Matur og Drykkur

Old Iceland at the Harbour's Edge

The Grandagarður waterfront in Reykjavík operates on a different register from the downtown hotel strip. Fishing infrastructure still defines the streetscape here: cold-storage buildings, the Saga Museum a short walk east, the smell of salt water cutting through even on still evenings. Matur og Drykkur occupies a converted fish factory at number 2, and that industrial origin shapes everything about the dining room's physical character — high ceilings, raw materials, a space that makes no effort to look like anywhere else. Before a fork hits a plate, the address alone positions the restaurant within a specific strand of Icelandic culinary thinking: one rooted in the sea, the cold, and the resourcefulness those conditions historically demanded.

A Cuisine That Predates Tourism

Icelandic food culture spent centuries solving problems that most continental cuisines never faced. An island with limited arable land, long winters, and near-total dependence on fishing and sheep farming developed preservation techniques not as artisanal affectation but as survival infrastructure. Skyr, hákarl, harðfiskur, hangikjöt: these are not novelty items on a themed menu but the actual archive of how people on this island ate for generations. The broader movement among Reykjavík's serious restaurants in the 2010s and 2020s has been to treat that archive as source material rather than something to be replaced by imported technique.

Matur og Drykkur sits at one end of that movement, specifically the end concerned with fidelity to historical recipes rather than their deconstruction. Where DILL works in the New Nordic register — ingredients local, technique internationally inflected, and ÓX operates as a high-control omakase counter with Icelandic produce, Matur og Drykkur is making a different argument: that the recipes themselves, properly executed, are the point. Chef Gísli Matthías Auðunsson's kitchen draws on old Icelandic cookbooks and the kind of preparation methods that ran through Icelandic households before refrigeration arrived. That framing gives the restaurant its particular identity in a city where the competitive pressure runs toward Scandinavian modernism.

Where It Sits in Reykjavík's Dining Tier

Reykjavík's premium restaurant tier is smaller than its international reputation might suggest. The city has a concentrated cluster of €€€€ dinner destinations, including Hosiló and Brút, and a longer list of mid-range options where strong produce does most of the work. Matur og Drykkur prices at the €€€€ level, aligning it with this upper cluster rather than with casual harbour dining. Within that tier, its positioning is distinct: the Michelin Guide has awarded it a Plate designation for both 2024 and 2025, recognising kitchen quality without the star designation that would place it alongside the city's most technically ambitious operations. La Liste scored it at 77.5 points in 2025 and 76 points in 2026, a modest directional dip but still a placement that keeps it inside the list's acknowledged tier. Opinionated About Dining tracked it in the casual European category in 2024, ranking it at 384 in Europe, a category designation that speaks to the restaurant's atmosphere and format more than its ambition, which runs considerably higher than the word casual implies.

For context, OTO, another Reykjavík modern option, operates at the €€€ level, making Matur og Drykkur a step up in spend. The comparison worth holding in mind is less about price and more about what the money is buying: at Matur og Drykkur, it is buying access to a culinary tradition that most visitors have no reference point for, executed in a space that gives that tradition physical credibility. That is a different proposition from the international fine-dining format that places like Le Bernardin in New York City, Alain Ducasse at Louis XV in Monte Carlo, or Alléno Paris au Pavillon Ledoyen represent.

The Format and What It Produces

Service runs Wednesday through Sunday, 6 to 11 pm, with Monday and Tuesday closed. There is no lunch offering, which concentrates the restaurant's entire operation into the evening hours and gives dinner the weight it deserves given the food's cultural register.

The menu structure follows the logic of the source material: dishes built on Icelandic staples, prepared with methods that prioritise the preservation-and-fermentation tradition over the modernist kitchen's toolkit. That means lamb prepared in ways that reflect the herd's central role in Icelandic food history, fish handled with the directness that comes from proximity to the catch, and dairy used in the ways Icelandic households historically relied on it. The old harbour location is not decorative in this context. It is argument by geography.

Visitors who have been to 3 Frakkar, Reykjavík's long-running seafood institution in the 101 district, will find a different register here: less neighbourhood-restaurant warmth, more deliberate engagement with the culinary archive. Those who have eaten at Moss in Grindavík, which pairs Icelandic produce with geothermal drama, will find Matur og Drykkur more textually grounded, less about spectacle, more about what the ingredients actually mean in context. For readers planning a broader Iceland itinerary that includes Grindavík, the two restaurants occupy genuinely different positions rather than competing for the same meal slot.

Internationally, the restaurant fits within a pattern visible in cities from San Francisco to Seoul: serious kitchens applying research-led fidelity to pre-modern culinary traditions, rather than mining those traditions for aesthetic inspiration. Lazy Bear in San Francisco and Atomix in New York City operate within their own cultural archives in broadly comparable ways, though the archives themselves are very different in character. Emeril's in New Orleans and 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong represent the more internationally inflected end of the spectrum, anchored in a place but not making tradition-recovery the central argument.

Planning Your Visit

Matur og Drykkur is at Grandagarður 2, in the 101 Reykjavík postcode, within walking distance of the Old Harbour area's other food and drink options. Given the price point and the Wednesday-to-Sunday evening format, advance booking is advisable, particularly for Thursday and Friday slots during the peak summer season when the city's visitor numbers are at their highest. The restaurant is not an obvious fit for families with young children, given the format and spend, a point addressed directly in the FAQ below. For those building a full Reykjavík eating itinerary, the EP Club's guides to the city's restaurants, bars, hotels, wineries, and experiences map the broader scene.