DS Louise Restaurant - Oslo, Norway

Our first day in Oslo when we stopped for lunch, we asked our guide where we could find some good, authentic, Norwegian food. She led us over to DS Louise Restaurant and Bar, 

named after a 19th century steamboat. That is when we had our first sticker shock in Oslo. We knew it was going to be expensive, but we had no idea... The visitoslo.com website lists DS Louise as "one of Oslo's most popular restaurants" with a menu combining "Norwegian and international cuisine guided by...current trends." It also lists the price level as "Mid Range." Yikes. The price of our lunch for a pretty modest set of food was about $100.00, but we learned our money did not go very far in Norway. As a comparison, a Big Mac and fries, just down the way, was about $14.00. DS Louise is on the waterfront, in Oslo Harbor, in the old Akers Mechanical Workshop building where the machine shop was located. It is huge inside and filled with maritime related items, but we sat outside on the patio where we could enjoy the beautiful weather. 

From where we sat we could see our docked cruise ship (the Emerald Princess), 

but by this time we had actually left the cruise ship for a separate post-cruise tour developed by the travel agency we used. We had a fun seat next to a bronze statue of a man urgently communicating to a woman. 

As the sun hit us directly, we ended up moving to the other side of the statue to get out of the direct sun. 

Judy courageously ordered steak tartar and it turned out to be amazingly good. 

The raw, ground steak was in the center of the plate on a raised platform. Around it were piles of cut up pickles, red onions, cheese, beets, capers and the yoke of a raw egg. Judy piled all of the ingredients on the raw meat, except the egg yolk, and it was very good. 

Surprisingly and genuinely good, as in I would have no problem ordering and eating it again, it was so good (if it wasn't so darn expensive). She was a little leery about putting on the raw egg yolk, but I put some on and really liked, and so did she, so the rest was eaten with egg yolk and it was quite amazing. 

Not for the faint of heart. I got a sampler plate with different items. 

It included cured salmon (it had a green outside layer and a translucent flesh) which was good; seared tuna with some sort of seeds on the outside; marinated and cooked shrimp; a marinated mushroom; a scallop; several kinds of cheese, one particularly hard, and one softer; some sort of liver pate which was more solid than the pates I've had before; 

a marinated, grilled portion of artichoke; and several types of cured meats, including what appeared to be prosciutto. It was good, but Judy really won the prize for unusual and good.