In Love

Since I've been back in the States, I can't help but notice how in love certain segments of America seem to be with Copenhagen, Denmark and Scandinavia in general. Here's a general survey. I still can't decide if it makes me more or less 'hjem'-sick...

A search of the New York Times website turns up no less than nine articles that reference the world-renowned Copenhagen restaurant Noma in the past few months alone. You can practically hear the sound of Mark Bittman's drool hitting the pages of the magazine section as he lauds head chef Rene Redzepi as the 'Prince of Denmark' and dishes out Noma-style recipes like Whitefish with Grilled Cabbage and Langoustines with Oysters and Seaweed.



Replace dude in the suit by the window with Me!



A mere month after my return, imagine my surprise to discover that I'd beaten Mr.  Bittman himself to the punch, having had one of my last, best meals in Copenhagen at Restaurant Paustian. To add to the entire feeling of deja vu, the photograph featured in the article shows the exact table I sat at. And my very same waitress!



And not to single out NYT or Mr. Bittman for their unabashed obsession, other food magazines have similarly jumped on the bandwagon. The January 2012 Food & Wine magazine features a love-fest between the aforementioned Mr. Redzepi and California chef Daniel Patterson in which they tinker around the kitchen creating new recipes. 


This is how exciting it is to be Danish!



I found the whole article a bit alienating. Despite my love of cooking and food, I couldn't quite muster up the same high-five slapping enthusiasm for dishes like Brown Butter Chicken Jus with Citrus and Greens, in which each diner is allotted exactly three walnut pieces and about six leaves of parsley as garnish. According to Redzepi, "A recipe is like when you buy an Ikea closet with maddening instructions. You need to bring some common sense to it." An interesting parallel, given that a meal at his restaurant including wine will cost you about as much as Ikea's most expensive closet... though it also explains why there are so many courses as it must take a lot to fill up if you replace all the meat with a suggestion or hint of meat.

Interesting for entirely different reasons was a September 2011 Bon Appetit article on an obscure restaurant in the wilds of Sweden and yet another chef obsessed with scraping things off the forest floor and eating them. The article didn't entirely convince me of the chef's overall sanity, however I did come away with an appreciation for his up-front honesty, a characteristic I've found universal among the many Scandinavians I've known and encountered:

'A rickety old ice cream maker was delivered to the center of the dining room and loudly cranked. Again, we all looked. "I deliberately don't take care of my ice cream maker so it will make a lot of eeer-awww, eeeeh-errrkk sounds," Magnus Nilsson says with a sly, faint smile.'

The entire Viking-worship phenomenon isn't just limited to food and restaurants. Here's a bunch of other stuff I've run into:

Town & Country's December 2011 issue featured a small article on blogger Mikael Colville-Andersen and his championing of the 'citizen cyclist'. Copenhagen Cycle Chic is a fun blog that gives a great sense of Danish bicycle culture, fashion and the amazing number of things that can be done with, by or on a bike. While it did bring back my nostalgia for riding on the back of a bicycle through the city, it did not convince me that drop crotch pants should be as universally adopted.

Elle Decor's November 2011 edition features a Stockholm apartment that could be similarly found in the tonier 'burbs of Copenhagen. Good move not featuring the bathroom in the photo shoot as there's nothing glamorous about showering standing over your own toilet.

An article on a Danish art collective's recent project in New York City caught my attention, not so much for its daring, as for the name of the artist interviewed - Bjørnstjerne. For a country with such strict naming rules, I'm surprised they let "Bear-Star" fly...

The entire Design Within Reach catalog is like taking a stroll through a Danish design museum, though I'm not exactly sure whose reach they're referring to by carrying a $15,000 sofa.


Why all this love? My favorite explanation comes from journalist and author Joel Stein's column for Food & Wine magazine's Nordic trendspotting piece:

Nordic Food: Ikea is Forever

Humorist Joel Stein ponders our Scandi-centric moment, as we eat skyr, watch Nordic chefs and worship prefab furniture.

