My Favorite Meals in Copenhagen, or Second Breakfast #17
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If you’re in Los Angeles, I’ll be in conversation with my dear friend Annalee Newitz about their new book Automatic Noodle at Book Soup on August 6 at 7 p.m. Join us in plotting the robot noodle revolution : )
I was nervous about taking a toddler to Copenhagen. We’ve traveled a lot with our kid, but always to the open arms of family and friends. Now we were looking at 11 hour flights, 11 hour time differences, and no one else along for the ride. What if we died? Of miserable baby?
Reader, we lived. Honestly, we thrived. Copenhagen is a perfect place to take a little kid. It’s got beautiful playgrounds, delicious pastries, and so many different forms of fast, easy public transportation.
It wasn’t all smooth. In one idyllic playground, he got stung in the face by a wasp. I sprained my ankle tripping on a bike lane. Sit down meals were kind of a farce.
Making things more challenging was the (self-imposed) pressure I felt to Try The Things on The Lists and/or Featured On The Bear, since Copenhagen exerts enormous influence over the food world. More than once, when planning out our day, I had to remind myself I was not on assignment, I was on family vacation.
Still, we ate pretty well! We even pulled off a full-on tasting menu meal with the aid of books, toys, trips outside between courses, and a lot of Sago Mini. Here’s some favorites.
Lunch at Kodbyens Fiskbar
When Ken at Now Serving told me this was the place he wanted to try most in Copenhagen, I knew I had to go. Some of the best seafood I’ve ever had, both in terms of its quality and the skill of the kitchen. I’ve been having a bit of a grilled fish summer, and their grilled turbot was a stellar addition. Even more stunning were the raw dishes, especially the mackerel pictured above.
Pastries and bread at Collective Bakery
I checked out “only” four bakeries in Copenhagen, which sounds like a lot but is too few for me, especially because I missed the famous Juno. That said, Collective was the obvious standout. Their pain au chocolate was rich, flaky, and made with bracingly bitter chocolate. And the cardamom buns were powerfully spiced, sweet and fragrant.
Dinner at Jatak
Should you take a two-year-old to a three-hour tasting menu? Probably not. Should you leave Copenhagen without sampling its famous fine dining scene? Also no!
I’m really glad we gambled and got to try Jatak, which piqued my interest after Rachel Karten praised it on Instagram. I’m still thinking about certain dishes, like the lobster-stuffed zucchini flower above.
Plus, the staff was so patient and generous with our kid. He declined to eat the beautiful tomato-bedecked noodles the kitchen made for him, but he did eat every bite of the strawberry castella cake.
Dinner at Cleo
We stayed in Norrebro, very near Jatak in fact. Our Airbnb host recommended this neighborhood bistro. It offered dreamy glimpse of the neighborhood, and the prix fixe menu was affordable and packed with delicious dishes, like a stunning corn-mushroom gnocchi and a “pizza bread” focaccia that became my kid’s entire dinner.
Communal Dinner at Folkhuset Absalon
If we’d had more time in Copenhagen, I would have loved to further explore the world of social dining. All over the city, community organizations and restaurants host these affordable dinners around shared tables.
We booked a Tuesday night dinner at a colorful and vibrant community center in a former church. Joining us at our seafoam-green table was a group of female friends, also there for the first time, and who were going to take a ceramics class at the center after. A couple veteran diners helped us navigate the system of ordering drinks at the bar and picking up our shared platters of food.
The meal began with the head cook leading a communal stretching session and then inviting us to tell the person to our right the last time we did something that scared us. I think I said: Traveling here with my kid!
The food was delicious: fresh focaccia, broccoli tossed in a miso sauce, and a lentil-tomato soup. It wasn’t quite like restaurant food, and it wasn’t quite like home cooked food either. More like the best possible version of a college vegetarian potluck, one where everyone knew about seasoning.
A few different times on the trip, when I mentioned I was from Los Angeles, someone responded, “I heard the food is great there! But it’s so hard to get around.” And I’d say, yep, that’s about right.
The hard-to-get-around thing goes beyond the headaches of traffic. Los Angeles’s civic life is fairly dysfunctional. There’s plenty of communal life here, but it’s often in private homes. There’s certainly no robust tradition of social dining.
So even though the social dining wasn’t the best meal I had, it’s the one that’s stuck with me. It felt of a piece with the other aspects of Copenhagen that I couldn’t find at home: the trains that came every four minutes, from platforms where the elevator worked every time. The buses that ran every five minutes. The public playground with bikes for kids to ride and giant legos they could use to build playhouses. The apartment courtyards with communal sandboxes. The windmills spinning just off the shore. The bikes. All of the bikes.
When I got home, I felt disappointed that the one thing that is coming from Copenhagen to Los Angeles is… fine dining. It’s a cousin to the disappointment I felt when I re-encountered the robotic taxis endlessly circling my neighborhood after a week of riding around on Copenhagen’s driverless trains. Robotic taxis are impressive! But they’re useful to so few.
July was a big deal for me because I published my first short story in a decade. It’s in the July issue of Lightspeed, and it’s called The Lord of Mars. The story explores the tensions that arise on a private Mars colony when the crew decides to unionize.
This month I also attended my first science fiction convention in a few years, Readercon, where I caught up with old friends and helped playtest a game-in-progress about superintelligences and the mortals just trying to get by in their world. I also got turned on to the Boston-area chain Clover, specifically their zucchini-tofu sandwich, which I ate for three lunches in a row.
Some reading from the month:
More on Copenhagen’s social dining scene
The r/Copenhagen dining guide hasn’t been updated consistently but has some interesting stuff
Alissa on the effort to finally create a long-term plan for Los Angeles’s public spaces, one of the biggest contrasts between here and Copenhagen. I really cannot emphasize how beautiful and FUN the playgrounds were.
As someone who reports on an industry that’s largely teeny-tiny businesses, I found this op-ed on the populist side of advocating for small businesses really interesting
Taco Maria, one of California’s best Mexican restaurants before it closed in 2023, has moved to rural Wisconsin! I’m so curious.
While traveling in Denmark I found myself thinking a lot about this piece on visiting Finland as an American to understand their version of happiness. This comment about the article on Reddit also clarified why the Danish people I chatted with at the playground or over dinner were so quick to praise their social system
Tejal on my favorite new taqueria I’ve tried in Los Angeles, and what more tacos / less borders means during the ongoing ICE raids
Khushbu on her “internet niece,” Renad from Gaza: “Just today Renad posted a video sharing a list of foods she has not tasted in 5 months. The list is filled with staples we take for granted: eggs, milk, fruit, lemons, onions, garlic. Chocolate. Cheese.”
If you’ve read this far, allow me to share a few more general recs from Copenhagen.
A touristy boat tour was surprisingly fun. Go to Apollo Bar for lunch after.
Tivoli is the best of weird, vintage Disneyland without all the other overwhelming stuff, plus it’s in the middle of the city, not in Anaheim!
We spent exactly one hour at the Louisiana Museum, 10 minutes of which involved a toddler meltdown, and it was still one of the most best museums I’ve ever been to.
This was our Airbnb, someone’s beautifully designed actual home packed with toys.
Reffen market is a great waterfront scene
That’s it! Thank you for reading.
Meghan
