Coffee Parties Are the Best Way to Experience Greenlandic Culture

It’s just above freezing on a late August morning in Itilleq, Greenland. As I peel off my hiking shoes and head inside the home of Emma Davidsen, I’m immediately filled with a sense of relief that I decided to wear socks that are not only warm but, more importantly, matching.

Inside, the smell of freshly brewed coffee, chocolate cake, and crumbly chocolate chip scones hangs in the soft morning air of Davidsen’s fjord-side kitchen.

“Welcome to my kaffemik,” she says, pouring coffee as warm and inviting as her smile into small ceramic mugs. Derived from the Danish word for coffee (kaffe) and Greenlandic word for together or with (mik), kaffemik is a community-wide social gathering akin to an open house, and it’s one of Greenland’s longstanding cultural traditions, Davidsen explains.

Hugging the Arctic Circle, just one mile north of the invisible line of latitude at 66° north, Itilleq is a remote island settlement on Greenland’s central-western coast with a population of less than 100. The village, like so many coastal villages I’ve had the chance to visit on my inaugural trip to Greenland, consists of a series of interconnected footpaths that carve their way between 20 or so salt-licked polychrome houses lining the bay and shoreline.

Davidsen says there are no restaurants in Itilleq — not even a hospital. There is a church and an elementary school, as well as a communal all-purpose store for household items and other necessities that’s only open upon request. Like most villages in Greenland, Itilleq has no roads or bridges connecting it to any other town. Less than a 10-minute walk up a moderate hill from a small lake at the center of the village, a white picket fence encircles a serene meadowside cemetery wedged between the mountains and the sea.

“Do you ever get lonely living here?” I ask Davidsen as I take a bite into a slice of delightfully doughy and still slightly warm chocolate cake. “Sometimes, in the winter, when it’s very dark, that’s when we have kaffemik, sometimes even twice in a week,” she says.

Born in Sisimiut, Greenland’s second-largest city with a population between 5,500 and 5,600, Davidsen says she moved to Itilleq after marrying her husband, whose family is from the village. Inside their home, her butchery diploma hangs proudly on the wall of their living room, which better explains the expertly cleaned barrel-shaped ribplate of a seal hanging next to a severed head of a reindeer. Other memorabilia include her husband’s hand-painted birth certificate; photos of her in-laws dressed traditionally in seal skin, fox fur, and large beaded collars called yokes; and drawings by her four-year-old daughter.

It wasn’t long ago that tourism in off-the-grid villages like Itilleq was limited to the occasional wayward backpacker or wealthy backcountry heliskier, says local guide Niels Sanimuinaq Rasmussen, Greenland Cultural Ambassador for Viking. That’s changed since the 2024 opening of an international airport in the country’s capital city of Nuuk, along with shore excursions from small expedition ships like Viking, which brought me to Davidsen’s kitchen table for this experience.

While the word kaffemik can be traced back to Greenland’s colonization by Denmark and the importation of coffee, sugar, and other goods in 1721, open house gatherings and community celebrations have long been a part of the social fabric in Inuit culture, Rasmussen explains.

“During the colonization period, it [coffee] quickly became a household item in Greenland, and soon, coffee even became the main attraction to invite someone over because that’s what all the foreigners did; they invited each other over for tea and coffee, so Greenlanders adopted that into their vocabulary, and instead of saying, ‘Can I have a plate of muskox or a plate of reindeer,’ coffee just became the thing that you would say instead, and it’s been that way ever since.”

While every village and city hosts their own version of kaffemik, the one thing they all have in common is that it’s always very casual and open to whoever wants to come and celebrate, explains Rasmussen, who was born and raised in Ittoqqortoormiit (pronounced it-ockor-tormit), a remote settlement with a population of 345.

“Every town has their own specific tradition,” Rasmussen says. “In my hometown in Eastern Greenland, for example, we throw a bunch of coins and some candies on very specific days that we really want to celebrate, whereas in Western Greenland, they like to serve snow crabs and reindeer for kaffemik, because that’s the main animals they have to catch. So it’s different from place to place.”

While the spirit and tradition of hosting friends, relatives, and neighbors at your home for kaffemik hasn’t changed much over the centuries, Rasmussen says the initial reason behind bringing people together stems from a darker side of Greenland’s history.

“Back then, Greenland had a super high mortality rate, so they would look for a reason to celebrate anything, it could be a baby’s first tooth or a quarter year of someone’s birthday, the idea was everyone in town was invited to come and have some coffee and cake, and just be together and celebrate,” Rasmussen says.

Today, the most common kaffemik celebrations include birthdays, national days, and important life events. “It can be anything worth celebrating in someone’s life, like getting a job, catching your first seal, or catching your first polar bear,” Rasmussen says. “It is very important that you celebrate to ensure that you have a good hunt for the rest of your life.”

On the southeastern shore of Disko Bay, Qasigiannguit (pronounced kah-see-ghyah-ni-gweet), population 952, has seen an influx of tourism in recent years, which has prompted kaffemik tours to share “the everyday side of Greenland.”

“As Greenlanders, we are known as a genuinely open and warm people, maybe because we are living in harmony with our surroundings and nature, which is so beautiful and peaceful,” says Laila Mikaelsen, co-owner of Mikami Guest House, via email. “When you visit a Greenlander’s home, you’ll get an inside view into how we live our day-to-day lives, but also, you get to taste how and what that family prepares as far as their local food customs, their homemade cakes, caribou, a fresh catch of seal, and of course, coffee.”

Davidsen showed me the herbs and teas that she forages, like dandelion, thyme, and kuannit, which she says are medicinal for winter colds. Travelers coming to kaffemik can purchase any as a souvenir.

“Kaffemik is the best way to get insight into how everything happens, especially all the smaller things that you might not think about when it comes to Greenlandic culture,” Rasmussen says. “And you get to see how people act, how we celebrate life as it is, so if you get the opportunity to go to one, absolutely do it.”