When money is flowing and times are like a Jimmy Buffett song, we tend to think of heading south. To less stressful places with charmingly lax laws, fruity cocktails and warm azure water lapping upon us. These are cocky thoughts. They are 2006 thoughts. In 2011, we find ourselves thinking of all things Nordic. Of mittens and mutton. Of stylish sturdiness.

So we are hunkering down, longing to eat at places like Copenhagen’s Noma—easily the most influential restaurant in the world, converting chefs into micro-localists, foraging lichen in their basement and curing musk ox. Platters of toro sashimi might not be around in 10 years, but you can be sure there will be lichen and musk ox after the apes take over.

Scandinavia is about resilience, hardiness, a cool edginess. It all makes sense right now; we want to simplify. To drink clear, hard liquors (aquavit) and listen to spare pop songs (Lykke Li). We trust these things in times of trouble. Because no matter how low the NASDAQ falls, you can always buy things at Ikea. And when they break, you can buy more.

Some Days I Just Dream of Moving In

For anyone else as unfamiliar with IKEA as I was before I moved to Copenhagen, here are a few more pictures from the 55 square meter concept house (that's just under 600 square feet for all you metric-challenged folks).

Honestly, some days I just dream of moving in... but wait, didn't some guy already do that?

Waxing Philosophical About a Big Box Store

I couldn't really give this post devoted to IKEA a number on the list. That's not to say I won't come back to it later but first of all, technically, IKEA is Swedish. Secondly, in the absence of polling average Danes on the street, my Google search "Do Danes like IKEA?" popped up a number of articles from a couple years ago about how Danes felt insulted that IKEA named all their lesser household furnishings after their towns while other Nordic coutries got to grace their more upscale furniture. They literally felt like Danish doormats. You can read all about it here.

As an American who never had the privilege of living near an IKEA, I never really got IKEA. Now living in Denmark, I'm not even sure I would have totally gotten IKEA even if I had. Growing up and well into my adulthood, I only knew of IKEA as a place that had cheap stuff. I think a lot of Americans have that idea about the store and they're not wrong per se but they're really missing out on so much more.



A fateful trip to Scandinavia's second largest IKEA

Americans have a real addiction to cheap stuff. It's a defining quality that we look for in our shopping experience, always hunting for bargains, sometimes to the point of insanity as evidenced by Black Friday stampedes and such. IKEA is an interesting social commentary on how Scandinavians do view cost as a decision-making factor but refuse to sacrifice quality, aesthetics, efficiency and functionality in the process.

I didn't fully appreciate the devotion to form and function that IKEA takes until I visited for the first time. Walking through our now local store, I came across "concept apartments" - fully decked out, functionally operational, liveable spaces. But here's the IKEA catch. These demo dwellings are roughly 270 sq ft for a single person, 375 sq ft for a couple and a  palatial 590 sq ft that's set up for a family with a young child. And yes, this is including a bathroom and kitchen! To most Americans, this would be viewed as either a funny joke or some granola-crunchy grad student's master's thesis.

Could you live like this?

And why not laugh away? America lives large. We're not used to thinking about form and functionality in our daily lives. We have so much excess square footage to fill that we don't care if it saves space as long as it saves money. When we do have the luxury of thinking thoughtfully about design and sustainability, it's often in these odd American paradoxes like the Boulder, Colorado, question of how to get a 9,400 square foot mansion to have as small an ecological footprint as possible.

But here in Copenhagen, these are not just hypothetical questions or philisophical debates. It's reality. Whole families live in apartments and houses the size of the average American garage. Owning less stuff isn't a campaign or New Year's resolution, it's a practical solution when having to face sleeping on your balcony because you have too much stuff in your two-room apartment.


Prepared for overwhelmed Americans with a room to lay down

So I think I finally get IKEA. Unlike Wal-mart where everything is just plain cheap, IKEA is cheap with a purpose, with a world-view, with style. Maybe in America we won't learn to restrain ourselves until we are truly constrained in the economic and physical ways that Europe is. That won't stop me from hoping or trying to adopt this new way of living. Besides, when's the last time you heard yourself say, "I just went to Wal-Mart and, man, it was mind-blowing!"