ILIMANAQ, GREENLAND

On a lonely point on the west coast of Greenland sits Ilimanaq, a village with 53 residents. From June to September, visitors fly in from the capital Nuuk to Ilulissat Airport and cross the UNESCO-protected Kangia Icefjord by boat to visit the town for its other-worldly beauty and to eat at KOKS, the most remote Michelin-starred restaurant in the world.

From far away to far, far away…

This past northern summer, KOKS (koks.fo), which translates as “flirt” in Faroese, relocated to Ilimanaq from its original home in a 280-year-old farmhouse on the Faroe Islands, a Danish archipelago between Norway and Iceland. For the next two seasons KOKS will be in the tiny village while its new Faroe Islands home is built.

Okay but lots of places are

remote. Not like KOKS. Ilimanaq is a UNESCO World Heritage site south of the Ilulissat Icefjord. Although people live in the village year round, KOKS is only accessible in the summer (travel is risky in winter). So the drawcard is the scenery?

That and chef Poul Andrias Ziska’s artistry. A proponent of the New Nordic Cuisine movement, which promotes seasonal Nordic produce, he makes the most of what seems like very little: foraged seaweed, moss, lichen and a bounty of seafood.

What’s on the menu? The 17-course menu includes a finedining take on mattak, the delicate Inuit dish of bowhead whale skin and blubber from Greenland’s annual community whale hunt quota, as well as ptarmigan (a gamey wild fowl) with blackcurrant salsa, plus musk ox, reindeer and foraged produce. “In the Faroe Islands, 90 per cent of the menu came from the ocean but in Greenland we’re cooking a lot more game,” says Ziska. “That said, there’s lots of wonderful seafood that we couldn’t get in the Faroe Islands – Greenlandic halibut and some beautiful shrimp.”