Noma’s sweet legacy: Copenhagen’s new-wave bakeries
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to Copenhagen
In a city chock-full of fine-dining restaurants, you might think that the place to find alumni from Noma would be in the other Michelin-starred establishments. But, with a couple of exceptions, you’d be wrong, as many of the other top dining destinations have ploughed their own furrow.
Where you will find plenty of former Noma workers, however, are the plethora of high-end bakeries that have popped up across Copenhagen. Many have links to Noma, with chefs preferring to leave the upper echelons of restaurant life for the more family-friendly hours of baking — not so much due to the early starts, but the more regular hours and the free evenings.
What it means is that the bakeries of the Danish capital are some of the best in the world. Their star product tends to be the cardamom bun, striking in that it’s an import from across the water in Sweden rather than the more traditionally Danish cinnamon bun. They also tend to major in laminated dough — think butter-laden croissants, pains au chocolat, etc — and sweet items, less so savoury fare. So expect delicious and rich pastries, both classic in variety and with modern twists using ingredients like yuzu or other exotic fruit.
There are dozens of decent bakeries left off this list such as Andersen & Maillard, Lille Bakery, Seks and Benji, which are all worth a visit. This is a list of five of the best, spread across the city. Many have become popular destinations for tourists, so be prepared to queue (especially at weekends), but all are still neighbourhood bakeries at heart.
Juno The Bakery
Århusgade 48, 2100 Copenhagen
Good for: Fabulous cardamom buns
Not so good for: Queues, and it’s closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
FYI: Open Wednesday–Saturday, 7.30am–6pm; Sunday, 8am–3pm
Juno may well be the inspiration for much of Copenhagen’s bakery scene. Emil Glaser, a Swede and former Noma pastry chef, missed his native cardamom bun so much that when he opened a bakery in 2017 it was a natural choice to specialise in. The buns are laden with butter, sugar and, of course, cardamom and are baked fresh throughout the day, meaning that despite the frequent queues of tourists, you will be able to buy a warm one no matter the time.
There’s much else to enjoy at Juno, from the seasonal offerings, such as delicious fastelavnsbolle (cream-filled Lent buns) in January and February, and plum spandauer (croissant dough filled with vanilla custard and topped with plums) in the autumn, to plenty of other pastries. It even supplies rye bread to the best purveyor of modern smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches) in the city, Selma. The cream buns — filled with the likes of lemon curd or pistachio — are also to die for.
“We are in the comfort industry. We are not in the fine-dining industry,” says Glaser, as he supervises some of his 40 staff. His aim is to take the “familiar, but make it as good as it can be”. The bakery is rather off the beaten track in Østerbro, but well worth a detour.
Hart Bageri
Gammel Kongevej 109, 1850 Frederiksberg, Copenhagen
Good for: Modern twists on the classics as well as great bread
Not so good for: It’s better for sweet treats than savoury (although the sausage roll is good)
FYI: Open Monday-Friday 7.30am–6pm; Saturday–Sunday, 8am–5pm
It’s no surprise to find that the cardamom croissant is the best-seller at Hart — they can sell up to 700 a day, as well as 500 loaves of bread — but it’s a different creature to other Copenhagen bakeries. Originally, it was made with the leftover scraps of dough from croissants, but it became so popular the dough is now specially made for it. It’s somehow even more delicious than what you can find elsewhere: sinful, buttery and impossible to avoid wolfing down.
The sausage roll is another favourite, the meat flavoured with fennel and chilli, and the pastry is topped with fried onion. Like most Copenhagen bakeries, Hart is otherwise heavy on pastries and bread. “Baking is cultural. Taste is nostalgia. Here in Denmark, there’s a strong emphasis on sour and a cultural bias against dried fruit,” says Talia Richard-Carvajal, Hart’s creative director. Few of the bakers here are Danish, allowing them to be playful with form and flavour while still making traditional products like rye bread.
When I visited in February, Hart — like every other Copenhagen bakery — was specialising in fastelavnsboller, the Lent pastry of choice in Denmark, but with some original twists. One version came with blackcurrant jam and vanilla custard as well as the traditional whipped cream, while another was flavoured with yuzu and vanilla.
