You are not to think you’re anyone special, or that you’re better than others. That’s the first rule for a happy life in Denmark. It’s a concept they call Janteloven: the idea that a good Danish citizen shouldn’t flaunt too much individuality, wealth or success.
This, naturally, inspires two thoughts in the mind of the honest Brit. 1) Oh, you Scandis think you’re better than me, do you, with your humility and generous welfare state? And 2) OK. Then why are there so many restaurants in Copenhagen where you won’t escape for less than £500 a head?
Well, primarily it’s Noma’s fault. Twenty years of having the world’s best restaurant in town pulls other top chefs in. But according to the jet-set set, Noma is now past its prime. Plus it’s about to reinvent itself as an even more po-faced food laboratory. Everyone who is anyone — or at least whose bank account says they might be — is going to Geranium instead.
Which brings me to the second factor at play: these restaurants aren’t for locals. On the night I eat there, only two of the twelve tables are populated by Danes. The locals I speak to laugh at the very idea of going.
No, these places are for the type of people who fly in from Taiwan, eat lunch at Geranium and are back on the plane by evening, as a waiter here tells me one table did. Try to get a table at Geranium and you’ll fast be disabused of any notion that Scandi cooking is losing its supremacy. The global super-rich are still flooding in.
Advertisement
Yet there’s an element of Scandinavian understatement here. That might seem like a deranged thing to say when your only option is an 18-course tasting menu for £481, but it’s true: the place named best restaurant in the world in 2022 is located on the top floor of an innocuous office block, dumped in the middle of a grey car park, sandwiched alongside the national football stadium like a pie and mash shop. Inside, it’s sleek and modern, a sea of beige and pale wood. To a British eye, there’s something of the regional hotel conference room about it.
For some courses they have you eating with your hands. A spongy buttermilk bread pancake with a film of truffle and foraged wild garlic. Or a springy potato waffle that you smear with sour cream and pickled walnut leaves. As you rip into the thing, you could almost be breaking bread with your socialist brothers, but for the fact you’re spooning a fat pot of gold caviar on top.
“Some places want to make a carrot taste like a radish,” the co-owner Soren Ledet, who used to work at Noma, tells me. “We want to make it taste like the best carrot you ever ate.”
He’s done it: a carrot sorbet with a white chocolate panna cotta-type cream, an intricate crystallised carrot cutout perched on top like a stained- glass window. Eating it makes me want to cry, which is also a deranged thing to say. But eating at Geranium seems to make you want to come out with a lot of deranged things.
Here’s another: this tastes like simple food, as if each ingredient has just become more of itself. It’s not. As Dolly Parton once said: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Well, it takes a lot of talent to make a menu that tastes this simple. Glance at the open kitchen and you’ll count at least five pairs of tweezers in use. “Boiled beetroot” here means tiny, millimetre-thin, glowing, flower-shaped cutouts of the stuff, dusted in cherry powder and swimming in savoury-sweet horseradish foam. “Sorry, did you say this is just boiled?” I asked a chef in disbelief. She smiled sheepishly: “Ah, sort of. It’s a complicated process.”
Advertisement
I’ll bet. Everyone working here is an obsessive: young people brought in from all over the world the way 16-year-old prodigies are sold to the Premier League. In the open kitchen, there’s none of the shouting and clanging of the Gordon Ramsay school — or indeed of the Noma school, where the head chef, René Redzepi, admitted to bullying staff in the past, and started paying interns after one claimed all she got to do for three months was make beetles out of jam.
Here, the chefs work in silence, moving instinctively around each other like particles in Brownian motion.
Could any dinner be worth this cost? Well, yes. It could. But only if you’re into umami. Wild mushroom soup with dark beer, almost meaty in its richness. Roasted celeriac in a sauce of yeast flakes. Chunky walnuts, cauliflower mousse and sauerkraut foam. Imagine a miso soup you’d be willing to pay a month’s rent for: most of the tasting menu tastes like that.
Among the besuited super-rich, I spotted one man with long scruffy hair and a denim jacket. He had to be the richest person in the room to have the confidence to be that casual. There’s a metaphor there for what Geranium is doing. “You’re not to think you’re anything special” is the rule. These guys are special.
★★★★★
geranium.dk
