Katrina Christiansen

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A House That Remembers

The building at Bringsnagøta 6 has been standing in the heart of Tórshavn since at least 1707, when it operated as a barbershop. Over the following three centuries it became a general store, a family home, and eventually the birthplace and childhood address of William Heinesen — the most widely recognised Faroese author. Partly burned twice, expanded, rebuilt with salvaged timber, and stocked with everything from kerosene to woollen stockings, the house has accumulated more history than most museums. Today it is a restaurant, and the layers are still visible: vertical wallboards on the ground floor date to around 1800, horizontal ones upstairs to roughly 1900; an original lathe sits in the basement workshop; a kerosene pump stands by the entrance.

The restaurant takes its name from Katrina Christiansen, the tenacious shopkeeper who ran the store through much of the twentieth century. A photograph of Katrina and her employer Zacharias Heinesen overlooks the counter — which, incidentally, is built from old banana boxes.

Tapas Shaped by the North Atlantic

The kitchen works in a tapas style, sending out several small shareable dishes so guests can move across a broad range of flavours in one sitting. The starting point is Spanish in spirit, but the ingredients are firmly Atlantic. Cod tongues — lippur — are fried and served with padrón peppers, dill, lime, and ramson mayo, a local speciality that rewards the curious. Cod croquettes arrive with chives, paper-thin katsuobushi flakes, and chili mayo, while razor clam ceviche with yuzu foam offers a clean, bright counterpoint to richer plates. Gratinated langoustine, beef cheeks with red wine sauce and Jerusalem artichoke chips, and fried cabbage with hollandaise round out a menu that moves confidently between sea and land.

The set menus — a five-course Katrina's Menu and a seven-course William's Menu — follow the seasons and bring in dishes like scallops with apple compote and toasted pine nuts, salmon terrine with dill and fennel, and leg of lamb with Faroese root vegetables. On Sundays, the kitchen shifts to ommusa lambskjøt, slow-cooked traditional Faroese lamb served with potatoes, red cabbage, and brown gravy.

This approach to tapas, grounded in what the Faroese sea and landscape actually produce, earned the restaurant recognition at the White Guide 2026, where it received a Fine level award — a mark of the kitchen's consistency and the overall quality of the experience.

Rooms With Stories

The atmosphere is lively rather than hushed. Young servers navigate a steep staircase between floors, the rooms are named after figures from the house's past, and early works by William Heinesen hang on the walls. Six distinct private rooms — from the 38-seat Williamstova to the intimate 8-seat Hjallurin — make the space equally suited to a quiet dinner for two, a client event, or a banquet. The restaurant describes itself as "as much a museum as a restaurant," and that is not an exaggeration: guests are encouraged to explore, and the staff are happy to answer questions about what they find.