How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark Page 4
Something stirred. It wasn’t the full-scale understanding of food culture that he has today. It was just the realisation that people weren’t eating very well back home in Denmark. “I was compelled by the idea of going to a cheese shop and knowing what cheese is best at what time of year,” says Meyer. “The idea of spending five hours just to prepare a meal for your family. The idea of spending three hours just to share it. And then when I came back to Denmark I saw the opposite. I saw a desert. With only one cheesemaker, one pea producer, one slaughterhouse supplying the whole nation with uniform, generic, passionless food. And I saw a people without passion and love for the meal.
“I didn’t truly understand the way that our monopolistic food system had created a total lack of enthusiasm for food. It was just about me, and me being the child of divorced parents. I was in lack of love. I almost didn’t see my father for four or five years, my mother became an alcoholic when they divorced, my grandma died. So I felt that there was a relation between the lack of love or care, and the terrible food in Denmark. And in France I saw the opposite – an abundance of love and generosity, and taste and smell and great meals. And you can say in some ways that when I started the Nordic cuisine movement, it was a replication of what I had lived in Gascony, 20 years before.”
Can the New Nordic kitchen last? Already, there are signs that a new generation of Danish chefs want to try something slightly different. One night I eat at Relæ, a new restaurant founded by Christian Puglisi, once the sous-chef at Noma. He still has close ties to his alma mater, but he doesn’t want his new project to be known as Nordic. Many of his inspirations are in fact Italian, he has a no-foraging policy, and – most blasphemously of all – Puglisi uses olive oil.
Another night in Copenhagen, I find myself sitting in a disused meat market, stabbing at a table with a Stanley knife. Eventually, I carve a hole in the surface, and underneath it I find part of my supper: a bed of herbs. Earlier, I stabbed another hole, inserted a straw and slurped up some sort of mushroom soup. Later, the waiters will hand me a kebab, and I’ll go outside to fry it on a barbecue with the dozen other diners. This extraordinary experience is known as “I’m A Kombo”, and it’s just one of the many wacky culinary concepts currently sprouting in Copenhagen. An occasional supper club rather than a permanent restaurant, “I’m A Kombo” is held twice a month by two young chefs, Lasse Askov and Bo Lindegaard, a big man with the beard of Hagrid and the round glasses of Harry Potter. In one sense, it’s the perfect example of the kind of inventiveness that the New Nordic cuisine has encouraged. The bed of herbs is the kind of thing you might find at Noma. Then again, other bits of the menu display a frustration with some of the New Nordic mantra. Each course has a theme, and the third one – with a recipe nicked from a Japanese chef – centres on theft. It’s a vague dig at the way many of the New Nordic restaurants have become quite derivative and often steal each other’s ideas; carrots served in a pot of earth, for instance, is now quite a hackneyed Nordic trope. Then there’s the sixth course – a large chunk of malted pork that the chefs have simply called “Comfort Food”. New Nordic restaurants tend to serve lots of tiny, delicate courses that aren’t in themselves particularly filling, so the inclusion of something as big and homely as the pork is almost rebellious. “It doesn’t really seem like it,” says Lindegaard, “but we feel that it’s one of the most progressive things that we do.”
Lindegaard is grateful for the platform the New Nordic kitchen has given I’m A Kombo, but says it’s not a movement he aspires to join. “We’re definitely more international,” he explains. “It would be stupid for a company like us to hook up with New Nordic cuisine. That would be the death of our future. That would be the worst business plan ever. Nordic cuisine is like the Spanish cuisine [a reference to the restaurant El Bulli, which closed recently]. It will die. Very soon. A few years ago everyone was looking at Spain. Now everyone is looking at Copenhagen. In a few years time they will look somewhere else. So why would you want to build your business around it? I don’t get it.” When I put it to Meyer that the New Nordic kitchen might soon come to an end, he’s phlegmatic. “Whether it will last or not last - who cares? If you’re the minister responsible for tourism, then you might be worried about that. But I don’t wake up in the morning and think about whether it will last.”
