Local Food Festival: This weekend’s foodie destination

Local Food Festival is the largest food event outside of Reykjavik. It is a large-scale exhibition featuring a number of food related events and competitions, such as coffee and cocktail-making, salted-cod cooking, baking and more.

There is no entrance fee to the exhibition, as the aim is to promote and celebrate the bounty of food from North Iceland – which happens to be Iceland’s largest food production area. It is held in Akureyri on the first Saturday of October.

A number of local companies are participating in the exhibition, which takes place in the sports centre – everything from farmers, to restaurants and production companies.

A speciality this year is Frá haga í maga – From turf to the stomach. The show will begin with a whole carcass being first handled by a butcher, then handed on and on until it ends up as a dish prepared by a chef.

Alongside the festival, there will be a special Food & Fun pop-up going on in town, where many restaurants offer special menus, in the spirit of the Food & Fun Festival which takes place each year in Reykjavik.

As the name of the festival implies, all the food is local, which makes this a golden opportunity to get to know the food of North Iceland straight from the source and the people who make it.

One of many ways to prepare salted cod Photo: Iceland Monitor/Styrmir Kári