An award-winning chef offers a taste of Greenland's history and culture through food

NUUK, Greenland — Chef Inunnguaq Hegelund is constantly moving.

On a recent trip to a local hunter's market, the car barely stops moving before the star chef jumps out to see what options are available for dinner.

"The fisherman or the hunter will come with this fish or meat here, and then we can buy it fresh," he says as he inspects the offerings. The market advertises musk ox, belugas, narwhals, seals, caribou, polar bear and walrus. He settles on an eider, a type of sea duck.

Hegelund has been a chef for about 20 years and is now working to preserve Greenland's Indigenous food traditions by leaning into what he describes as new Arctic cuisine. It's a movement toward local, sustainable and traditional food — more about the ingredients and sourcing them than any particular technique.

"In Greenland, we have the world's wildest kitchen, but we also have the [cleanest tasting] foods in the world," he says.

All Things Considered recently spent an evening with Hegelund to learn more about the island's history through food.

Hegelund says most of the food, like different types of vegetables and most dairy, is imported from other countries. At the grocery store, he points out freezers with only locally produced Greenlandic foods. He fills a cart with locally caught halibut and smoked salmon, narwhal meat and dried whale.

Hegelund says when non-Greenlanders think of Inuit food, they always mention whale blubber. When he thinks about Inuit food, his mind immediately goes to dried fish. There are hundreds of varieties.

"I normally compare it to curry," he says. "Because a family in India will have their own recipe in their own house. And this is the same with the dried fish up here."

He wants Greenland to be self-sufficient and to preserve the time-honored traditions of local food. He says where the food comes from and how it's sourced matters.

The food he's preparing for us has been through a journey.

"[Greenlanders] do a lot of hunting. [They] are out in rough nature," Hegelund says. There's probably a fisherman who went out in "negative-30 degrees on a dogsled and [drove] 30 kilometers (about 18 miles) to get to this hole where he's fishing."

Hegelund lives in a small apartment shared with a roommate that overlooks the Nuuk fjord. This is where we join him for dinner. And as soon as we walk in the door, he jumps into action — a flurry of activity in a small galley kitchen.

When Hegelund breaks down the duck from the hunter's market, he gives out a warning: "Take care of your teeth because [there might be] bullets." That's how fresh the food is here.

Near the start of the pandemic, Hegelund opened his own restaurant but struggled. He says his restaurant hadn't been open long enough to qualify for government pandemic assistance. Ultimately, he had to shut it down —and went to work on a fishing boat as he rebuilt his life.

Today, he has a wide portfolio of culinary projects, including a food festival and a national competition for chefs.

Back in the kitchen, he is juggling dishes of Greenlandic lamb smothered in a mushroom sauce, smoked salmon salad and seared halibut.

Hegelund says he loves being a chef because seeing the way people respond to his food is like "medicine."