Scan Magazine | Best Restaurant in Western Norway | XL Diner
The restaurant goes through 21 tonnes of klipfish every year.
Pinning bacalao on the culinary map In the very heart of the klipfish centre of Norway lies the longstanding bacalao restaurant XL Diner, with chefs whose veins are filled with the salted and dried cod and whose passion for bacalao has led them to put Norwegian klipfish on the international culinary map. By Line Elise Svanevik | Photos: Tommy Rasmussen
Going back to 1999, restaurant entrepreneur and chef Ivar Breivik opened the doors of XL Diner in Ålesund, Norway, as his experience of cooking bacalao is deeply ingrained in his background as a chef. Little did he know that it would become one of the biggest bacalao restau46 | Issue 100 | May 2017
hometown. “That’s why I wanted to make a good klipfish restaurant that was going to take good traditional Norwegian food and mix it with influences from Brazil, Spain and Italy,” explains Breivik, who has travelled the world in his quest for the best bacalao recipes.
rants in the world – now going through 21 tonnes of klipfish on an annual basis.
A versatile dish
The city of Ålesund is built around klipfish, and today a whopping 96 per cent of the klipfish exported worldwide comes from this particular place – Breivik’s
But bacalao is more than just the red dish it is known as to most Norwegians. “The word ‘bacalao’ just means ‘cod’ in Spanish, but somehow Norwegians have created their own definition of it as the