Street food Copenhagen style
Street food is one of the hottest food trends these days. I’m not talking about the Sabrett’s hot dog carts or the tin trucks that have been part of Philadelphia’s streetscape forever, but the style of handheld food that (from what I can tell without having done any formal research) migrated from Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City and Bangkok to LA and then morphed into the street food/food truck movement in the US. In Philadelphia, where I live, the offerings from parked trucks ranges from BBQ to samosas to gourmet cupcakes to banh mi.
I haven’t seen much evidence of this trend in my European travels but to be fair, there aren’t many places in London or Paris or Rome where someone can park a truck and set up shop. As an American, though, one of the things I notice in Europe is how rare it is to see people eating food on the street. In Paris or Italy, if you’re hungry you drop into a bar or a cafe, eat your snack, and leave.
Copenhagen, one of the hippest places we’ve visited, has their own unique version of this trend. They’ve converted a warehouse on a small island and collected a couple dozen street vendors under one roof.
The exterior is somewhat less than impressive. It’s a small island with a couple of shacks and a couple of low industrial buildings. None of the industrial detritus has been removed but the iron trash just adds to the ambience. The seating area in front of the building has a gorgeous view of the river from a motley collection of distressed picnic benches and repurposed containers.
Inside it is dark and cluttered with objects that mix ethnic, hip, industrial, urban, and “street” aesthetics. The gloom and the clutter hide the size of the place. There are 40 stalls and lots of informal, picnic bench style seating. At lunch hour when I visited, the place was humming, mostly with millennials with a sprinkling of tourists.
Of course the food is the real star and it’s pretty intriguing. Now there is only so much sampling one guy can do at one lunch but I did my part for the culinary world with a smoky ostrich burger. Please note the sumptuous biodegradable plate and cutlery and that the size of the burger is somewhere between slider and full burger. It was really good in a completely unexpected way. The ostrich meat was just ordinary but it was accompanied by a bacon jam, pickled onions and an out-of-this-world chipotle mayonnaise that brought this sandwich to the next level. I also have to mention the guy behind the counter who had the most unusual English accent I’ve ever heard. He was born in Argentina but learned English while living in Dublin, and both the Spanish accent of Argentina and the Irish accent were quite pronounced. 
But it takes more than ostrich burgers to create a street food paradise. Copenhagen street food’s offerings include vegetarian pizza, Moroccan flatbreads, Brazilian rodizio scaled to street food portions, sushi, vegetarian Colombian food, Korean deep fried chicken, and more desserts than are probably healthy for you. And regular burgers. And gourmet hot dogs.
One more thing. At first glance, you can’t help but think that this is the worst possible location for a food emporium imaginable. To get there from Copenhagen center you have to walk to the end of the Nyhavn and then walk across a long bridge that crosses the Københavns Havn and let me tell you, that bridge gets pretty cold and breezy in October. I can only imagine what it’s like in January. Who decides on a whim to eat at a place like this?
Yet it’s very existence and location makes a statement. The Nyhavn I mentioned is one of the iconic tourist spots in Copenhagen, a canal lined with boats and brightly colored buildings creating the perfect selfie spot. It’s also lined with dozens of restaurants offering unimaginative tourist food. Walking across that bridge for Korean bulgogi and a locally brewed organic beer is almost an assertion of the non-conventional.
At the same time, less than 100 m to the south is Noma, a two-star Michelin restaurant that makes a legitimate claim to being one of the most creative restaurants in the world (and likely has prices to match, although I’m not able to verify that).
So within a very small triangle on Københavns Havn you have on of the world’s culinary superstars, the heart of mediocre food for the mass feeding of tourists, and more than three dozen low-end funky entrepreneurs bursting with energy and creativity. If those are my options, I’ll pick Copenhagen street food every time.