Communal dining is Copenhagen’s best-kept culinary secret

Copenhagen is a gastronome’s paradise. Stroll around the Danish capital’s elegant boulevards and before long you’re bound to stumble upon a hallowed, Michelin-starred temple of New Nordic cuisine. However, there’s a cheaper and more convivial side to the city’s culinary scene: its communal supper tables.

Leading the way is the community centre Absalon, a former church in the smart Vesterbro neighbourhood. On a Sunday evening in September, the air buzzes with conversation and the clatter of cutlery as about 200 people tuck into bowls of steaming tomato lentil soup and piles of fried potatoes in a creamy fennel and chive sauce. This is the nightly fællesspisning dinner (the Danish word loosely translates as communal dining), featuring long tables, shared by strangers. The menu changes daily to spotlight locally sourced ingredients made into affordable dishes that are served tableside by the guests themselves.

I’m sharing with a group of Danish nurses who are in town to celebrate 40 years since they met as students. They ladle out bowls of soup and kindly insist on serving my son first – he is getting restless in his high chair – and pass down extra chunks of focaccia for him throughout the meal. All around us, people are chatting in English and Danish, and though everyone looks very at ease, I’m fairly sure we’re not the only tourists here. It’s a pragmatic kind of welcome, with all diners expected to get stuck in: at the end of the meal, we all stack our plates neatly and file happily back over to the kitchen.

“It’s a wonderful idea,” says one of the nurses, Ivonne Christensen, when I ask what she and her friends enjoy about fællesspisning. “You don’t have to cook, you can come here when you’re tired; it’s easy.”

Crucially, it’s also affordable. At Absalon dinner costs 60DKK (about £6.75), or £11.20 on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, when dessert is included. Children under three eat for free.

“This is for everyone,” says Lennart Lajboschitz, the founder of the Danish retail chain Flying Tiger, who launched Absalon in 2015 with the goal of bringing people together over food. “It’s such a simple thing, but a very important thing.”

Although it’s accessible, Absalon strives to offer an interesting and elevated dining experience: recent chef-led creations have included creamed potatoes and braised chicken, as well as more international dishes such as coconut dal and cauliflower and chickpea korma. “We want it to be good quality,” says Lajboschitz of the cuisine. “People said, ‘You can’t do both, that’s too cheap,’ because prices are high in Denmark. But we do the magic.”

Lajboschitz also has two hotels in Copenhagen, including the upmarket waterside property Kanalhuset – where a sophisticated fællesspisning offering costs about £17 – but variations on these communal suppers can be found at venues all over the city. At the supper club Kafa-x, weekly vegan or vegetarian dinners come with a suggested donation of 30krona (£3.40), and guests are asked to wash their own plates and cutlery.

Certain supper clubs are great for young children. At Ku.Be, a cultural centre in Frederiksberg, fortnightly fællesspisning includes child-friendly versions of whatever’s on the menu – which could be anything from spinach and ricotta dumplings to seafood or vegetarian paella. Send Flere Krydderier is a social enterprise that employs women of ethnic minority backgrounds and has two canteens in the Nørrebro area, and an onsite children’s library, play area and sports hall at its Nørrebrohallen site – meaning younger diners have plenty of opportunity to burn off energy before or after the weekly communal dinners.

The Send Flere Krydderier vibe is noisy but relaxed: everyone is free to sit wherever they like, food is served from 5pm onwards and meals are collected from the counter when your number is called. The dishes are inspired by African and Middle Eastern cuisine – the name means Send More Spices, a reference to what women who arrived in Denmark in the 1980s and 90s would write in their letters to family in their home countries. On our visit, my son (who is under three, so eats free of charge again; adult portions are£8 ) devours his baby portion of aubergine and chickpea curry and fresh scallion salad, before being set free to attempt to commandeer toys from his Danish peers.

“These kinds of places are made for kids,” says Eva Buchhave, a regular at Send Flere Krydderier since having her own child three years ago. “Restaurants are expensive and not for screaming kids – and park picnics are off the agenda in cold winter months,” she says.

Indeed, despite visiting several parks – including the beautiful King’s Garden – repeatedly during our trip, as well as the theme park Tivoli Gardens and the fabled food markets at Reffen and Broens Street Food, it was the communal dinners that provided the most interaction with Danes and a sense that we had scratched beneath the surface of the city’s cool, calm and collected culture.

Fællesspisning is, inherently, a welcoming tradition, but there’s no denying that eating at a communal dinner requires a little more courage than frequenting restaurants staffed by polyglot waiters. At Absalon, an onstage host welcomes everyone to the meal and runs through the evening’s dishes in English, but eating at other venues as a tourist necessitates more legwork, with many websites and online ticketing systems only available in Danish.

It’s nothing that can’t be overcome through a combination of guesswork and Google, however, and once on site, people are chatty and helpful. At Send Flere Krydderier, Buchhave taps me on the shoulder when I miss my number being called. “Your food is ready,” she smiles.