Hæ. We don’t know what we are doing. However, we want to know what we are doing. Okay, that’s out of the way.
Hæ, we are Sindri and Trausti. Each of us wrote every other word. You won’t know whose words you’re reading. We are friends, both interested in videography and cooking. We both felt an urge to combine our interests and instead of suppressing it until it’s too late and regret it at an old age, we decided to do something about it. There came the idea of making a cooking show on the innernette. After years of market research; customer surveys, focus groups, SWOT and analysis of competition we found a gap in the market: Icelandic cooking show for English speaking people! ta-da! Sure, no one has uttered the words “I wish there was an Icelandic cooking show in English” but remember some of your innermost wants and desires are never expressed.
We’re thirty-something Icelanders who grew up in north Iceland. Today one of us lives in London and the other one in Reykjavík, and vice-versa.
The name?
In the sixties, we, the people of Iceland, blinded with Icelanders ambition and inferiority complex towards Norwegians, who were selling their stinky fish to Britain, came up with the brilliant new idea of opening a restaurant in London, humbly offering the best ingredients in the world. The aim was for peckish Londoners to demand Icelandic food at their butchers and mongers.
The restaurant would be called Iceland Food Centre, offering cod and lamb of the highest quality, thus totally differentiating it from Norway, who opened Norway Food Centre across the street a few years before, offering cod and lamb of the highest quality. See, the first name isn’t even the same. Totally, totally different.
At the height of its existence, the government-backed restaurant was selling basketload of “chicken in a basket”, an American-diner-style fried chicken, for the simple reason that it was popular in one of the few restaurants in Iceland and perhaps, just perhaps, it might make a profit for the establishment. I mean, why wouldn’t you want American food at an Icelandic restaurant? Please tell us by writing in.
Cut a long story short the restaurant was a costly mistake experiment.
So here we are today, trying to revive the good ol’ brand of Iceland Food Centre, representing the best ingredients… (gotta stay humble here) representing Icelandic food to the world, which is totally totally different to Norwegian food. We promise. Instead of opening a restaurant we’ll have a go on the internet. The Iceland Food Centre here on the internet has no connection (get it?) to the restaurant, its people or the government. Just two lads having fun while having fun.