Wonderful Copenhagen part III

Jim Gaffigan once said, “going on vacation is just eating in a place you’ve never been.”

While planning our trip to Copenhagen, we dreamt of cafes and pastries — after all, this is where danishes came from, right? Pastries in Denmark go far beyond danishes, however, and I’m frankly shocked that of all the pastries to choose from, the rest of the world adopted the most boring one.

If you throw a rock in Copenhagen, you’ll hit a bakery. Our apartment in Amager was a five-minute walk from at least two. Every morning after we had our showers and a coffee, we’d shuffle around the corner to Lagkagehuset for a pastry, determined to try every single one by the end of our vacation.

Denmark’s locally famous pastry is the Kanelsnegle, a.k.a. Cinnamon Snail. It’s less cakey and more flakey than the standard Americanized cinnamon bun, and it’s delicious. A lot of Danish pastry methods actually come from Austria, when Viennese migrants came to Denmark in the 19th Century and brought with them their yeast-levened, 27-times-folded bread recipes.

Our personal favourite is the Direktorsnegl (Boss Snail). It’s like a cinnamon roll, but with a butter cookie base, and drizzled in chocolate. It’s a crime that we can’t find any in Canada. We found recipes online, and they’re extremely complex, but by god it’s worth a shot someday.

Our apartment was also close to a handful of grocery stores, which was ideal for stocking our kitchenette with the essentials. Even though English is widely spoken in Denmark, it’s still secondary to Danish, so grocery shopping involved at least some Google Translate usage as all the labels were in Danish. We did find, however, that written Danish is a tiny bit phonetically similar to spoken English, so we could at least estimate what certain words meant on our own.

In addition to yummy baked goods, Denmark is rife with hot dogs. There’s a hot dog stand on every corner, even in the airport. Plain, covered in pickles and onions, or shoved into a hollowed-out baguette, the Danish hot dog experience is surprisingly diverse. We both had the baguette dog (Franske/French hot dog) from the stand at our nearest Metro station, and found it quite tasty and worth the hype.

My research of restaurants in Denmark spanned YouTube and Tiktok at first, then we learned that Copenhagen had actually been showcased on a Netflix series. Somebody Feed Phil has TV writer Philip Rosenthal eating his way around the world, and Copenhagen is featured in season 2, episode 4.

Scandinavia isn’t all quick bites and street meat. We dined at some fabulous sit-down restaurants. Pincho Nation is a circus-themed restaurant that is app-based in both senses of the word. You order appetizers using their mobile app instead of a traditional menu. It’s a gimmick, but it works. It was particularly apt to visit after spending all day at Tivoli.

Stix and Sushi was a Japanese restaurant right by our apartment (we really were in a prime location). We ate dinner there twice, bookending our vacation with sushi rolls and yakitori skewers — a combination we don’t really see much of at our local sushi establishments.

Last but not least, our third favourite sit-down meal was Wulff and Konstali, a brunch spot serving up customizable platters of small dishes with near endless possibilities. I had salmon puree, vegan yoghurt with granola, fried eggs, and a chia pudding with coconut and pineapple compote. My husband had a fruit cup, scrambled eggs, sausage links, mini waffles, and cheese with jam. We shared three pastries. It was remarkable.

Copenhagen is making a name for itself as a food mecca, and I am all for it.