In fact, he would welcome other regions picking up where Denmark has left off. For what’s important to Meyer is the survival not of the New Nordic brand itself, but the values and solutions that come hand in hand with it. “Obesity, diabetes, healthiness, the environment, biodiversity, the empowerment of the farmer” – these are the things the New Nordic diet addresses, he says, and these are things that will last.
“It goes beyond that one restaurant,” says Meyer. “It goes beyond being quoted in Time magazine. It’s about leaving something great for the world to come after you. Maybe all the international food magazines will stop writing about New Nordic food in three or four years. I hope that maybe it will be some South American country that will prosper. Or that Greece will fight back with Albania and Romania. As a foodie I would love that. As a global citizen I would love that. It’s not a war of ratings. We’re not declaring war against Mexican food. It’s not warfare – it’s a choir. It’s a global choir.”
3. MORE THAN JUST CHAIRS:
the Danish design DNA
“We’ve had our share of chairs now… We’ve had our share of furniture.” – Jacob Fruensgaard Øe
“I am Mr Egg,” smiles a chap who turns out to be called Mr Hans Mannerhagen. You can see where he’s coming from, though. The man is surrounded by dozens of cone-shaped chairs, most of which he helped build, and each one looks like half a hollowed-out hard-boiled egg. It’s a slightly unworldly scene. A warm fug of leather hugs the air, while dozens of upturned domes are heaped on the ground. Some are beige, some brown, and some checked – and they’re all splattered at jaunty angles across a factory floor.
The floor belongs to Fritz Hansen, one of Denmark’s oldest and most famous furniture-makers, and at its centre stands Mannerhagen, the firm’s master upholsterer. It’s his job to fix a coat of leather to each chair’s foam shell – a job that might take three days and more than 1200 stitches. Mannerhagen is almost teary at the thought. He points at a chair. “When you work on these kinds of things,” he says, “you put so much of yourself in it. Your whole heart, and your whole soul. It becomes a part of me. The design. The handicraft. The history.”
For these are not just any egg-shaped chairs. These are the Egg chairs, and they have been built here continuously by Fritz Hansen for the past 50 years. Along with a lot of Danish furniture from the middle of the last century, you can argue that they have almost as firm a place in Denmark’s recent identity as they do in the man who stitches them together. Dreamt up by the Danish architect and semi-deity Arne Jacobsen, the Eggs are a late, lauded example of Danish Modern, a school of furniture design that gripped the creative world in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and which still casts a long shadow over contemporary Danish culture. In 1951, when the UN wanted an extra debating chamber, they chose the great Danish Modernist Finn Juhl to design its interior. In 1960, when Kennedy and Nixon clashed in America’s first televised presidential debate, JFK was sitting on a chair – The Chair, to give it its usual title – designed by Juhl’s contemporary, Hans Wegner. In 1963, when Lewis Morley photographed a nude Christine Keeler, he asked her to sit astride a copy of another Jacobsen creation – the 7 Chair. And in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick wanted to stock the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he chose some of Jacobsen’s cutlery.
The Egg chair – a late, lauded example of Danish Modern
You would recognise Danish Modern if you saw it in a sitting room. Most Danish Modern chairs are wooden ones – rich and wholesome in colour; clean and functional in their design. “In Danish and Scandinavian design,” says Nille Juul-Sørensen, designer of the Copenhagen metro stations, and now head of the Danish Design Centre, “if it’s no
t functional, we think: why the hell should we have it?”
In this respect, the leather-clad Egg is almost frivolous in comparison with its wooden, straight-faced forebears. The Egg would not have been out of place on Kubrick’s spacecraft, but Wegner’s The Chair – with its thin, gently rounded back and its four functional legs – is more at home at a kitchen table, or even in a classroom. But Danish Modern was about more than specific chairs – and about more than just furniture, in fact. At its most idealistic, it aimed to make Danish homes better places to live in – and the chairs were just one means of doing that.
