Cool meets cozy
White-hot Refshaleoen: Denmark’s trendiest neighborhood
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — The Oxford Dictionary defines hygge as “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment.” The Danish concept has become so popular that it made the dictionary’s word of the year shortlist in 2016.
I first discover the true meaning of hygge at La Banchina, a 16-seat farm-totable pescatarian restaurant overlooking Copenhagen Harbor. Some in today’s lunch crowd are frolicking in the sea despite the nearfreezing mid-winter temperatures. Others are swirling glasses of natural wine as they peruse the three daily Nordic dishes scribbled in erasable marker on the back window — all of which will be cooked right in front of them so as to create a dialogue with the chef.
La Banchina embodies one of the defining characteristics of Danish culture, yet its setting is anything but cozy.
“When we opened in 2016, there was basically nothing in Refshaleoen,” La Banchina’s manager, Signe Norregaard, said of the neighborhood, which was, until recently, an industrial wasteland.
Refshaleoen (pronounced ref-say-loon) is less than three miles from the city center — a 15-minute bus ride from Copenhagen Central Station. But Norregaard, like most Copenhageners, had never ventured here growing up. She even had to look up directions the first time she came.
A good day at La Banchina in 2016 meant 20 guests. Now, this hygge-infused slice of warehouse-lined Refshaleoen regularly handles 400. Such is the skyrocketing appeal of the unlikely neighborhood as it emerges from the ashes of its industrial past to become Copenhagen’s new capital of cool.
Refshaleoen was, from 1872 to 1996, home to the shipyard of Burmeister & Wain, which at one point was Denmark’s largest employer. An icon of Danish industrial history, the area had been largely closed to the public until about six years ago, when it opened up and reinvented itself as one of Europe’s most innovative neighborhoods. Now, it’s a place for raging music festivals, top New Nordic restaurants and trailblazing displays of sustainable design.
La Banchina lies in the former waiting room of the old shipyard where workers
would clock in for the day. The only new establishment that predates it in Refshaleoen is Amass, an American-owned restaurant in a graffiti-filled warehouse that offers multicourse degustation menus set to hip-hop.
Chef de cuisine Max Bogenmann shows me the 1,075-square-yard urban garden at Amass, where he sources between 15% and 25% of the produce, depending on the season. In the colder months, it might be brimming with cabbages, kales or swiss chards. Over the spring and summer months, you’ll find tomatoes, herbs and berries.
Like its new neighbor Noma — which bagged the No. 1 slot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list four times before relocating to Refshaleoen last year — Amass champions locavorism and sustainability within the cooking industry. It opened a craft brewery in a warehouse across the street in January called Broaden & Build to “look at beer through a chef’s eyes.” Bogenmann said cooks use the offcuts from the restaurant for snacks, while the brews incorporate things such as fruit rinds and surplus herbs.
That same warehouse also houses a genre-defying alcohol company, Empirical Spirits, and a newly opened modern art gallery called Copenhagen Contemporary.
“Were you to ask me five years ago if I thought all food and drinks was moving out to Refshaleoen, I would have said certainly not. It wasn’t a place you came,” Empirical Spirits chief operating officer Ian Moore said. “But it happened and it’s really cool.”
Refshaleoen’s most talked about new feature, CopenHill, is a waste-to-energy plant capable of processing approximately 560,000 tons of waste annually to supply more than 72,000 apartments with heating and 30,000 with electricity. As if that wasn’t impressive enough, the skyline-dominating geometric wedge will also have a ski slope and trail running course on its roof, as well as the world’s tallest manmade climbing wall rising 279 feet up its side.
CopenHill is fantastically outrageous. When complete, it will have a restaurant up top and an area for apres-ski down below, making it the closest thing you can get to a ski resort in the heart of a flat city.
I walk to the opposite side of this post-industrial playground just as the sun is plunging into the harbor. My destination is CopenHot, an oh-so Scandinavian sauna complex on the neighborhood’s northern edge.
CopenHot is a true Nordic wonderland with one sauna, two “sailing spas” and a halfdozen hot tubs. Lit by billowing bonfires when I arrive, it’s yet another hygge-infused place built for harnessing those prized Danish feelings of wellness and contentment. It strikes me that, for such a gritty area, Refshaleoen has become improbably cozy.