I will try to make this short and only tease what we did, if you are interested feed free to comment and I will gladly add more information.

My partner and I share a lot of interestes (I think this might be the reason we have been together for the last 15 years) one of which is food. Our common interest ranges from exploring local specialities to enjoying gourmet food. And Copenhagen was always a very decent foodie destination for us, as we have been here before. And since this holiday is expensive enough, we skipped Noma or Alchemist or any other hip "modern nordic cuisine" venues. Although they are of course worth the visit.

So we asked a couple of chefs we know and read some food blogs and added 3 very interesting restaurants to our schedule.

The first one was Rebel, a Bib Gourmand Bistro which we were told was kind of under the radar with a very relaxed attritute.



The service didn't wear a suit, it was loud and a little hectic. But in a friendly way. And the food was outstanding which I will tray to demonstrate by showing two examples of our 7 course tasting menu.



Danish cottage cheese, smoked peas and roasted pistaccios. Simple, elegent but also very tasteful. Nothing was overbearing the other component and everything was there for a reason: Taste, texture or temperature.



Or the main course: Secreto of Duroc pork, pointed cabbage, green asparagus and potato foam with parsley powder. The meat itself was already very tender and flavourful. But everything was tied together by the foam, which was very fluffy and light. And we may have asked the chef about the ratio to use in the ISI siphon to achieve this consistency and are now able to recreate this component at home. ;-)

The next day we went to the zoo. This was an absolute "Must-Do" as my girlfriend loves Giant Pandas. In fact she adopted the Giant Pandas in Edinburgh from the beginning to the end and we visited Chengdu and even booked the Panda-Experience there to have 30 seconds next to this rather clumsy animals.
How they survive in the wild is still a mystery to me. The one in Copenhagen, for example, climbed a tree and got stuck. And his solution was to fall down.



It was very warm, so most of the animals were ... not active.



Even the pandas. But the zoo is quite nice and a good option if you want to see some rather unusual animals like a tasmanian devil.



After the zoo visit, we thought: Oh, we haven't eaten for hours. Luckily, we had planned this in advance and booked lunch at Carl Nielsen, right in the tourist centre of the city.



This restaurant is famous for its Smørrebrød, open-faced sandwiches, usually consting of buttered rye bread topped with cold cuts. Here an example of what that can look like.



From the left: Herring with cottage cheese, small pickled onions and dill oil, herring with apple slices, quince jelly and thyme and herring with a subtle hint of liquorice and a very intense red onion, also pickled.
Again: Simple yet very tasteful!

A not very wise descision was to ask the waiter if they have an interesting digestif. That opened some sort of rabbit hole, as he was a very knowledgeable Aquavit guy. They even had a special Aquavit for this restaurant.



But hey, we're on holiday, and in the end we're glad to have tried some of the 8+ bottles of aquavit he showed us. But not all of them.
Afterwards we strolled around the city a bit, the sun was shining and we let ourselves drift a little. A kind of ‘city beach’ on a disused harbour basin looked cosy and because we Germans obviously have a seventh sense for it, we found a kiosk with around 100+ craft beers to choose from. After all, there's not much nicer than sitting in the sun by the water with a good drink and that's what we did for an hour or so.





I mentioned that we like to eat out, so we planned another restaurant visit in the evening. We started yesterday with a rather modern, rebellious, unconventional restaurant. For lunch, we then visited a very traditional, old-fashioned and typically Danish restaurant. So basically what's missing is the traditional French gourmet cuisine, right?

And so it's off to the Kong Hans Kælder restaurant, a two Michellin starred restaurant, right next to Kongens Nytorv.



Kong Hans was opened in 1976 and since then, the restaurant has had four chefs: Michel Michaud from 1976 to 1980, Daniel Letz from 1981 to 1996 and Thomas Rode Andersen from 1996 to 2014.
With Daniel Letz, the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star in 1983, which it lost again in spring 2014. Thomas Rode Andersen changed the restaurant's cuisine, which was otherwise based on classic French cuisine, by introducing elements of the Stone Age diet and removing bread and sugar from the menu, for example. Since 1 September 2014, Mark Lundgaard has been head chef and the restaurant has returned to French cuisine. In 2014, a Danish documentary film called "Restaurant Kong Hans - Drømmen om stjernerne" was released, showing the then 30-year-old Mark Lundgaard in his hunt for the lost Michelin star. In 2016, the restaurant was once again awarded a Michelin star. Since 2021 it has two stars and we were curious why.



A rather classic gourmet restaurant ambience with waiters who were quite stiff at first, but warmed up after a while. Perhaps because we always ask technical questions and are always curious about how the dishes are prepared. Or maybe it's simply because we have so much fun doing this and show it (not in a way that bothers others, of course).
Again two examples why this was an absolutely amazing experience.



The classical part of the menu: A very firm and perfectly cooked, very flavoursome turbot, small sautéed mushrooms and a wonderful broth with peas. Topped with caviar. Very french, straight out of the Escoffier book.

And there were also some creative dishes like this one.



Wafer-thin asparagus slices, larger, firmer pieces of asparagus, lightly roasted shallots with a veloute and a soya-lime emulsion.

One of our top 10 gourmet menus so far - everything was very well executed and arranged, all dishes were very tasteful and not too complicated with 20+ components which is overwhelming for us most of the time.
And one last plus for this restaurant: They have a cheese cart!



Again: We tend to connect with the people working at those restaurants, so maybe we were invited to drink some digestif at the bar. Where chef Andersen was also present. This lead to a very short night (totally worth it, if you ask me now - I had a different view back then), because the next day started very early with us going back to CPH.