The CPH Factor
If you’re shopping for an inferiority complex, Copenhagen is a great place to start. Impossibly good looking and enviably progressive, this Nordic “It” city can make the best of us feel as though we were troglodytes. Bicycles outnumber cars, locals swim in pristine downtown waterways, and renegade chefs go foraging in the forest. The city emanates an easy cool that make the brazen boasts of attention-seeking megacities seem, well, positively childish. Dubai can keep its Burj Khalifa; Copenhagen is far too busy perfecting the good life.
If you have any doubt that Copenhagen does it better, wake up in time for rush hour. A modern purgatory in most cities, it’s an enchanting spectacle in the Danish capital. City streets flood with pedaling commuters, from inked hipsters to high-profile government ministers. It’s not a fad; it’s how the locals roll. Almost 40 percent of Copenhageners do their daily trek on a bicycle seat, collectively pedaling more than 1.2 million kilometres each day on 650,000 bikes. Not bad for a city of 1.2 million people. My Copenhagen mornings usually begin in this torrent of two-wheeled virtuosity, one eye on the road ahead, the other on the passing parade of chiseled eye candy. It’s as though I were cycling through a modeling convention. That one city can have so much GQ potential seems unfairly disproportionate, but it’s wholly appreciated.
Fine form is not limited to the city. After all, this bite-size nation gave the world such design greats as Poul Henningsen, Verner Panton, and Arne Jacobsen. Their functional creations grace offices, living rooms, and my rainy-day go-to, the Designmuseum Danmark. Like cycling, good design in Copenhagen is not a happy accident; it’s purposeful intention. You’d be hard-pressed to find a local who didn’t know a Henningsen lamp when she saw one. Chances are, her bedstemor (grandmother) had one hovering above the table. I myself have spent many an afternoon drooling over such classics at Illums Bolighus, a blockbuster design store dedicated to the ergonomic, the beautiful, and the refreshingly useful.
I usually pass Illums Bolighus on my way to TorvehallerneKBH, Copenhagen’s revamped central market. Even this is an aesthetic triumph: two clean-lined glass halls on a cobblestoned square—one packed with produce, cheeses, and seafood plucked from icy seas, and the other lined with prêt-a-manger (ready-to-eat) food stalls, serving everything from seasonal porridge to wood-fired pizzas. The Coffee Collective, a microroastery whose velvety espresso could make your average Neapolitan weep, is always my first stop. It’s a far cry from the days when Copenhagen was a coffee wasteland of beige chains, serving what Italians dub acqua sporca (dirty water). Hailing from the great coffee city of Melbourne, Australia, I felt it was one of my few trump cards in Copenhagen. These days, that card is slipping from my fingers.
TorvehallerneKBH and its army of artisan provedores are emblematic of Copenhagen’s culinary transformation. In fewer than 15 years, the city’s rye–and–starch food scene has bloomed into a culinary wonderland. Driven by sustainability, creativity, and a rediscovered reverence for their own regional bounty, a wave of visionary chefs have created the New Nordic cuisine, food as pure and invigorating as Scandinavia itself.
The undisputed poster child of the New Nordic revolution is Michelin two-star-rated Noma, a place where quail eggs are pickled and smoked and scallops are dehydrated and paired with beechnuts. Their food is enough to make me gasp, swoon, and Instagram, but I don’t want to get too carried away, because it is just one in a growing parade of Copenhagen restaurants reinvigorating the palates of patrons from across the globe. In that crowd is Kadeau, a restaurant I first stumbled across on a research trip to Bornholm, a windswept Baltic island famed for its røgeri (smokehouses). Over a long lunch, Kadeau co-owner Rasmus Kofoed shared with me the virtues of sorrel and their future plans to open a new, year-round Kadeau restaurant in Copenhagen, complete with the original’s soft, rustic elegance. Now, they have. When I am in town, this is where you will find me, quietly marveling at the ingenuity of pairing spelt with pine and at the modesty of the Kadeau owners and their equally lauded peers. No hype, no ego, no attitude—just stunning food.
In a way, these young guns embody the city itself. Despite global accolades, coveted style, extreme ingenuity, and an undeniable X factor, Denmark’s urban overachiever continues to keep it real. Heading back alongside the swimmable harbor, catching the shy smile of a passing cyclist, I humbly concede the obvious: Copenhagen could teach us all a few lessons.
Originally published by 7x7