How the World’s Best Restaurant’s Alumni Have Taken Over Copenhagen

If you care about food culture, you’ve likely fantasized about getting a table at Noma.

The revolutionary Copenhagen restaurant, helmed by star chef René Redzepi, has garnered a staggering amount of accolades, rave reviews, and industry admiration. In fact, Noma was crowned the World’s Best Restaurant so many times in a row the awarding group eventually changed its rules—and Noma won again anyway.

Noma’s status as a pinnacle of culinary innovation and respect reached an even larger audience when it was incessantly name-checked and lionized in The Bear, FX/Hulu’s surprise hit drama about a tatted-up, chain-smoking line cook plagued by his own past.

Redzepi and his restaurant have been so influential for both Danish cuisine and food culture worldwide that clichéd terms like “iconic” and “legendary” actually do seem to apply.

You can add the word “exclusive” to that list because, suffice to say, it’s an incredibly difficult table to snag. I once watched with seething jealousy (and a bit of class-war agitation) as a person seated next to me during a concert at MSG confirmed their Noma reservation via email and bragged to a friend about flying out to Denmark specifically to dine there.

Earlier this fall, I traveled there to check out Aarhus, the country’s second-largest city, which took me by surprise with its incredible food and art. Doing so meant flying in and out of Copenhagen, and so I figured I’d try to get a Noma table while I’m in town. No such luck, of course.

But Noma’s impact on Copenhagen goes far beyond the restaurant. Having Noma on your résumé is a golden ticket of sorts and many staff alumni have stayed in the Danish capital and opened up their own spots—often with a co-sign from Redzepi—that then became top destinations themselves.

Noma alumni-run spots exist at every level of cuisine in the city, from bakeries to pizzerias to burger spots to taco stands to seafood bars to Michelin-favored fine dining. And so with full knowledge that my Noma experience will have to wait (perhaps indefinitely), I spent several days exploring Copenhagen, with assistance from VisitDenmark and its local partners, eating myself silly in the shadow of the famed restaurant.

The first stop on our tour was Bæst, a pizzeria run by Noma’s former sous-chef Christian Puglisi. Located in the heart of the Nørrebro district—a buzzy melting pot named “the world’s coolest neighborhood” by Time Out earlier this year—Bæst demonstrates how the Noma emphasis on ethics, sustainability, locality, and seasonality can even be extended to something as populist as a pizza joint.

All of Bæst’s bread comes from next door at Mirabelle, a stellar organic bakery also run by Puglisi. Every morning upstairs, Bæst’s in-house butchery makes the sausages, hams, and salamis; and a fromager makes hand-stretched fresh mozzarella, ricotta, and stracciatella. Fresh mozz, interestingly, is a rarity in Denmark, and Bæst’s rendition is a near-perfect blend of milky and mild. From the wood-fired oven, we tried a seasonal pie with greens and the house pie with tomato sauce, garlic, and stracciatella—both great. We did, however, deeply regret not getting the pie with smoked mozzarella, ‘nduja sausage, and red onion. Don’t make the same mistake, as we noticed every table savoring over it only after we’d finished our meal.

Other pizzas on the menu include more unique options like one with fermented green tomatoes or one with a whipped salt-cod spread. “We just want to make our own pizza in the best way possible,” Puglisi has said.

The following afternoon we stopped by Torvehallerne, the city’s famed open-air market and food hall. There are plenty of solid options for a bite, including Coffee Collective (which had long but fast-moving lines every day we walked past), Hallernes Smørrebrød for traditional Danish sandwiches, and GRØD’s extensive roster of savory or sweet porridges.

But the main reason we came here was Hija de Sanchez, the taco-stand offshoot of a well-regarded Mexican restaurant from former Noma pastry chef Rosio Sanchez. Her namesake institution serves contemporary Mexican cuisine with some inventive spins like a Jerusalem artichoke tamale with king oyster mushroom mole, while her three more laid-back taquerias scattered throughout Copenhagen serve a rotation of classic tacos. We were in town on a Monday, when most of the city’s restaurants shut down, and so we ate at the taco stand rather than her sit-down eatery.

The house-made tortillas at the taco stand disappointingly crumbled within seconds of becoming vessels, but the fillings were superb: Succulent and tender beef barbacoa; potatoes with a jalapeño salsa and fresh cheese; and a slow-cooked cochinita pibil with a damn-near perfect swirl of sweet, peppery, and acidic flavors.