Richard Hart, former head baker of Tartine in San Francisco, opened his bakery in the west of Copenhagen with the financial support of Noma chef René Redzepi in 2018. Richard-Carvajal says that plenty of those heading to Noma pop into Hart too, but it’s a worthwhile stop for those who have missed out on a seat at the three-star restaurant. Staff advise coming in the morning to avoid queues. (There’s a second branch by the waterfront in Holmen.)
Rondo
Sjællandsgade 7, 2200 Copenhagen
Good for: Savoury items shine just as much as sweet ones
Not so good for: You have to wait until 11am to buy the amazing focaccia
FYI: Open Tuesday–Friday, 7.30am–6pm; Saturday–Sunday, 8am–4pm
There are few better places in Copenhagen for a takeaway lunch than Rondo. Other bakeries showcase the sweet, but it’s the savoury items in focus at this bakery in the multicultural Nørrebro neighbourhood. Daily focaccia — with an ever-changing selection of inventive fillings such as delicious mortadella, straciatella and pistachio, or potato salad and herbs — are on sale from 11am. There are the usual suspects of the cardamom and cinnamon snegle (literally meaning “snails”, but here a bun due to their rolled-up shape), as well as croissants and an assortment of bread. But better still is the savoury snegl made with peas, feta, za’atar and dill.
There are other savoury pastries — when I last visited these included pecorino and baked-onion delights — as well as cheese rolls and a small selection of artisanal products such as cheese, butter, anchovies and drinks. Rondo has benefited from the recent closure of one of the pioneers of high-end bakeries, the nearby Mirabelle. But its quality is enough for it to stake a claim as one of Copenhagen’s very best bakeries.
Københavns Bageri
Flaskehalsen 22, 1778 Copenhagen
Good for: Traditional Danish classics
Not so good for: Located far from the centre in Carlsberg Byen
FYI: Open Monday–Friday, 7am–6pm; Saturday–Sunday, 8am–6pm
Two of Copenhagen’s best small bakeries are Alice and Benji. But both were proving too popular for their locales, so they clubbed together this year to open Københavns Bageri in Carlsberg Byen, the hip new district built on the former site of the capital’s main brewery. The area is far from the centre, but is picking up a buzz thanks to carefully attracting some of the coolest names in Copenhagen food and drink, including here.
Rasmus Kristensen, another ex-Noma chef and founder of Benji, says the aim was “to do old-school classics phenomenally well”. So, of course, there are cardamom buns — but there are also less common traditional favourites such as kringle, a Danish cake with laminated dough, filled with vanilla cream, toasted almonds, macerated prunes and the sweet local paste known as remonce. Other classics that Københavns Bageri has spruced up include tebirkes, a Danish pastry with poppy seeds on top, poppy seed rolls, and after Easter, wheat buns (hveder).
Collective Bakery
Nørrebrogade 176, 2200 Copenhagen
Good for: Decent coffee as well as pastries
Not so good for: Small selection and the favourites are sometimes sold out
FYI: Open Monday–Friday, 7am–5pm; Saturday–Sunday, 7am-4pm
Coffee plays a big role at all the bakeries listed here, but nowhere is that more so than at Collective Bakery, which grew out of the Collective group of coffee shops. The interior of the bakery in Nørrebro is pretty minimalist, with only a limited number of pastries available at any one time.
Those that are available — before they sell out — are excellent, especially the citronbølge (lemon wave) made with croissant trimmings and glazed with lemon syrup and lemon-tea infusion. The cardamom spiral is perhaps more floral than other pastries using the same spice in Copenhagen, but just as delicious. There’s also a simple sesame-seed roll with cheese that may not win any prizes for inventiveness but hits the spot in terms of taste.
Tell us about your favourite Copenhagen bakery in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter
Cities with the FT
FT Globetrotter, our insider guides to some of the world’s greatest cities, offers expert advice on eating and drinking, exercise, art and culture — and much more
Find us in Copenhagen, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Rome, Frankfurt, Singapore, Miami, Toronto, Madrid, Melbourne, Zurich, Milan and Vancouver
Comments