Visited Copenhagen last week and went both to Restaurant Relae and Manfreds & Vin, which are right across the street from each other and owned by the same folks.
I’d been to Relae last fall and thought that, in terms of price/performance, it was one of the best places in Copenhagen. The food was spectacularly flavorful, but deceptively simple in presentation, and the wine pairings were odd but interesting. For calibration, it cost around 130 EUR for a 5- or 6-course meal (depending on whether you count the opening snack), including wine pairing. That’s pretty cheap for high-end food in Copenhagen. (The place has 1 Michelin star. Other 1-stars in Copenhagen cost upwards of 250 EUR, albeit for somewhat longer meals.)
Last week I decided to return to Relae with friends. It was very good, but not spectacular like the last time. In fact, I would say I almost had the dual experience. Last time, the one course I didn’t care for was the cheese course. This time, it was my favorite. It was dead simple, consisting of some sharp shredded Danish cheese (I think) together with (toasted?) buckwheat berries. I enjoyed most of the other dishes — a mashed potato and olive dish was delicious and the seaweed ice cream was right up my alley — but they just didn’t jump out at me like they did last fall. Other people liked the pork dish a lot. I thought it was good, but it kind of paled in comparison to the slow-cooked spice-crusted pork I had eaten at my friend Lars Birkedal’s home the night before. It’s always a bummer when you pay through the nose for food that’s not as good as a home-cooked meal. (That has happened to me more times than I count.)
On the plus side, the wine pairings this time were spectacular. The wine at Relae is all “natural”, which means (I think) that they don’t use sulfites or there’s natural fermentation or something like that. I don’t really understand these things when they’re described to me while I’m in a half-drunken state. In any case, the wine tastes kind of in between a normal wine, a sour Belgian lambic, and sake. It’s fascinating stuff, and all the wines we had were great (a rare experience for me). I would say the wine alone (together with the generally high quality of the food) is definitely enough for me to return to Relae. But I will refrain from my orgasmic descriptions of the food until I can calibrate their average quality with a third meal. FWIW, it should be noted that they have a vegetarian menu, which is about half the same as the regular menu. All my favorite dishes were vegetarian, and the one dining companion (Jessica Turon) who ordered one of the other vegetarian dishes proclaimed it the best of the night. So, in a word: veggie-friendly.
As for Manfreds, it’s basically a casual wine/tapas bar that shares its wine cellar with Relae. (The sommelier is the same at both.) I went to Manfreds for lunch by myself and had a 5-course meal with wine pairing for about 100 EUR. Expensive lunch, but it was great. I might even go so far as to say that it was more satisfying than the meal at Relae, if only because I came in with no particular expectations and the food exceeded them by a large margin. It was simple but super-tasty, especially a dynamite cabbage dish (at least I think it was cabbage) in some kind of butter sauce. Also, strange to say, the pork they served was I thought even tastier than at Relae. Go figure. And again the wine was fantastic.
The meal at Manfreds was made extra special by the fact that I was seated next to a table where the chef sommelier (of Manfreds and Relae) was entertaining a crass and clueless American drinks journalist (I think), who was like most Americans an embarrassment to me (at least when I’m in Europe and feeling all classy and European, regardless of whether there’s any merit in that self-assessment). The journalist was complaining about people who are all self-righteous about natural wines, and the sommelier was assuring him that he wasn’t opposed to normal wine, he was just trying to do something different at Manfreds. Duh — it’s called niche marketing. And who cares if they are self-righteous about it? Everybody’s self-righteous about something these days. I know I am.
Restaurant Relae: B+
Manfreds & Vin: B+
Wine at both places: A
Hot Potato Cold Potato 