The menu, explained
Bidos and the three courses: the dinner at the reindeer camp
Cold-smoked salmon, bidos, and a fireside dessert — what's on the table, and what to know about dietary needs and kids.
See reindeer camp & dinner tickets on GetYourGuide ↗The three courses
| Course | What it is |
|---|---|
| Starter | Cold-smoked salmon |
| Main | Bidos (Sami reindeer stew) with Sami bread |
| Dessert | Chocolate cake with blueberries |
| Drinks | Coffee, tea and hot chocolate |
Bidos: a stew built for special occasions
Bidos is a slow-cooked Sami stew of reindeer meat, traditionally served at weddings, confirmations and other occasions where a shared meal matters. The seasoning is kept simple, usually little more than salt, which leaves the flavour of the meat and the broth that develops around it to carry the dish — it's a cooking style built around the ingredient, not around spicing it up. Serving it to visitors at the camp puts a festive, celebratory dish in front of you rather than a simplified tourist version, which is part of why it anchors the whole dinner rather than sitting alongside a more generic main course.
The full three courses
Dinner opens with cold-smoked salmon, moves to bidos served with Sami bread as the main course, and closes with a chocolate cake and blueberry dessert. Coffee, tea and hot chocolate are served alongside. It's a fixed set menu rather than a choice of dishes, in keeping with the format of a shared fireside meal rather than a restaurant service — everyone at the lavvu eats the same three courses in the same order, which also keeps the kitchen simple enough to run from a fire rather than a full commercial setup.
Where the meal is served
The whole dinner is eaten inside a candlelit lavvu, warmed by an open fire, which is also where you first come in from the cold after the sled ride. The setting does a lot of the work here — this is a meal built around the fire and the company around it as much as the food itself, and the smell of woodsmoke and cooking is part of the experience well before the first course arrives. Seating is shared and informal rather than at individual tables, which suits a dinner built around conversation and storytelling rather than a quiet, private meal.
Dietary requirements
Because it's a fixed set menu built around one specific dish, dietary requirements are worth flagging at booking rather than raised on the night. The GetYourGuide listing is the place to note any requirements before you pay, so the operator can confirm what the current menu can accommodate while you can still change plans if needed — a stew built on reindeer meat and a smoked-salmon starter both have limited substitution room compared with a restaurant menu, so an early heads-up matters more here than it would for an á la carte kitchen.
Kids at the table
The format — a shared meal by a fire, with feeding and a sled ride either side of it — suits children who are old enough to follow instructions around large animals. The practical limits are the late finish and temperatures that are regularly well below freezing outdoors, both worth weighing against a younger child's evening rather than the meal itself, which is straightforward and not spiced beyond what most children would eat at home. A child who is comfortable around dogs or horses is usually comfortable around a calm, hand-fed reindeer herd, though the operator can advise on current age guidance for the booking itself.
Why a fire-cooked stew instead of a restaurant kitchen
Cooking bidos over an open fire in a lavvu rather than in a restaurant kitchen is closer to how the dish is actually made in a Sami household or at a Sami gathering than a plated version would be. The slow cooking that a stew like this needs suits a fire that's already burning to keep the tent warm, so the cooking and the heating happen together rather than as two separate jobs — a practical detail as much as an atmospheric one, and part of why the dinner takes the shape it does rather than being served as a faster, more conventional three-course meal.