Iceland legalised beer on 1 March 1989. Until that date - through seven full decades, longer than the United States ever managed - the country had banned full-strength beer entirely. Spirits were permitted; wine eventually; the strange compromise of low-alcohol "pilsner" was tolerated. Beer itself, with the rest of the world drinking it, was illegal. Reykjavík's entire modern bar culture begins from this fact. Slippbarinn - which opened at the Reykjavík Marina hotel in 2012 as Iceland's first serious cocktail bar - is the cleanest place to see what that history did to the city.
Reykjavík had no recognisable bar culture in the modern sense. Drinking was done at home, at private functions, or in the small handful of hotels licensed to serve foreigners. The cocktail menu was a Manhattan, a Martini, and a vodka tonic; the bartender was, in most cases, a hotel waiter. Bjarni Sigurðsson's 1981 cocktail book - the first Icelandic-language cocktail manual - sold poorly.
What grew in beer's absence was a serious drinking culture around brennivín - Iceland's caraway-flavoured aquavit, popularly nicknamed "Black Death" - and around the rúntur, the weekend pub-crawl tradition that survived because Icelanders refused to let the prohibition stop them from socialising.
From March 1989 the country had to invent its bar culture from a standing start. Initially, this meant a wave of mediocre beer-and-shot bars across Laugavegur. The serious version of the scene - cocktail bars, craft brewers, natural-wine rooms - took roughly two decades to arrive.
Slippbarinn opens in 2012 as the first room in Reykjavík genuinely competing on the international cocktail-bar standard. The bar's opening menu used Icelandic ingredients (angelica, rhubarb, birch syrup, smoked Arctic char garnishes) on top of a properly classical foundation. The result was the bar that taught Reykjavík what a cocktail bar could be. Most of the better cocktail rooms in the city now were opened by someone who had previously worked behind the bar at Slippbarinn.
The bar itself is busy with a mix of hotel guests, Reykjavík regulars, and bartenders from other rooms (Slippbarinn is the industry hangout on the bartenders' nights off). Order the Smoking Lavender - gin, lavender, smoked Arctic char garnish, lemon - or any of the rotating angelica-and-birch cocktails. The bar runs lunch and dinner service from the hotel kitchen; bar tapas are available throughout.
