Kongens Nytorv 8, 1050 Copenhagen (00 45 33 13 37 13). Meal for two, including wine and service, £180
If you paid too much attention to people like me, you would think Copenhagen has just one restaurant, a place called Noma where they do things with milk skin, the fluff foraged from their own navels, and the sort of bitter leaves most of us would extinguish as weeds. Of course, Noma is there, and much of the above is true. It's also brilliant: a hardcore, take-no-prisoners, bonkers restaurant you almost certainly won't get into because they now get thousands of requests for tables that they cannot satisfy. Them's the breaks.
That said, you can still get a taste of Noma, not that chefs in Copenhagen would thank me for saying so. They would insist that there has been a major revival in Nordic food over the past decade of which Noma is merely a part, and this is true. Sweden in particular is now thronged with restaurants run by big hairy men who like dragging animals through the dining room by their horns, sawing at thigh bones then doing dainty stuff with lingonberries and sorrel to go with it.
Bo Bech in particular would spit in my direction if I were to suggest he was labouring under the shadow of Noma and its chef René Redzepi, and, given his size, he'd probably manage to hit me from there. He's a huge man, with big shoulders, a scrub of beard and a fierce expression. Still, as an accessible example of what New Nordic means, Bech's recently opened restaurant, Geist, is not a bad primer. It is a huge, dark and shiny site, full of polished stone and wrought metal. It is, by Copenhagen standards, reasonably priced, which is to say it's kill-me-now expensive. Starters cost between £12 and £20; mains flirt with £30 then have their wicked way with it. The cheapest wine is £35 a bottle. Danish alcoholics shouldn't get treatment; they should get a medal for being able to afford the habit.
What this money buys you is a roller coaster of a meal with great highs and awful lows, but most of all an all-pervading love of local ingredients. There are places in Britain that display the same interest, but most wear their commitment to seasonal and local like hoodies do their Nike. For example, a Geist dish of finely sliced but crunchy courgettes with tiny raw fjord prawns was just two local ingredients dancing perfectly together. Butter-rich mashed potato, topped with brown stone-crab meat would have been completely luscious were it not for the application of a salted butter foam that risked overwhelming it. Even so, the potato crab mix felt like something I could happily bathe in. Long-cooked suckling pig, the meat a mess of tangled flesh and jewels of fat, served with blackened spring onions, was all the best things of the season on a plate.
But there were missteps. Tiny lambs' kidneys were perfectly cooked, but putting them with cherries was an idea that should have been sorted out with a Jungian analyst, not foisted upon diners. The fact that sliced cherries look like rare kidneys is no excuse. A truly brilliant tranche of smoked eel was buried beneath a compost of bitter endive and did not benefit from the addition of white chocolate. Spinach with sorrel and herbs was an unconscionable amount of money for a mediocre warm salad.
Desserts were more even. Vanilla ice cream with dried black olive and English liquorice did the salty-sweet trick very nicely. Even better was a thin, crisped disc of porous bread over a light, sweet cream, sprinkled thickly with grated milk chocolate.
It's obvious that our filthily expensive meal at Geist was less than consistent, but for anyone intrigued by where food is going right now, it does represent some of the strengths of the contemporary eating opportunities in the countries of the north. It will completely bankrupt you, but at least you may eat well.
