If eating your way around the land of fire and ice isn’t in the cards this year, Toronto’s about to get the next best thing. Taste of Iceland 2025 returns to the city from Thursday, Nov 20 to Saturday, Nov 22, turning a handful of downtown venues into a mini-Icelandic getaway packed with food, music, northern lights lore and lava (yup, actual molten lava).
The heart of it all is a tasty Icelandic dining pop-up at The Dorset in The Well. For three evenings, The Dorset is handing its kitchen over to an Icelandic-Canadian chef team for a one-off tasting menu built around the flavours of the North Atlantic. Guest chef Gabríel Kristinn Bjarnason (2025 Icelandic Chef of the Year) joins The Dorset District Executive Chef Ryan Lister to serve a four-course prix fixe menu for $88 per person (plus tax and gratuity), with an optional $45 wine pairing add-on!
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The menu includes the very best of Icelandic ingredients. Guests start with torched Icelandic Arctic char glazed in birch, maple and cedar syrup, topped with Icelandic wasabi and spruce-pickled onions, all set on a rúgbrauð (rye bread) crumpet! From there, a pan-fried Icelandic cod course layers confit tomatoes, pickled cucumber, jalapeño mayo, popped quinoa, caramelized cauliflower purée, Icelandic bok choy, feykir cheese and a creamy cod sauce.
The main is a grilled loin of Icelandic lamb, one of the country’s signature exports, while dessert is a ganache of skyr brown cheese caramel (think thick, tangy cultured dairy that’s somewhere between yogurt and fresh cheese). The full menu is available every night of the festival from 4:45 to 9:45 pm, and reservations are strongly recommended.
If you’d prefer a midday treat, The Dorset is also hosting the Demo & Dine: Icelandic Lunch Experience this Friday. Icelandic chefs Hafliði Halldórsson and Snaedis Xyza Mae Ocampo will walk guests through the preparation of a wild Icelandic cod starter, an Icelandic lamb main and a skyr dessert before everyone sits down to eat. It runs from 12 to 1:30 pm (keep in mind it’s a ticketed event with limited seating!)
Food isn’t the only way the festival is showing off Icelandic flavours. On Saturday night, the festival wraps with Comedy & Cocktails at the Thornton-Smith Building’s Aperture Room. Alongside a two-hour set from Icelandic comedians and storytellers Ragnar Ísleifur Bragason and Bergur Ebbi, every guest will be treated to a complimentary cocktail courtesy of the Iceland Hotel Collection by BERJAYA.
The drink is infused with the local flavours, wild botanicals and a sense of place drawn from the group’s hotels across Iceland. Bonus: guests go home with a skincare gift from Blue Lagoon Iceland!
If you can pull yourself away from the table, there’s a full slate of Icelandic experiences:
- Iceland Airwaves Off-Venue at El Mocambo’s Starlight Room brings a free showcase with RAKEL, Spacestation and DJ Hermigervill on Thursday night, turning one of Toronto’s most storied music venues into a Reykjavík club for a few hours.
- At Jazz Bistro on Friday, Icelandic jazz heavyweights Óskar Guðjónsson and Skúli Sverrisson play an intimate, one-hour set curated by the Reykjavík Jazz Festival, the duo’s first Canadian appearance.
- Design lovers can drop by bulthaup Toronto from Thursday to Saturday for From the Depths of Iceland-DÝPI, an exhibition of algae-based, plastic-free mineral paints inspired by Icelandic landscapes.
- Experience real Icelandic lava in Toronto! Over at STACKT Market, the Lava Show is hauling in a portable lava furnace (said to be the only one of its kind in the world) and pouring real molten lava in a series of three demonstrations on Saturday afternoon.
- Families will enjoy the Draw Iceland’s Stories! art workshop with illustrator Rán Flygenring, then stick around for the Northern Lights in Toronto talk by astronomy educator Sævar “Astro-Sævar” Helgi Bragason (it comes with VR previews of glacier hikes and aurora tours in Iceland).
For more info and tickets, visit Taste of Iceland Toronto.
