I’ve spent the last three weeks in Denmark, longer than I expected, but I haven’t regretted it a bit. When I originally mapped out my travel I thought I’d be here about a week; I’m planning a larp in the United Kingdom in 2022¹ and assumed I’d be conducting a site visit in late August. But travel restrictions meant my codesigner couldn’t visit without quarantining on the way back, and I was getting nervous about getting locked out of my next stop — Iceland — if I went.² So I just planned to stay put through end of the month.

I had been looking forward to spending time someplace that felt a little more sane in its COVID policies, but even here it looks like people are declaring victory. Within a week of my arrival the government cancelled all socially distancing and even removed all mask requirements on public transit.³ You’re required to provide your Corona passport to eat in restaurants — I’ve been using my vaccination card, which has been accepted everywhere — and I guess nightclubs and discos are closed, not that I’ve tried to get in anywhere. Other than that, things seem to be more-or-less normal, to a first approximation.

My extended time here has given me a chance to see more of the country than I’ve seen before. I started out with one week in Copenhagen and spent the subsequent two traveling around, to Odense, all the way up to North Jutland, way to the east to Bornholm, then back for a couple days in Copenhagen. In past years I’ve only been through for larp conventions and larps, most of which seem to run in the fall or winter,⁴ so wandering through during the summer is a rare opportunity.

Copenhagen was — as always — a delight to visit, moreso since I didn’t have any immediate demands on my time. I caught up with friends in person, visited far too many museums,⁵ and just in general enjoyed my time in the city. The Danish capital feels neat and tidy in a way most large cities don’t. The most recent points of reference I have — Amsterdam, Dublin, and London — are all messy and loud and confusing compared to Copenhagen.

In contrast, the few weeks afterwards traveling through more rural environs⁶ gave me more insight into Danish culture. There’s lots of romanticizing the sea, from all the Viking museums to the paintings of storm-wracked beach landscapes to the mermaid imagery everywhere. And you can get glimpses of that in Copenhagen, but it hits quite a bit harder when you’re standing on a spit of beach in Grenen watching waves crash into one another while the wind whips sand past your face. Maybe that dichotomy, between the coziness of Copenhagen and the wilds of Jutland, is part of what makes Denmark feel so well-adjusted. It probably helps keep you sane if you’re constantly confronted with reminders of both civilization and its discontents.

I was in Denmark because of a restaurant called Noma. Noma has shown up on “best restaurant in the world” lists since it opened — typically ranked first or second⁷ — and it’s been on my list of places to visit for years. But it’s also one of these places that’s tricky to score a reservation for, and furthermore they’ve divided the menu into three “seasons” and the summer season is the vegetable one. So it’s never worked out.

But I was in lockdown in April when I booked travel to Norway for early October, and it occurred to me I’d be at least in the neighborhood right at the end of Noma’s vegetarian menu. So I put myself down on the waitlist for September. And then I put myself down for the waitlist in August as well. And then a spot became available in early August with about five minutes to decide if I wanted it, and I kind of panicked and booked it.⁸

The experience was incredible. Noma’s famous for incorporating local ingredients, and by local they often mean from the garden that surrounds the restaurant, which you walk through on your way to the entrance.⁹ And that philosophy is deeply woven into the experience — for at least some period of time olive oil, lemon juice, and tomatoes were all banned from the kitchen.¹⁰

I could launch into the typical food-reviewer-speak, but while I may be the sort of person who takes pictures of each dish¹¹ there’s little point in trying to describe them. Trust me when I say the food was amazing. Daringly designed, perfectly prepared. Every course was enchanting.¹² The funny thing, though, is that Noma wasn’t a transcendent experience solely because of the food. Maybe it was even great despite the food.

Many of the places we buy food at, day-to-day, are strictly about getting calories in your mouth: Starbucks, or Burger King, or 7-11, or the “Grab and Go” sections at the front of your local grocery store. Some of it’s better and some of it’s better for you, but no one looks for or expects a culinary experience from it. You’re in a hurry. It’s there. That’s enough.

