Space bread, installations that are appropriate for the Tate Modern, a planetarium that fires out ever-changing scenes, a disruption of fine-dining rhythms, and a chef who wants to eventually take diners to space – there is no place quite like it
Words: Josh Lee
Let’s get one thing straight about Alchemist, the experimental Copenhagen restaurant – if you can even call it a restaurant – where a meal starts at little over £600 a head: it’s the closest you’ll ever get to an acid trip without actually taking a psychedelic. There are nettle-fed butterflies served on leaves made of parsley, spinach and juiced kale. A dish called Space Bread resembles a fragment of moon rock and is composed of a delicate freeze-dried meringue of soy, spread with a tiny heap of caviar. The cocktail that’s sweetened with lime, honeydew melon and some coconut emits a glow when served in the dark, the gentle light courtesy of the bioluminescent jellyfish powder that it’s mixed with.
You’ll be whisked into live-art performances across scores of rooms, and the wine cellar looks as though it stretches to infinity, like the gun rack scene in The Matrix. Water kefir – peach, vanilla and fig; blueberry and fermented Pu’er tea – is served with the same reverence that a sommelier elsewhere would give to the rarest cuvée.
The planetarium dome, the style of which you haven’t seen since a lower-school trip to the neighbouring town, fades to different landscapes throughout the evening – in the ocean, cherry blossoms, the Northern Lights, and what seems to be a riff on an Escher – and the candyfloss dumpling sings with the soft, joyful flavours of wasanbon, nam jim and pak choi.
Rasmus Munk, the lead chef at Alchemist. All imagery courtesy of Alchemist
The hand-sculpted bronze doors of the restaurant entrance
For quite some time, Copenhagen has been a pretty magnificent place to eat out, a hot streak that many have credited to René Redzepi, the chef-owner of Noma who turned wild herbs and strange greens and the tart burst of sea buckthorn into artistic pleasures. Other cooks – Rasmus Kofoed, at Geranium; Nicolai Nørregaard, at Kadeau – have also been lynchpins in popularising Nordic naturalism, serving raw shrimp with hazelnut milk and turning whole meals into loving narratives and homilies about the landscape. Rosio Sánchez (a product of the Noma line) has also done wonderful things to showcase great Mexican food on the continent, and Kristian Baumann’s (another Noma acolyte) Korean-inspired fine-diner, Koan, is just spectacular.
The ‘taste wall’, located in one of Alchemist’s many kitchens
If you are in Copenhagen to eat, Alchemist seems to be the real talk of the town these days, a destination that, from the outside, looks equal parts modern-art exhibition, Alexander McQueen runway, sci-fi feature and destination where you can get something to eat. As contemporary trends go, the notion of dining as theatre has become a clichéd notion, and any menu that lists cocktails that foam or a skillet of endangered puffin served nine ways has been proclaimed to pack a modernist punch, yet it is perhaps still most appropriate to understand Alchemist – whose genre-stretching operation is less of a cushioned pleasure and more of an avant-garde incubator that brings together high-tone arts, social commentary and a genreless menu into a coherent rhythm – through a lens often reserved for stage drama. It is a ‘holistic cuisine,’ as lead chef Rasmus Munk puts it.
A dish titled Hunger, made of thinly cut rabbit and colourful petals
Hardwired to pushing the envelope on what food can be – in much the same way that the exotic cubes and transparent raviolis coming out of San Sebastián and El Bulli in the 1990s supplanted nouvelle cuisine’s purées and Troisgros tropes – Munk, following meetings with a dramaturg, queried why his world, the one of carbon-steel pans and knife scores, had never successfully incorporated other creative disciplines without the whole experience becoming a circus or losing track of the ingredients.
For Munk, the goal is bigger than gaining stars and moving up rankings (it currently sits at No.8 on the World’s Best list), and he choreographs his restaurant in a specific way so that diners leave feeling provoked and with societal issues on the mind: not only sustainability and zero waste (the butterfly served is said to be a possible alternative to chicken and beef, as it has almost three times the protein content), but also topics such as invasive species (king crab, overly popular on Nordic coastlines and a destroyer of fishing nets, is pan-seared with a farce of lobster claws, shallots, scallops and citrus, and is served with bread that’s been hit with a brush of shrimp paste) and the harvesting of personal information (for the Instagram-obsessed, you’ve likely seen the lacquered eyeball prop – a reference to 1984’s Big Brother – filled with a cream that folds in corn, lobster tartare, chanterelles and sourdough croutons and is overlaid with some caviar).