(Speaking of Sanchez, her husband Martin Ho runs a super-hip natural wine bar in Nørrebro called Pompette, along with its next-door neighbor Poulette, a tiny shop offering just two sandwich options: spicy fried chicken with Kewpie mayo, lettuce, and pickled cukes on a brioche bun; or a deep-fried mapo tofu sando with Sichuan chili oil and a mapo mayo dressing. When the weather’s nice you can take your sandwich over to the wine bar’s outdoor terrace and order a glass to complement the spice. Maybe one day we’ll get a Sanchez-Poulette crossover?)

On our third day in town, we explored the uber-posh Frederiksberg neighborhood with its lush greenery, boutiques, record shops, and “Little Paris” strip, stopping for a lunch of assorted snacks at Hart Bageri, the Redzepi-partnered bakery from Richard Hart, the former—you guessed it—baker at Noma.

The Danes famously love rye bread, but a persistent Hart opened his shop with the intention of turning the locals on to the wonders of a sourdough loaf. As such, the mammoth “city loaf” is a well-known hit, but we snacked on some of Hart’s other wonders: a cardamom pull-apart sticky bun, at once crispy and flaky and savory; and an addictively savory sausage roll topped with an everything bagel-like assortment of caraway, sesame, onion, and cumin. I could have eaten Hart’s pastries for every remaining meal if given the option.

A short walk southeast of that will bring you to Kødbyen, or the Meatpacking District, a cool and confident neighborhood jam-packed with galleries, breweries, eateries, and nightclubs. The restaurant that pioneered the transformation of the area’s abandoned abattoirs into a food-and-drink paradise is Kødbyens Fiskebar, a laid-back seafood bar run by Ander Selmer, a former Noma manager and sommelier.

With a decidedly Noma-like emphasis on daily caught fish, hand-picked shellfish, seasonal recipes, and foraged veggies/herbs, Fiskebar is far from ordinary. There are no gilded seafood towers, no generic cuts of fish grilled to order, no stuffy atmosphere. The space is rough, industrial, and unpretentious.

We plowed through (perhaps too much, he says in hindsight) an assortment of hot and cold appetizers, all delightfully creative and downright delicious: fried whole baby shrimps served “popcorn”-style in rolled-up newspaper with a creamy dipping sauce; thinly sliced raw brill with smoked mussel and burnt onion; scallops with a refreshing cucumber sauce; noodle-like slices of squid in an unbelievably savory chicken broth; and Danish summer peas with smoked cheese, dill, and buttermilk. We had to get greens in there somehow.

By the time the mains—a whole turbot roasted with butter and hazelnuts, a pan-roasted hake filet, and a side of some truly enormous carrots—rolled around, we were absolutely stuffed. Nevertheless, we powered through. And we even got to tour the kitchen, a treat apparently bestowed upon diners who are either lucky or simply just ask.

Back in inner Copenhagen the following afternoon, we stopped by Restaurant Barr, which was fully booked for dinner but has a sleek wooden bar area for walk-ins to partake in some beer, wine, and simple snacks.

Barr opened five years ago as a partnership between Redzepi and his pal, restaurateur Thorsten Schmidt, and is housed in the gorgeous bricked waterfront building that Noma called home from 2003 to 2017. The tasting menu is decidedly meat-heavy, favoring the staple cold-weather dishes of North Sea cuisine, including Danish meatballs, schnitzel, salted waffles, pork ribs and sausages, and duck.

While we only were able to enjoy light snacks and some lambic beer crafted specially for Barr, the smells wafting from the dining room were intoxicating, to say the least.

Elsewhere in the canal-laden Christianshavn neighborhood is POPL Burger, arguably the most peculiar of all the Noma-related spinoffs. The restaurant was originally conceived by Redzepi as a pop-up shop, slinging burgers while Noma was on lockdown at the height of the pandemic, but it has since morphed into a permanent spot.

POPL is focused on the core experimentation of Noma’s food lab: fermentation. Pretty much everything on the menu is fermented. The beef patty? Cooked with beef garum, aka fermented meat sauce—a specialty of Noma wizardry. The vegetarian patty? Made from fermented quinoa. The pickles? “Mildly” fermented. The fries? Fermented potatoes.

All of this fermentation lends itself to some of the most umami flavors you’ll ever experience in something as simple and cheap as a hamburger. Proof that getting a taste of Noma’s legacy is not so out of reach.

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