The next step up are casual restaurants. Most locally owned and family restaurants go here, along with chains like TGI Fridays¹³ or Applebee’s¹⁴ all the way up to places like Cheesecake Factory or California Pizza Kitchen, where the food’s generally okay — maybe even good — but it’s more about sitting down and relaxing and having someone cook for you. It’s about the experience, in other words. That’s clearest in places like Hooters or Rainforest Cafe, where the food obviously isn’t the real attraction.

Above that is fine dining, and that’s where it becomes significantly about the food. I’m thinking back to the fancy places I’ve eaten — Arpège, Gramercy Tavern, Per Se — and while all of them were certainly curating the experience, the experience was their interpretation of what “fancy dining” was. I’ve eaten several times at Gramercy Tavern, and one of the things that stood out (or deliberately failed to) was the elegant, subdued decor and chill but impeccable service. Those elements are muted so the food stands out. And that trend extends to the sort of celebrated chefs who reject fine dining, like David Chang with Momofuku Noodle Bar. It really is all about the noodles, there.

What’s fascinating about Noma, to me, is that it feels like it’s trying something different. Sure, it’s a fancy upscale restaurant. But it’s interested in questioning what that even means. It challenges your expectations and pushes, if gently, your boundaries.¹⁵ The restaurant wants you to at least reconsider your relationship to food; to make you understand the connections between the garden you passed through outside and the flowers that ended up on your plate and the small army of cooks and waitstaff that greeted you as you walked through the kitchen on the way in. The food is an elemental part of that, but it’s just one small piece of what they’re up to. They want you to rediscover that joy and amazement you had, biting for the first time into a strawberry or a piece of sushi or an heirloom tomato.

There are other restaurants which do similar things; Alinea, for example, is renowned for confounding its diners with clever gastronomic tricks.¹⁶ But I think the real spiritual predecessor is Chez Panisse, the revolutionary restaurant founded by Alice Waters over fifty years ago. Chez Panisse was a manifesto for quality ingredients; for simple, well-prepared dishes; for celebrating regional cuisine. Noma’s leaning in very similar directions.

Noma’s expensive, and that by itself means it’s not for everybody.¹⁷ But it’s maybe the one really expensive restaurant I’d recommend to people who don’t consider themselves foodies. The food is sublime. But the experience of the meal really sets it apart. It’s one of the very few meals I’ve had that I’ve found myself thinking about long afterwards. It raised questions that I’m still mulling over. I see the world a little differently. That alone makes it worth the price of admission.

Spending this much time in Denmark¹⁸ makes me wonder why I don’t stay put longer. And then I count the days I’ve spent in Schengen so far and I remember. I can’t stay too long on a tourist visa, not without removing my ability to visit other places in Europe. It’s just the way it works.

I’ve spent just under six weeks in Schengen since I arrived back in July. I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Iceland so that’ll be another ten days, and I’m spending roughly another two weeks in Norway for Knutepunkt at the beginning of October. That’ll leave me with a grand total of 21 days until I start regaining time on my visa in February.

Travel’s still iffy enough that I haven’t made plans for the winter yet;¹⁹ I still don’t know where I’ll be over Christmas and I guess I’m waiting to see how places look through the fall. There’s no sense booking anything before I get a sense of if and when we’re likely to go back into lockdowns.

The Danish²⁰ concept of hygge had kind of a breakthrough cultural moment in the United States about five years back. You started to see home design stores and magazines like Good Housekeeping²¹ talking about it a lot. I was reminded about it when I visited the Danish Architecture Center,²² and it kind of encapsulated a lot about what made Denmark feel so comfortable.

Hygge is hard to translate exactly into English; in the United States it mostly means cozy and comfortable, like thick woolen socks and snuggling in front of a warm fire. The meaning is properly broader than that — a feeling of conviviality and friendly togetherness, less about stuff and more about being with other people. But the DAC was arguing there’s a still broader community sense, where a well-designed city incorporates those principles to provide support for everybody and encourage civic-mindedness. You could as reasonably talk about a hygge bike path or traffic intersection as you could a hygge mug of cocoa.

