Greenland Street Food

Kalaallit food culture runs on what the sea and the hunt provide — seal, whale, and fish eaten raw, dried, or simmered into soup, with almost nothing grown locally to fall back on.

🐋 Mattak — raw whale skin and blubber — is served in bite-sized cubes, sliced straight off the animal like sushi.

4 street food dishes from Greenland — what each one is, why it's made that way, and what to expect when you order it.

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Signature street foods of Greenland

National Dish · Meat & Rice Soup Suaasat There's no single recipe — it's made with whatever the hunt brought home that week, seal, whale, reindeer, or seabird, so the same bowl tastes… Suaasat is a peppery soup built from seal, whale, reindeer or seabird meat, simmered for hours with rice or barley, onions, and a heavy dose of black pepper and bay leaf until the meat…

Delicacy · Raw Whale Skin & Blubber Mattak Eaten raw and unseasoned, it's one of the few traditional foods on Earth that supplies vitamin C in a country too cold to grow a single citrus fruit… Mattak is the skin and a thin layer of blubber from narwhal, beluga or other whales, sliced into small chewy cubes and eaten raw, often at celebrations after a successful hunt. The texture…

Snack · Wind-Dried Capelin Ammassat They're not gutted or salted first — just hung whole on outdoor racks and left to the Arctic wind for days, which does the preserving that salt or a… Ammassat are small capelin, caught by the netful when they swarm the coast each summer, then hung whole on wooden racks to wind-dry in the open air. Eaten by hand, bones and all, they're a…

Open Sandwich · Cooked Shrimp Rejemad Greenland's waters supply a large share of the world's cold-water shrimp, yet most of the catch is processed and shipped straight to European plates… Rejemad is an open-faced sandwich piled high with small, sweet, cold-water shrimp, a spoonful of mayonnaise, dill, and a wedge of lemon, on buttered rye or white bread. It's a fixture of…

More street food in Americas

Part of World of Street Food — 690 dishes from 118 countries. Photo credits.