“Last Sunday a Danish paper wrote about this ‘world-famous Danish furniture designer Arne Jacobsen’,” says an irritated Juul-Sørensen, a bulky man with thick 50s-style glasses. “I thought: should I take the phone and call this stupid journalist? Because Arne Jacobsen was not a furniture designer. He was an architect. And he used architecture to influence a new family life.” In the fifth-storey window behind Juul-Sørensen, you can see the Tivoli Gardens, the world’s most tasteful theme park. As he talks, a rollercoaster plunges groundwards. “At the time, the furniture we had was from a different decade. It was not for modern life. So Jacobsen just redesigned things to fit the new architecture, to fit the new lifestyle. And he needed some chairs [to do that]. He was not a furniture designer; he changed architecture, he changed the way we live.”
Jacobsen was not the father of the movement, however; if anything, he was considered something of a rebel. Kaare Klint, the founder of the furniture department at the Danish Royal Academy, was the man who pioneered Danish Modernism in the 20s. Klint and his contemporaries were inspired by the humanist aims of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, but they felt that Bauhaus buildings and Bauhaus furniture designs were in practice not particularly humanising. Danish Modern was partly an attempt to do what the Bauhaus hadn’t.
Like most of his contemporaries, Klint had a keen eye for detail. In the 30s, goes the myth, Klint was introduced to the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund. They talked shop. “What are you working on?” Klint asked.
“Oh, just a school, a hotel and a few houses. What about you?"
“I am working on a chair,” said Klint.
A few years went by before Klint and Asplund ran into each other again. “What are you working on?” Klint asked for the second time. “Oh, a town hall or two,” replied Asplund. “And a couple of villas. What about you?”
“I told you last time,” said Klint. “I am working on a chair.”
This anecdote, told best by Andrew Hollingsworth in his book, Danish Modern, highlights another of the movement’s tropes: painstaking craftsmanship. Their furniture was planned in excruciating detail, and was designed to last. Jill, the Fritz Hansen PR, has another way of demonstrating this. Taking a 7 Chair from its display, she places it upside down on the floor, takes off her heels and carefully steps onto the chair’s back. Then she bounces, gingerly. Nothing snaps. “See!” she says, in triumph. “That’s how you know it’s not a fake.”
Ironically, it was this emphasis on quality that killed the movement. By the end of the 60s, says Hollingsworth, consumers increasingly preferred the brash colours of pop art to the understated Danish aesthetic. Meanwhile, the Danes’ careful craftsmanship could not compete with the mass-produced and mass-marketed pieces made overseas, and in 1966 the Annual Exhibition of Cabinetmakers – for decades a showcase of the best Danish design – folded. In some respects, the decline was partly due to the success of the Danish welfare state. New social legislation – including the introduction of the minimum wage – meant that the cost of labour rose dramatically, which in turn made labour-intensive industries like manufacturing increasingly unprofitable. The manufacturers that remained – like Fritz Hansen and Rud Rasmussen – had to up their prices tenfold, and started to stick to the designers they knew and trusted, rather than develop younger ones.
Hans Wegner's The Chair
If you entered many Danes’ homes today, you would not necessarily realise all this. To put it very glibly, if an Englishman’s home is his castle, the Dane’s home is her temple to the descendants of Kaare Klint. The icons of the 50s and 60s still form the centrepieces of many Danish living rooms, which helps explain why The Bridge’s Martin Rohde has a house full of so many design classics. I lost count of the number of houses that have a Poul Henningsen artichoke lamp hanging from the ceiling – something that regular viewers of the political drama Borgen (which features several Henningsens) may recognise. After an interview, a university professor proudly shows me his two prized Børge Mogensen armchairs. At a party in Vesterbro, a geography student in his late twenties says he has just saved up the equivalent of £500 to buy a Jacobsen original.
Poul Henningsen's ubiquitous artichoke lamp
“A very high percentage of the Danes know about Arne Jacobsen,” says Kristian Byrge, who runs Muuto, a thrusting new furniture company aimed at promoting younger designers. “That’s one of the differences between Denmark and a lot of other countries. We are proud of our design heritage. A lot of people will own his 7 Chair. They might have bought it reduced and repainted it or reworked it, but most people buy an original. It’s something we like our country to be associated with. Design is in our cultural DNA.”
