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Sea stacks rise off of one of the 18 islands in the Faroes 2.[#image: /photos/57d829e56520aa8f7013c982]||||||

The village of Bøur 3.[#image: /photos/57d829e71807135a7746d7ea]||||||

Faroese culinary evangelist Leif Sørensen 4.[#image: /photos/57d829e86520aa8f7013c983]||||||

Sea urchin, one of the Faroes’ most coveted exports (along with salmon and langoustines) 5.[#image: /photos/57d829ecc455f790358b981f]||||||

Just-cooked langoustine with a a garnish of black salt made by drying seaweed 6.[#image: /photos/57d829e9304c2be47da7706d]||||||

Lamb cures in the sea air 7.[#image: /photos/57d829eac455f790358b981d]||||||

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ené Redzepi is a busy man. So if the chef of Noma , the restaurant that put Scandinavia at the center of the chef-world map, finds time to pick up the phone while out foraging for some tasty bits of the Danish countryside, it’s because he’s got something he really wants to say. And if he then tells you about an obscure quasi-Danish island nation with the best seafood he’s ever had and a chef there he calls “a f%^&ing hero,” you start booking your tickets.

That’s how I found myself in the Faroe Islands, 18 gnarled fingers of land halfway between Iceland and Norway, the exact middle of nowhere. Go in the 50-degree summer and the earth will be green—shockingly psychedelic green—dotted everywhere with free-roaming sheep and streaked with streams that cut across the rock like slow lightning. The land is all sudden moves, cliffs and slopes—thousand-foot Legos dropped askew into the sea.

Standing on a cliff in Gásadalur (population: however many people can fit into 13 houses), I saw an island like a castle built on water. I saw buildings painted otherworldly black. I saw into the eyes of birds grabbing weaker birds out of midair. “This is not Middle Earth, this is not Middle Earth,” I kept telling myself. But what else could explain my surroundings, and biting into a turnip that tasted, I swear, like a pear? It was crunchy and juicy and sweet and, no, really, the yellow one next to it tasted like a cantaloupe, and what was going on here?

“I didn’t know how different our turnips were until I went to Denmark and ate theirs,” said Faroe-based chef Leif Sørensen . “They grow to be sweet because our soil is so cold.” When I met him last summer, Sørensen was cooking at Koks restaurant at the Hotel Føroyar . He’s the man Redzepi said was “helping the Faroese find their cooking voice.” It’s a serious way to describe a serious man. In photos, Sørensen, 48, has the expressionless face of a person who protects himself with silence. And while he turns out to be kind and wry, it doesn’t take long to see why he could come across as grim: Sørensen is trying to make a cuisine out of just what can be found on these islands. If this sounds like a story you’ve heard before, it’s not. Because you’ve never heard the story told about a place where there are incredible ingredients but so unbelievably few of them, where most people don’t get why you’d want to gussy up their fermented lamb, and the rest don’t get why you wouldn’t want the shrink-wrapped bell peppers that are flown in. Still, for Leif Sørensen, a country that grows no fruit is ripe for a proud new cuisine. He wanted to show me how promising that was—and I wanted to see.

As fantastic and otherworldly as they seem, the Faroe Islands can be a tough form of real life. They’re stunning—tourists come for the birds and the ends-of-the-earth vibe—but the place is so desolate, you wonder how the 50,000 people who actually live here manage to do it. Winters are long in the Faroes, storms can appear in an instant, and the wind has been known to blow waterfalls backward. For all their lush summer green, the Faroes do not give up food easily. The soil that makes such astounding turnips has never really yielded much else.

Faroe Islands: The Last Place on Earth

In the 1600s, a Danish priest moved there. “Countries are praised for their great wealth, several metals, minerals, precious stones, pearls, wine, and grain,” he wrote, “but all this God denied the Faroese.” Pretty harsh, especially coming from a man of God, but until a generation or two ago, most people here were fishermen and shepherds, subsisting on a diet of fish, traditional air-cured and fermented lamb called skerpikjøt , and potatoes. It’s a cuisine meant for warding off hunger, not for gastronomic art, and it’s the basis for how many on the islands still live today.

