20 degrees warmer than it is outside. Between leafy tomato stalks, bees buzz.
Farmers Helena and Knútur Rafn Ármann hatched the idea for the tomato-themed restaurant in 2012, after a visitor asked to peek into one of their four greenhouses. Friðheimar has a dual purpose for them: It provides guests with an up-close look at a working greenhouse farm, one that uses natural resources like geothermally heated water to create an anomaly—a Mediterranean environment just outside the Arctic circle.
It also provides a canny solution for any surplus produce that can’t go to market. Around 18 percent of Iceland’s tomatoes come from Friðheimar, which harvests 370 tons of fruit each year. But roughly 24 tons have surface imperfections like scratches, or other aesthetic defects in their size and shape. Instead of being thrown away, these tomatoes are sent to the kitchen to be pureed into pasta sauce, chutney, and even tomato ice cream.
The restaurant’s signature dish is tomato soup, served with a variety of freshly baked breads, in the daily lunch buffet for 1,900 Icelandic krona, or around $17. Although the menu is small—three mains, three desserts, and six specialty drinks—it displays chef Jón Sigfússon’s creativity with a single ingredient. (Yes, every single dish has tomatoes in it.) Even unripe green tomatoes are used: as a jam to accompany cheesecake, as part of a green tomato and apple pie, or in a tart mocktail with lime, honey, and ginger.
The fresh food—not so much farm-to-table as plant-to-plate—and the unique surroundings are prompting more and more diners to make the hour-long journey from Reykjavík. And for tourists visiting the popular landmarks collectively known as the Golden Circle, Friðheimar is becoming an unofficial stop, an attraction as unique to Iceland as the colossal Gullfoss waterfall. The numbers don't lie: Friðheimar saw 75,000 visitors in 2014; 104,000 in 2015; and thus far, 130,000 in 2016.
“It’s a challenge to grow tomatoes here, and we love that challenge,” says Knútur. “At the restaurant, the visitor has the chance to see the beauty of the harvest, and then, there is the beauty of eating the product next to where it’s growing.”