Before the trendy but delicious Avocado Toast became popular here both for its visual appeal and tastyiness, there was smørrebrød. In Denmark one of the common traditional foods you will find is smørrebrød. These are open-faced sandwiches built on buttered dense sourdough rye bread – the word itself comes from the first two layers of butter (smør) and bread (brød) with the butter being the protective layer to ensure the bread does not get soggy. Then on top of that you’ll find additional layers that can run the gamut from herring to egg, mushrooms, roast beef, just cheese, and more. Many smørrebrød restaurants may offer a dozen to at some places more then 100 smørrebrød options! Smørrebrød is healthy, hearty and everywhere – I had my smørrebrød experience while on my trip last week to Copenhagen during lunch at Restaurant Palaegade.

Restaurant Palaegade offers 40 options of smørrebrød at lunch, and I picked to have lunch at Restaurant Palaegade because they are in easy walking distance from popular sites like Nyhavn, Rosenborg Slot, and Christiansborg Slot so it’s a perfect stop between visiting these three locations (I’ll talk about my visit to some of these attractions next week on my Travel Tuesday post). Restaurant Palaegade was my pick from a list of possible locations that also included Restaurant Schønnemann (old school place with more then 110 options!), Restaurant Kronborg (traditional cozy setting), and Cafe Gammel Torv (located in a cellar!). I liked how Restaurant Palaegade offered traditional as well as new takes on smørrebrød. They also had seats outside on the sidewalk, but I was too cold it turns out. Also, this was recommended to me by Gary the Foodie, so I had to try it out!

I started off with a Snap – that is, a small shot of aquavit, and restrained myself from squeeing too much at the glass already set at the table even before I ordered. How can you not have a snap once you see this glass waiting at your place setting?

[Read more…]