And yet, Koks was a 2013 finalist for Restaurant of the Year (alongside Noma) in the Danish Dining Guide, a feat even more impressive when you consider the other difficulties of being a chef in such a remote place: When I visited, Sørensen’s sous-chef, Poul Andrias Ziska , was, it turned out, just helping his former mentor while home on vacation from his cooking job in Copenhagen. For years, Sørensen struggled to serve the amazing fish that surround him because Faroese seafood dealers are geared toward export; he had to send his own dad out on a boat. And he didn’t have a source for local shellfish until a few years ago, when an island captain noticed some mussel shells below him, reached down to pick them up, and a tiny Faroese shellfish industry was born.

At the time, it wasn’t clear to me whether Sørensen was just trying to make delicious Faroese cuisine, or if he was trying to change the culture of food in his homeland. “His battle is insane,” said Redzepi, who met Sørensen when he brought a sampling of Faroese food to the great chef. “I think he’s driven by wanting to leave his place better than when he found it.” Sørensen simply says he is trying “to tell a Faroese story.”

He offered to introduce me to some of the people who help him tell that story. We went to his fish dealer, Leif Høj , who poured us coffee, as he does all his fishermen as he tries to convince them to catch for quality, not quantity. I asked how that was going. “It takes a lot of coffee,” Høj said. After Sørensen persuaded him to sell to Koks, Høj also started selling to two other local restaurants.

We met Gunnar Marni Simonsen , who looks like a young, beardless Santa Claus. With barely a hello, he offered us freshly dispatched langoustines to taste. It was only after I remarked how they were sweet—like cabbage is sweet—that he started to talk. He was once selling fish to some European chefs when they scoffed that Faroese product wasn’t very good. Angry, proud, he decided to show them. He developed a way to harvest and ship his langoustines live—kicking wildly, clacking in individual “apartments”—and sent the chefs a taste. When the men came back desperate to buy them, he knew things had changed. Chefs from as far away as Las Vegas now vie for his respect, and he’s become a sort of Don Langostino, driven by Faroese pride.

That night, along with a couple of tables of tasting-menu tourists, I sat for dinner at Koks, taking in the panoramic view of Tórshavn, the capital city. The room was modern—pale woods and stainless steel—but outside, under the eaves, cod hung up to dry, spinning in the wind as they have for a thousand years.

BA TRAVEL AGENCY: FAROE ISLANDS

1. GET THERE: Atlantic Airways is the only airline that flies to the Faroe Islands, and Copenhagen is the most convenient hub. For a guide to your Danish layover, go to bonappetit.com/copenhagen .

2. STAY: The Hotel Føroyar is the most deluxe design hotel on the islands, and home to Koks restaurant. Hotel Streym is a modern budget hotel in Tórshavn. In the stunning village of Gjógv , you’ll find the charming, no-frills Gjáargardur Guest House . It’s remote but a beautiful place to get away and go for a hike.

3. EAT: Koks is one of the best modern restaurants in Scandinavia. Áarstova serves simple, well-made food like braised lamb. Restaurant Hafnia offers refined modern cooking.

4. GO: Summers are misty, with temperatures in the 50s to 60s; winter weather can be unpredictable and epic.

5. PACK: The hiking and birding are fantastic, so pack outdoor gear and binoculars. Many businesses have trouble with American credit cards, so carry cash.

Sørensen served a vial of flakes he called “A Taste of Umami.” They crunched and crackled, and the flavors revealed themselves: profoundly meaty, a little musty, like the edge of a dry-aged steak, washing away into a sweet sea taste. Those flavors came from caramelized seaweed, fish crisps, and fried skerpikjøt —the traditional saltless, air-cured lamb that puts the funk and gaminess front and center before it floats into a high, cucumber-y finish. That vial was the story of centuries of Faroese food, and was a stunning preamble to the next dozen or so courses of how Sørensen is remaking and retelling that story, not just by rearranging the sentences, but by adding new vocabulary to the language.

