The Good Life, Copenhagen Style.
“Silden skal have noget at svømme i.”
“The herring needs something to swim in.”
A beautiful little Danish saying, shared by our local food guide and a good enough reason to drink schnapps if ever I’ve heard one. In front of us - smørrebrød, pickled herring sitting on dark Danish rugbrød, alongside a glass of schnapps flavoured with beetroot and horseradish. One of the tastiest combinations I had all weekend.
Earlier that weekend, my mum asked our taxi driver what the predominant religion was in Denmark. He paused. “Umm… alcohol.” Between that, the herring needing something to swim in and the importance of double parking, Copenhagen made more sense the more I got to know it.
Surprisingly, it was my first time in Scandinavia, and spending a few nights in Copenhagen with my mum and brother, celebrating the former’s birthday and giving them a glimpse into my world, felt like a pretty great introduction. It’s a precious thing to take your loved ones away and spoil them a little - or a lot. They’ve spent most of my life doing that for me in many more ways than one, so being able to do something like this for them is something I’ll never forget. And there’s no better way to do so than by eating far too much, drinking plenty and discovering a new city together. And your mother should be spoiled. If I didn’t quite realise the importance of that before, I certainly do now.
I knew Copenhagen as a great food city long before arriving. It would be difficult not to. New Nordic cooking has travelled far beyond Denmark, and for a relatively small city, Copenhagen’s impact can be seen on restaurants all over the world. Seasonality, locality, fermentation and foraging are all now firmly lodged in contemporary restaurant vocabulary. And the restaurants that built that reputation are every bit as exciting as you’d hope. But over the weekend, I became just as interested in everything that surrounds them - the everyday food, the rituals and, most of all, the way Copenhageners seem to make eating and drinking such a natural part of life.
You don’t have to look particularly hard for good food in Copenhagen. Just avoid the tourist traps along the iconic colourful harbour. There are wonderful bakeries like Juno, tasty burgers served out of petrol stations, markets full of beautiful produce from independent traders and an admirable commitment to bread, butter, fish, meat and pastry. But it’s the people around all of this that make it so lovely. Bakeries have queues, people stop for long lunches or grab a couple of beers and sit along the bridge for a post-work gossip. None of which require any justification. Eating well here isn’t reserved for a Friday night splurge or special occasion; it’s simply part of the day. And there’s remarkably little fuss about any of it. Copenhagen cares deeply about food without disappearing up its own arse. For a city with such culinary pedigree, eating here is far less precious than you might expect.
One of the best things we did all weekend was a food tour. I’m convinced they’re the best way to get to know a city, particularly if the prospect of following someone around for three hours as they rattle off historical facts with seemingly no end in sight doesn’t exactly fill you with excitement. You still get the history, the people and all the little peculiarities of a place, except every so often someone hands you something delicious.
We bounced between a few restaurants, a buzzing market, a wonderful ice cream shop and a brewery in a gentrified neighbourhood that felt like Copenhagen’s version of Hackney, eating and drinking our way through the city. Rye bread, Danish cheeses, natural wine and schnapps, each accompanied by stories of where they came from and the people behind them. We heard about cheesemakers, old traditions and an ice cream shop owner who gambled pretty much everything on making the place work. Thankfully, it did. It was as much about the stories as the eating, which is exactly what I want from a food tour.
This is the stuff of food I love. You can have a few simple ingredients that aren’t trying to be particularly clever, but start asking why it’s there and suddenly you’re talking about climate, agriculture, preservation, geography and what people have been eating for hundreds of years.
Copenhagen might also be the most wholesome city I’ve ever visited. People cycle everywhere, swim in the harbour, spend significant time outside and, despite their love of schnapps, appear irritatingly beautiful and healthy. The city is clean, calm and seems to operate on a level of trust I’m not particularly used to.
Outside our hotel one evening, two drunk students were rolling around on the pavement, play-fighting like small children. The sort of drunken scene that in London could turn sour very quickly, involving broken glass, someone propped against a wall having a piss, while someone else is being told to fuck off. Here, they were just giggling and pulling their punches. You got the impression that had either of them broken a glass, the fight would have been immediately abandoned for an apologetic search for every last shard. A drunken scrap, Copenhagen style.
That feeling of safety was probably one of the things I noticed most. Living in London, you develop a hyper-vigilance of your surroundings without really thinking about it. You check your phone is still in your pocket, keep an eye on your bag and pick up little habits that simply become part of moving around the city. Copenhagen seemed to have far less of that edge. People appeared to self-police in the best possible sense - not through rules or any obvious authority, but through a shared understanding of how to behave around one another.
Perhaps what I liked so much was the ease of it all. That same relaxed attitude seemed to extend to how people ate, drank and spent their time. Copenhagen seems very good at making time for things that are enjoyable - sharing a bottle of wine by the canal, stopping for cinnamon gelato in the afternoon, picking up a cardamom bun from a bakery on the way home from work. Nothing particularly profound, but that’s the point. There seems to be very little guilt attached to simply enjoying yourself here. Copenhagen reminded me how much value there is in that.
Perhaps that’s what I’ll take from the weekend more than anything. Not a lesson in hygge, or some great revelation about Danish happiness, but a reminder to make more time for the good stuff, and for the people you want to enjoy it with.