The various projections shown in the planetarium room
Munk also has manifold projects that extend beyond his restaurant walls; he’s currently working with Børneriget, a near-complete children’s hospital in Copenhagen, to create soft-textured instant meals for cancer patients whose chemotherapy has caused mouth sores; it’s also been announced that, next year, he’ll be taking six guests to the edge of space for a ‘stratospheric dining’ experience.
So, when you’ve made your way to Alchemist, stationed on the raw edges of the city, a post-apocalyptic-looking enclave of street food, behemoth warehouses and contemporary-art shows, you’ll be dropped off in front of a heavy door made of hand-sculpted bronze, a feature that appears to have been smuggled straight from a Game of Thrones set. You’ll edge through the opening, going from daylight into darkness. The host, in the usual routine of a multi-course restaurant, will take your name, remind you that flash photography is not permitted, and have you stop short before you’re finally sent into the first part of the night (each stage of the meal is sectioned out into what the restaurant calls Impressions, and there are usually 50 altogether).
A dish titled Dumpling, made with wasanbon, nam jim and pak choi
A dish titled The Perfect Omelette, an egg yolk membrane flooded with egg yolk and Comté-cheese cream
Depending on when you visit, your first encounter may have been with a solo violinist, or walls covered in murals that salute to the visual brilliance of New York, or a stage performer who takes you through a trance-like routine. You’ll be moved to the lounge area, where front-row seats offer a view into the test lab, the scene of which looks like a mashup between an operating theatre and a Top Chef montage. In the planetarium, a huge, colossal space the scale of a school gym, you’ll be served a little bowl that’s as dark as Donald Trump’s heart, filled with a purée of foie gras and sea urchin, with a cracker disc of caramelised crab bisque. A lobster claw is deep-fried in a batter of corn starch and vodka – the world’s most aerated bread, according to the restaurant – and is given a coating of fermented-tomato dust. What’s called Plastic Fantastic – a remark on ocean trash – makes use of algae and collagen from fish skin and is fashioned like a discarded sweet wrapper. (It may also remind you of Osteria Francescana chef Massimo Bottura, whose dish, Mediterranean Sole, is intended to evoke burnt parchment paper.) Finely sliced rabbit is draped over a small skeletal prop, studded with colourful petals. The music that fades in and out of the evening has the soft soundscape you’d find in a spa, a waiting area or a Stanley Kubrick feature.
Come here and you’ll feel as though Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s big-screen abstraction raved about for its hyperactive narrative, is child’s play.
A cocktail titled Cheers, which glows in the dark thanks to bioluminescent jellyfish powder
An earlier version of the restaurant’s Space Bread
Yet, although Munk doesn’t so much admit it himself, and at odds with his wildly radical propositions, you get the feeling that he’s still a chef’s chef. His upbringing, in Randers, Jutland, didn’t so much comprise the debauchee type of screwball solipsism you might associate with cooks committed to dismembering restaurant norms: he did culinary school, he did time doing the prep and working the line, and he scootered all over Denmark undertaking non-paying kitchen labour. He learned how to transform food through the application of heat before he even touched a pair of tweezers, and, at a time when he could’ve continued to do conventional fine-dining work, he dropped it all to push the perimeters.
Chef Rasmus Munk brainstorming new dishes
And so, even with his nonconventional vision, his Perfect Omelette – an egg yolk membrane flooded with egg yolk and Comté-cheese cream, topped with a wafer slice of pork jowl, a pattern of black truffle, and butter infused, via ultrasound, with black pepper – is still anchored by a homely, lustworthy quality; the Sunburnt Bikini might have you thinking of the greatest ham-and-cheese toastie you’ve ever consumed on a long weekend in Barcelona; and though the Burnout Chicken is a bold statement of a course – arranged in a cage, on a small bed of hay, as a comment on battery farming – it will still freeze you in place as it rings with a familiar poultry hit.
When you’ve done the hours under the dome, been ushered into another installation, toured the service kitchen, and ascended further up the restaurant, all will feel a little hazy. There will be a dessert that resembles amber, in which a red wood ant is suspended in a candy of Tasmanian-honey and ginger, with a crackling exterior of sugar and beeswax; a cube of solidified margarita mix; and some pretty easygoing servings of chocolate – Munk, despite the hours of mental turbulence he dishes out, is not averse to a soft landing.
At the end of the evening, the length of which will likely last the duration of a trans-Atlantic flight, you’ll be shot down the levels in an elevator, you’ll put your wool coat over your shoulders and you’ll sync back into normalcy.
You’re safe and back to Earth – and life will never be the same.
Want more restaurant content? Read our review of Sushi Kanesaka at 45 Park Lane…
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