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A Perfect Vegan Week in Denmark
A gorgeous variety of delicious vegan meals to help fuel all the biking and kayaking you’re going to be doing
You know a country is on the forefront of environmental action when a café cashier points to the water cups and without provocation exclaims, “Don’t worry, those aren’t plastic! They’re made of maize.” This happened to me at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art this summer on my 10th trip to Denmark in 25 years.
There are more pigs than people in this little country, but according to the German-based search engine for vacation rentals, Holidu, Copenhagen is the sixth best city in Europe for vegans, based on the number of eateries in relation to its population of almost six million. Plant-based eating is on the rise here — from Michelin-recognized New Nordic-inspired restaurants down to the open-faced sandwich (smørrebrød ) spreads marked “vegansk” in the local grocery stores and the date-based truffles available in every 7–11 store. In 2017, Danish politicians even took a public “22-day vegan diet challenge.”
It hasn’t always been this way, though. It has long been a challenge for vegan travelers to eat in the country where the national dish is still “stegt flæsk med persille sovs” (fried pork with parsley sauce) and its citizens love their cod, herring, and pølse (bright red boiled pork sausage, sold in street stands). But the new focus on vegetables fits right in with the locally-sourced bio-dynamic precedent set by restaurants such as Noma and the entire country’s commitment to caring for the environment, as seen in the bike-friendly city of Copenhagen and the government’s goal to phase out coal by 2030, replacing it with wind power.
High End
Chef René Redzepi took the culinary world by storm when his two-Michelin-star restaurant Noma first topped the list of S. Pellegrino’s 50 Best Restaurants in 2010 (and later again in 2014). The concept of Nordic terroir emphasizes local, natural, and seasonal ingredients, including much of the formerly overlooked produce of Scandinavia. The restaurant was not vegan but revived an interest in little-used indigenous plants such as sea buckthorn, beets, celeriac, lingonberry, and elder flowers, among others.
