XL Diner

Going back to 1999, restaurant entrepreneur and chef Ivar Breivik opened the doors of XL Diner in Ålesund, Norway, as his experience of cooking bacalao is deeply ingrained in his background as a chef. Little did he know that it would become one of the biggest bacalao restaurants in the world – now going through 21 tonnes of klipfish on an annual basis. The city of Ålesund is built around klipfish, and today a whopping 96 per cent of the klipfish exported worldwide comes from this particular place – Breivik’s hometown. “That’s why I wanted to make a good klipfish restaurant that was going to take good traditional Norwegian food and mix it with influences from Brazil, Spain and Italy.”