My goal will be to always keep an updated lists over all the restaurants in Tromsø, covering the «substandard», the «favorites of the locals (and your parents)», and the «worth to visit» restaurants. The definition of these three terms follows:

  • Poor quality/tourist traps

    • A combination of some of the points bellow are usually true for the substandard restaurants:
      • The most important reason behind placing restaurants in the substandard category: The food is not tasty- bad quality food/the food is way overpriced for its quality.
      • Restaurants created solely to make money of tourists, i.e. not reliant on returning customers. They might exist for a couple of years, then change name or owner without making other adjustments. Brags about serving «Authentic Norwegian Food» or «Nordic Traditional Food» or something along those lines.
      • The owners might own other tourist shops and/or other shady restaurants (in Norway this is public information, and can easily be verified).
      • At ~21:00 (9pm) it changes from a restaurant to a night club/pub, but with a completely new clientele which probably don’t even know they served food earlier that day.
      • Huge and (too) diverse menus. From sashimi and nigiri made of whale and cod, different reindeer and king crab dishes to pizza and pasta.
      • Physalis with the dessert.
      • Get bad press in the local newspapers for legitimate reasons. E.g. bad hygiene (this is controlled regularly in Norway by Mattilsynet (Norwegian Food Safety Authority) and is regularly reported in local newspapers when occurring.), not paying their employees salary, «piece glass in the food and accuses guest of lying»-incidents, etc.

  • Medium quality (Favorites of the locals)

    • Make no mistake, this is no «secret hipster restaurant»-list. Popular with the locals in Norway is not what you might associate it with – Norwegians don’t go out to eat local Norwegian or “authentic” food, we usually make it at home. This is a list where the restaurants listed is neither substandard (a typical tourist trap), nor serve tasty enough food worth mentioning them in travel guides or magazines, or can’t even try to compete with national or international restaurants in their respective category. All the bellow is somewhat true for these restaurants:
      • Some of these restaurants might actually be quite decent, but they vary too much in quality and show no ambition in trying to improve themselves.
      • Restaurants for the masses. Both tourists and the locals can enjoy an evening or a quick meal at most of these places when hungry. Not a place to visit if you want to have an experience.
        • Unless you’re my parents (aged ~55 and above), which would enjoy every single restaurant on here because they don’t really eat that much out and find all the available dishes new and exciting!
      • Teens eat here before/after going to the movies (cinema).
      • If a group (5-10) of students from the university (e.g. a very diverse group with some people just want a McDonalds-burger, while others want foie gras) wants to eat out, this is usually a sort of place they’ll end up in.
      • Locals grew up with some of these places having «the best pizza», «the best burger», «the best pasta» etc. due to lack of alternatives. To some, they still are «the best», despite new and better restaurants have opened in their respective categories

  • High quality (worth to visit)

    • After identifying the two above mentioned categories, I’m left with the «worth to visit» restaurants. The type of restaurant and quality will somewhat vary in this category, and in Tromsø, it ranges from 10-course almost 1 michelin star quality restaurant to authentic traditional northern norwegian style stock- and clipfish with potatoes (yes, this actually exists despite my comments above. This is a classical example of a «tourist trap» not necessarily being a poor restaurant!). The common denominator for these places is food worth paying for usually because the people working there cares about the food they serve and cares about their customers. These restaurants will hopefully leave you feeling satisfied and smiling.
    • Due to my hobby (which is eating food) I’ve been to quite a number of decent to excellent restaurants. This experience is applied in an (hopefully) objective manner when placing restaurants on the “worth to visit” list.

The «medium quality» list is divided into a top and bottom section. The top of the this list are restaurants which with some minor and/or major improvements might advance to the «high quality» list.