I Tried the $28 Seal Milk Mousse Taking Over Williamsburg. It Tastes Like the Future.
Author: Amy Chan
Eater NY
It’s been all over your feeds for the past week. The question on everyone’s minds is whether this is for real or another lie to draw in tourists and yuppie foodies.
I arrived at Reykjavik Igloo on a Tuesday night. A block away from the East River, you can see the neon glow of new Manhattan construction reflected against the dark water. It was raining that night, the kind of freezing rain that always follows the weeks after Christmas. Despite the weather, fifty people stood under the LED awning that marked the entrance to the restaurant. Their faces were lit up by their phones, clad in hydrophobic shoes and jackets made from recycled plastic. They, like myself, were waiting for a single, four-ounce scoop of their “Nocturnal Sea” Mousse.
This is no ordinary mousse. As I stand in line, I can hear the key ingredient whispered down the line like a game of telephone. It’s made with seal milk.
Let’s just sit with that for a moment. This isn’t using almonds, oats, or some kind of nut in the Amazon we’ve yet to exploit and gentrify. Seal milk. The restaurant’s marketing claims this will give patrons a “full microbiome reset”. The milk contains rare yet natural sugars called “oligosaccharides” which act as a superfood for the colonies of Bifidobacterium that live in your gut.
So if you’re on a diet, don’t worry about this being a dessert. It’s far more like an optimization. Of course, this also seems like the kind of wellness hacks that we heard about every other week in the feeds.
By the time I actually got inside and situated at a table, my own gut bacteria were causing my stomach to rumble with anticipation. The restaurant’s aesthetic is much in line with its Icelandic origin: minimalist, functional, with lots of light wood and straight edges. My server, a young woman probably still in college, scooped a small, dark dollop of this mysterious mousse into a ceramic bowl and placed it in front of me.
I’d describe the mousse as very dark, like the sky on a cloudy, moonless night. As I took a small scoop with my spoon, I couldn’t help but admire how glossy and smooth it looked.
I held the spoon up to my nose and took a hesitant sniff. I mean, I was prepared for something fishy or salty, but it only smelled like bitter dark chocolate.
When I placed it in my mouth, I was all prepared for it to taste like cod liver oil or sushi. Instead it was a rich chocolate flavor. They use 70% single-origin Madagascan dark. That chocolate alone has a sharp taste that is worth tasting on its own. As the mousse coated my tongue, I could taste more flavors emerging. There was the bitterness of burnt sugar, like a perfectly caramelized crème brûlée.
I would be remiss if I didn’t describe the texture as well. It was like a heavy cream that still managed to melt in my mouth without any graininess. It was richer than gelato and silkier than any pot de crème I’ve ever had. As I swallowed the first bite, I struggled to make sense of what I had just tasted. The aftertaste clung to the back of my throat, a lingering sensation that reminded me of a freshly shucked oyster. It was pleasant. And it was enough to convince me to get a second bite.
After my delightful dessert, I spoke with Bent Torsson, the brainchild of this bold dish. He takes his minimalist design to his fashion choice too, as he wore a simple black turtleneck and long black slacks. He was tall and slim, evidently a beneficiary of his own product.
He was born in Vik, a small town in Iceland known for its famous black sand beaches. His parents were fishers, and he grew up around the sea. From a young age he admired the sea and all the wildlife that lived in it. Seals in particular were his favorite creature. They were able to survive in the harshest conditions of the country, without the benefit of a house and electricity.
When asked about the briny aftertaste, he explained it to me. “That’s the terroir. The phantom flavors pulled from the same sea these seals were born in. We wanted to make sure we honor their original home.”
He showed me a map on his tablet of the exact location where the seals are milked. “We chose a single, protected colony of hooded seals that live in the sea around Greenland. The raw milk is rich in calories, as you’d expect. It’s more than 60% fat. The baseline flavor is a bit like a thick fishy milkshake. Our profits go back to protecting them. Sustainability is important to what we do.”
Bent went on, explaining his process for transforming this sludge into something we can eat. A cryogenic homogenization process mixed with waters turn the thick liquid into something that has a smoother texture. There is still a gaminess which is balanced with the high-cacao chocolate and a controlled Maillard reaction to draw out the sweetness into something palatable.
It was an astonishing number of preparation steps to take their fatty milk and process it. Even that final briny taste seemed to be an intentional note, even if it was in fact a byproduct of the milk’s origin they couldn’t cover up. Torsson had a big grin on his face the entire time we spoke. “I know it’s unconventional,” he admitted. “But that’s what makes it so exciting.”
And the thing is... he is right.
As I left Reykjavik Igloo, walking around puddles back to the subway, I couldn’t stop thinking about that aftertaste. This whole night, the mousse, the conversation, all represented our post-natural world. We are so far removed from the natural way to eat. Our fruits will come by the shipload from halfway around the world so that we can have strawberries in January. We can grow chicken meat in a lab without ever harming a living creature.
Perhaps the culinary innovations of the day are more about conquering an ingredient, bending it to your will, and then writing a story interesting enough to collect $28 from your customers.
And the story of Reykjavik Igloo is just one example of this new future, with its exotic core ingredient and a claim to wellness that sounds plausible. I’m sure by next spring, there will be more artisanal processing labs popping up across the city with their own attempts to be the next superfood. It leaves a food critic, this food critic, with a lot more questions than when I started.