A Food Designer with a Passion for Raw Foods by Ágústa Rúnarsdóttir
If you ever intend to try your luck as a journalist, let me give you a piece of advice: to interview a restaurant owner at lunch time during the opening of a new location of her restaurant is a phenomenally bad idea. After showing up at Gló and watching a tiny hurricane of a woman run around for a few minutes, I made a judgement call and told her I would be back in the afternoon. Which, retrospectively, should have been my plan from the beginning. A few different businesses operate under the name of Gló in the Reykjavík area, two restaurants focusing on healthy fast food, as well as two more traditional restaurants, a juice bar and a market. The owner and master chef, Solla Eiríksdóttir, has been involved in vegetarian and raw food cuisine for over 30 years. My first question, when I finally got her to sit down, was simply: How did this start? “I became a vegetarian before I was twenty years old. I was sick with allergies and food intolerance and was forced to choose between going on medication or completely changing my diet. I chose the latter and became a vegetarian, a life change that soon turned into a passion for making good healthy food as well as spreading the gospel to othersl. Soon I started teaching vegetarian cooking and by 1994, I had my first restaurant. 16 years after my change, I found myself ready to try something new. That is when I gained interest in raw foods. I went to Puerto Rico in 1996 to study raw cooking. So I entered the world of raw rather early. “ According to Solla, people tend to connect “healthy” with “bad taste” in their minds. Her objective is to obliterate that connection by making raw food based on recipes and ideas that people already know and love. “My goal is to slowly but surely root out the prejudice and misconception that people have regarding raw food. In 25 years, the 24 | MyDestination - Reykjavik
option of having raw meals will have become as common and natural as the vegetarian alternative is today.” The road to reform is long and winding and Solla takes her role very seriously. “I am extremely passionate about this. Instead of turning my belief that raw food makes everything better just onto myself, I have spent the last 17 years inventing and developing recipes that turn what people already know into raw food. As a result, my restaurants offer pizza, enchiladas, sushi and lasagne, all according to the raw ideology. The idea is to get people to have a taste, to like it and to come back. “ But what exactly does the raw concept embody? According to Solla, it is a cooking method that entails heating the food to only 42-47°C. That way the enzymes in the food can be preserved in order to give the human body a chance to maintain its self-healing abilities. This applies to vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds and corn. But in order to get people on board, Solla adds a twist: “Our restaurants always offer six to nine types of salads, one raw dish, one cooked vegan or vegetarian dish and one chicken dish. We cook the chicken in a simple manner and then we add the raw sauces and good spices to get people used to the raw taste and texture. The purpose of this twist is to enable people who enjoy good raw and vegetarian food to come
here and eat with their friends or spouses who do not share their taste in food … yet” she says and laughs. Her endeavours have not gone unnoticed outside of Iceland. Solla has been voted “Favourite Raw Gourmet Chef” and “Favourite Raw Simple Chef” in the annual Best of Raw contest, which accepts nominations and votes through their website bestofrawfoods.com. This is indeed an exceptional honour for her and a priceless praise for Gló. Towards the end of our meeting, I asked this ridiculously busy woman if she never gets tired. She smiled and said: “Yes, but I have so much passion. The passion keeps me going. The days have been long in preparing the opening of the new restaurant, but I have been giddy as a little girl from excitement. I am so utterly convinced that Hippocrates was right when he said that we are what we eat. People are just people; they all have to eat. I want them to eat well and feel welcome.
Gló Laugavegur 20b, 101 Reykjavík Engjateigur 19, 105 Reykjavík Strandgata 34, 220 Hafnafjörður Tel: +354 553 1111 | www.glo.is Locally Informed, Globally Inspired