Speaking of Danish DNA, it is hard to continue this discussion about people’s homes without mentioning the very Danish concept of hygge. Pronounced roughly “hoo-guh”, hygge does not have a direct equivalent in English. It refers to the warm state of relaxation in which Danes find themselves when they’re sitting around a fire with friends, or having a beer in their beach house (another Danish mainstay) on the North Sea in the summer. It is often loosely translated as “cosiness”, but this seems both too broad and yet too specific a translation. When I first arrived in Denmark, I was surprised to hear many people describe all sorts of things as “cosy”. My bike was cosy, their table was cosy, and so too was a walk through Vesterbro. It was slightly perplexing – until I realised my friends were substituting the adjectival form of hygge (hyggelig, or “hoogalee”) for the English word “cosy”. Obviously, it doesn’t translate particularly well, rendering the concept less intelligible to an English ear.
Still, it’s safe to say that the attainment of this homely hygge (whatever it is exactly) is a constant goal for Danes. In turn, this might help explain both why Denmark has the second-largest homes in Europe (in terms of square metres per capita), and why the Danes are so concerned with making those homes look nice. Since restaurants are so expensive (thanks to a 25% tax on food), many Danes prefer to spend their evenings at home. Interior design is therefore incredibly important, and so too is Arne Jacobsen.
But therein lies a problem. A fixation on past masters is stifling the designers of today. “When you talk Danish design outside Denmark, people believe it’s an old chair,” says Juul-Sørensen, who says he took on his new job in order to challenge that perception. He has an uphill battle, if the exhibits at the Danish Design Museum, a few kilmetres north-east of Juul-Sørensen’s Danish Design Centre, are anything to go by. The fixation with chairs reaches almost comical levels here. As if in a furniture mausoleum, visitors to the museum process past a serpentine line of chairs that never seems to end. Chair after chair after chair; it is like an eery, empty, hyper-extended doctor’s waiting room. “We call it Danish Modern,” laments Juul-Sørensen, “but Danish Modern was actually designed in the 50s and 60s. People don’t realise that we are now doing a lot of other stuff.”
Thing is, much of that other stuff struggles to get made. Fritz Hansen only release one new piece of furniture a year, and even these ranges tend to be – by their own admission – influenced by the dead designers already in their collection.
“If you were a designer ten years ago,” claims Juul-Sørensen, “you didn’t have a future. A lot of these young designers could not get a job as a chair designer because when they went to Fritz Hansen and said, “Look I have designed this new funky chair,” [Fritz Hansen] would
say: “It looks cool, but we have a chair designed in the 50s which sells nine million pieces [a year], so no, not interested.” So these companies squeezed out a whole generation.”
Thomas Bentzen, one of the few designers from that era who did make it, remembers the frustration well. “It was like: ‘I’ve got this table and it’s made completely out of metal and it has this handle so you can move it around. Which Danish company do I want to approach with this? Who would see the good design potential in this table?’ And I’m not sure any of the classic Danish companies would have seen that.”
In Denmark, people are finally making new furniture, but in the main it is produced by young firms like Hay, Gubi, Mater and the aforementioned Muuto – companies set up in the last few years to promote young Danish designers, and to challenge the creative hegemony established by the likes of Fritz Hansen. In fact, some of their most well-known work is a very obvious piss-take of the classics. Hay’s Nobody Chair is made entirely from fabric, which is a dig at Danish Modern’s obsession with wood – while its very name mocks how the Danish tradition has become so focussed on the identity of individual designers, rather than the ideas they originally stood for. Meanwhile, Muuto’s Rest – a sofa without a strongly defined shape – is a deliberate contrast to the more rigid structures you might find at Fritz Hansen.
This isn’t a criticism of the old furniture firms. The direction they have taken is simply sound business sense, and the work they make is still beautiful. It’s just that they no longer have the same innovative spark that made them so important and exciting in the middle of the last century. This isn’t only because they don’t promote many new designers; they also lack the same democratic values they had in the 50s.