It’s one in the morning when I walk out of Alchemist in Refshaleøen, a former industrial area on the Copenhagen harbour. I’m buzzing from an epic, seven-hour culinary journey created by 33-year-old chef Rasmus Munk, designed to seduce the taste buds, arouse the senses and provoke debate.
“Gastronomy can have the same function as art in evoking emotions and raising awareness,” says the self-described alchemist who wants to “change the world” through what he calls holistic cuisine. “There are a lot of similarities: The painter uses pigments; musicians use instruments. My medium as a chef is ingredients, flavours and presentations.”
Chef Rasmus Munk. Photo:Jens Honoré
The city is already a gastro-tourism mecca, thanks to Noma – which will close its doors in 2024 and morph into a giant test kitchen creating new food products – and Munk attracts similar adulation for his innovative 50-course dining experience, presented in five “acts.” Munk, like Noma chef René Redzepi, has an R&D lab, and collaborates on projects like creating a bread recipe that can be baked on the International Space Station (with MIT) and using fermented fungi to make a delectable rice custard (with UC Berkeley).
Reservations at Alchemist start at 4,900 Danish kroner (almost $1,000) per person, and sell out in minutes. It has two (of a possible three) Michelin stars, and sits at No. 5 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. “When you serve people something totally unexpected, it’s like resetting all the senses,” the chef says. “It grabs people’s attention, and then they are open-minded and ready to discover new things.”
In Act One, my first bite – a seaweed chip titled Square One – is served in a dark room called Perspectives, where performance artist Lana Lind leads me around like the Pied Piper. For Act Two, I’m ushered into a luxurious lounge with a view of the kitchen-laboratory for whimsical snacks like freeze-dried butterfly, which is also a lesson on alternative food sources, since the farm-raised insects contain four to five times more protein than beef.
Acts Three and Four take place in the dining area, a planetarium-like arena where images of jellyfish, drifting amid plastic bags, are projected on the dome as I dine on a mini-tidal pool filled with raw moon jellyfish – an invasive species – while reflecting on marine pollution. I’m challenged to think about starvation in the developing world when I’m served Hunger, a small ribcage fashioned from silver, draped with a paper-thin filet of rabbit meat. The real awakening is Guilty Pleasure, a caramel-filled candy bar shaped like a coffin, which is a bittersweet reminder of exploitative child labour in the chocolate business.
Guests watch a video projection of jellyfish floating through a sea of plastic bags as they eat. Photo: Søren Gammelmark
In Act Five, I’m coming down from the high of romping in a ball pit and, from the balcony overlooking the dining room, having petit fours with a splash of premium whiskey. Far beyond a meal, the privileged and transcendent dining experience at Alchemist is less preachy or pretentious than it is memorable. This is where difficult conversations are championed, and food nourishes the mind.
