Buy a bag of prawns off a boat at the City Hall pier, sit on the quay, and eat them with your hands.
This is the best cheap meal in one of the most expensive cities in Europe, and it takes place on a wooden quay in front of the town hall.
How it works
Fishing boats tie up at Rådhusbrygge, beside the City Hall, and sell cooked prawns — reker — straight off the deck, by weight, in a paper bag.
They were caught in the Oslofjord or the Skagerrak, cooked in seawater on board on the way in, and they are still slightly warm.
You buy them, you find a bench or a bollard, and you peel them and eat them with your fingers, throwing the shells in the water for the gulls, which is expected.
Half a kilo is a generous portion for one person as a meal. A kilo feeds two properly.
What you need
Nothing is supplied.
- Bread — a baguette or a loaf.
- Mayonnaise, ideally the Norwegian kind in a tube.
- Lemon.
- Kitchen paper or napkins, in quantity.
- Something to drink. Note that drinking alcohol in public is technically prohibited in Oslo and widely, quietly done in summer; the police do not generally trouble people eating prawns on a quay, but it is not formally permitted.
The supermarkets a few minutes up towards Aker Brygge have all of it.
The season and the caveat
Boats are there most days in the warmer months and much less reliably in winter.
There is no guarantee. This is not a market stall with opening hours; it is fishermen selling a catch. Some days there is nothing.
If the quay is empty, the fish counters at Mathallen and the fishmongers at Vippa will sell you the same prawns.
The rest of the fjord table
Reker are the summer ritual. The rest of the year, Norwegian seafood is about cod, salmon and king crab.
Skrei — migrating winter cod from the Lofoten grounds — is in season roughly January to April and is genuinely special: firm, white, and traditionally served with the roe and the liver alongside, which is worth trying at least once.
Gravlaks, cured salmon with dill, and røkelaks, cold-smoked, are everywhere and are cheapest from a supermarket.
Fiskesuppe, a creamy fish soup, is on every menu and is a good cheap lunch.
Brunost is not seafood but should be mentioned somewhere: brown cheese, made from boiled-down whey, caramel-coloured and sweet, sliced thinly with a ostehøvel — the cheese slicer, which is a Norwegian invention of 1925. Foreign visitors either love it or are visibly upset by it.
Where to sit
The quay itself, the steps by the water, or ten minutes east onto the Opera House roof, which is the better view and where half of Oslo eats lunch in July.