And so there was a puck of hauntingly sweet scallops and celery root, topped with a white circle of cheese from a dairy set up to see if there’s a future for cheesemaking in the Faroes. Sørensen waved a blowtorch, and we watched, delighted, as the circle melted, drooping around the scallop. The top came alive, bubbled and browned, throwing off a warm aroma of toasting milk—a course you wish could last forever.

And then there was a snack of that eaves-dried cod, the fibers feathery until they took on a caramel-like chewiness. A dab of whipped brown butter completed the illusion, and I learned it’s possible to make something called “savory fish candy” delicious.

And at last there was a just-cooked langoustine, lying on a bed of rocks, curled up under wisps of pine smoke. The only garnish was a black salt made by drying seaweed, the way the Faroese produced what little salt they had for centuries. Only after thinking about that, combined with the sweet taste of the langoustine—so exquisite that Redzepi wrote that he literally cried when he first had one—did I really understand what Sørensen was saying: that you’re having one of the greatest tastes of your life in a place where even salt is hard to come by. That the Faroese might not have much, but what they do have is unreal.

I sipped a glass of that melon-like turnip juice, marveling at how Sørensen could create a meal so exciting and so satisfying, wondering how much his food matters to his neighbors, sturdy people who generally distrust anything that even hints at pretension. “I grew up when you had to be happy with what you were eating,” he said. “Sometimes we ate whale meat that was as leathery as my belt. But people could taste lamb and then point to which hill it came from, tell what plants it ate, how it was dried. So they knew a lot about the food. We just never talked about whether we liked it.”

was shocked when, a few months after I visited, Sørensen told me over the phone that, after three and a half years building Koks, he’d left the restaurant. He’d clashed with the management of the hotel one too many times, but he was happy to say that his sous-chef that day had moved back from Copenhagen to take it over; he trusts his protégé with his legacy there. This freed him, he said, to do even more important work in the food community. Sørensen will be working with scientists to find new ways to use local seaweeds in food. The Faroese government wants him to help develop safety standards for skerpikjøt producers. And he’s talking to the farmer who grows those unbelievable turnips, and others, about expanding their crops. As a chef, Sørensen was trying to pull together this community to remake Faroese food, but he may now be in a better place to do that work, at its roots.

He seemed upbeat for a guy who’d just lost his job, but then I remembered the day he drove me around, introducing me to his world: pointing out a field where a farmer had been trying, for years, to grow him carrots; visiting the potter who made his plates; noting a brewery that was trying to grow its own grain. And, every so often, he pointed out someone in a passing car: “There goes the hotel florist.” “There goes the nephew of a famous artist.” “There goes the son of a Faroese language expert, who calls me every time I’m on the radio to tell me how many things I said wrong.”

I kept thinking about how hard it must be to work in such a small place, but the sense of connectedness to the people every day must be what grounds him, too. Or maybe grounds is the wrong word. On that day, we stopped at the village of Gjógv, where, just beyond where the land meets the North Atlantic, the water goes down so far locals call it “The Deepness.” The colors of the houses—peach and pink and pastel blues and black—popped against the grass. Before us was grinding water and gasping wind; behind us, the land slashed up toward the clouds.

It’s the kind of place that makes you realize the earth is so much bigger than you can ever imagine. At some point, it dawns on you that there are no trees, no woods to get lost in: nothing to block your sight. It makes you think you can go right up to anything you see and touch it. It feels a little bit like floating. You feel a little bit magical, like anything is possible. And I wonder if that, too, is what keeps Sørensen going.

Francis Lam is editor at large at Clarkson Potter . His work has appeared in the 2006–2013 editions of Best Food Writing, which in pro football would count as a dynasty; in ancient China, not so much. He tweets at @francis_lam .