Not sure how this got to be a bakery, but this is one of my favorite tasting menu restaurants on…read morethe planet. Work brings me to Bergen from time to time and I've had the good fortune to dine at Colonialen twice. Once with two good friends and another time simply by myself.
A restaurant has to be amazing to get me to sit alone for 3.5 hours to go through all the courses.
The food here is imaginative and consistent. The wine pairings are spot-on. Listing the 20 or so dishes I've eaten there would take forever, so I'll stick with two or three of the standouts.
The first was a group of northern grains served in a mortar with a pestle. You ground up the grains with the pestle and an oxtail consomme was poured over top. This was painfully delicious. It was so good that I shamelessly begged (and received) a second.
On my second visit, the staff recognized me and gave me a lot of attention (which was nice since I was alone). I had long conversations with the chef and the sommalier about how they sourced their food and selected their wines. Their wine pairings are eclectic (france, germany, italy, pacific northwest, even a Norwegian selection worked its way in).
If you are in Bergen or traveling to Bergen, this needs to be on your list ... perhaps more than anything else in town.