I mentioned this to a number of Danes and reception was somewhat mixed, but I do think it was getting at something critical to Denmark. There’s a lot of thought put into community design, of integrating architecture and transportation and public spaces around people first and foremost. And that only works if the community buys in as well, and they do — to a greater extent than most of the United States, anyway.

Sometimes that feels a little weird and awkward as a foreigner.²³ But mostly it’s nice. New York City can come across like a large, haphazard mishmash of spaces which are crazy and chaotic and jammed together with the barest of nods to making sense.²⁴ Copenhagen is more seamless. It’s just better thought out, easier to unwind and breathe in. It’s nice to notice.²⁵ It’s even nicer to get to spend a few weeks relaxing in the leisurely bustle of the whole thing. I will miss it.

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Footnotes

¹ And Then There Were None, based on the Agatha Christie novel

² Current Icelandic restrictions say I’d be fine as long as I have a clean COVID-19 test, but at the time I didn’t want to gamble on the restrictions changing while I was wandering through Cumbria.

³ Weirdly, Denmark’s mask restrictions only applied on public transit while you were standing up, not sitting down.

⁴ The cheap season, in other words

⁵ I bought a Copenhagen Card, which gave me five days of free access to 83 different attractions and also covered all public transportation — trains, buses, metro, ferries — up to about an hour outside the city. I went to about a dozen museums.

Part of it was my attempt to stay active and get in better shape since lockdown. And according to the fitness tracker on my phone, I walked 11k steps in February, 14k in April, 125k in June, and 311k in August. So there’s that, at least.

⁶ I guess Aarhus and Odense don’t count as provincial in any sense at all, but they’re decidedly smaller scale than Copenhagen. And while you don’t really have rural areas in Denmark like you might in the United States — it’s compact enough that everything’s basically interconnected by train and bus — places like Skagen, Løkken, and especially Bornholm at least lean bucolic.

⁷ Although it’s never earned more than two Michelin stars, which should remind you to take all these ratings with a grain of salt

⁸ Like a lot of pricey restaurants over the past decade, they require you to pay for your meal up front. You’re buying a ticket for an event, not reserving a spot in case you decide to show up. If you can’t make it, they’ll do what they can, but you’re still on the hook for the money if they can’t replace you.

⁹ We passed a snail on the walk back, steadily making its way across the path from one half of the garden to the other; I helped it across so other diners wouldn’t stumble over it.

¹⁰ To be fair, our meal had some tomatoes and some olives, so at least some of those rules have been relaxed.

¹¹ Discreetly. No flash.

¹² Halfway through we were served a small dish featuring saffron, at which point my dining companion revealed they did not care for saffron at all — and then tasted it, and discovered they adored it. It was that kind of experience.

¹³ shudder

¹⁴ shudder

¹⁵ As an example, it regularly includes insects on its menus. One of my courses was a grilled summer salad with ants sprinkled on top. Not vegetarian, and I opted out of the fish and meat they were serving, but I decided my ethical concerns more-or-less stop short at bugs.

¹⁶ There’s a video online of their edible dessert balloons.

¹⁷ Hour-for-hour, Noma’s roughly comparable to Disney’s newly announced Galactic Starcruiser. I doubt the food’s as good at Disney, although I doubt blue milk will show up at Noma any time soon.

¹⁸ Like the Netherlands before this

¹⁹ I had to find a walk-in PCR COVID test last Wednesday in order to get into Iceland, since they require a negative test. That’s a lot of stress I could have done without.

²⁰ Also Norwegian, but the Danes have really leaned in to it.

²¹ What Is Hygge and How to Make Your Home Cosy for Autumn, 11 Ways to Make Your Life More Hygge, etc.

²² Museum 4 of 14.

²³ I was scolded — literally scolded — by a police officer after I crossed a bike lane against the light. The intersection was completely empty, with perfect visibility and no cars or bicycles for blocks, but they still felt the need to chide me for jaywalking.

²⁴ Which, I mean, it is.

²⁵ NUMTOTs represent!