Rasmus Munk, the celebrated Danish chef, has such memorable eyes—they are a piercing blue, and often bloodshot—that when a waiter at Alchemist, his restaurant in Copenhagen, served me an eyeball, I recognized it immediately. The iris was flecked with brown and rimmed with red, and the eye stared up at me unwaveringly, at least until I picked up a long-handled spoon and dug in. It had a gleaming gelatinous surface and was both salty and creamy, with a surprisingly nubby texture and a distinct taste of—what was it?—shrimp.
Alchemist, which opened in its current incarnation in 2019, in a waterfront warehouse district of the city, is one of the most sought-after reservations in the fine-dining world. Less than a year after opening, it was awarded two Michelin stars for a tasting menu of about forty courses which is served, four nights a week, to some fifty diners for five or six hours, in a sequence of spectacular spaces. These include a luxurious lounge bar featuring a fifty-foot-high tower lined with wine bottles on shelves, as in a library, and a vast dining room with a planetarium-style dome that offers an ever-changing visual accompaniment to the dishes below. The eyeball—a dome-shaped resin object, like an upside-down bowl, hand-painted with blood vessels and fashioned by a model shop in Copenhagen—is seven times the diameter of Munk’s own, and offers an appropriately surreal flourish during a culinary experience that can feel more like Buñuel than like Bobby Flay. The night I visited Alchemist, the edible pupil consisted of a blend of minced shrimp, raw peas, roasted pistachios, and crème fraîche. One of the restaurant’s thirty-five steady-handed chefs had spooned this mixture into a cavity in the eye’s center, then topped it with black caviar suspended in a gel made from codfish eyes and razor clams, to simulate a wet cornea-like surface. The flavor was considerably subtler than the presentation; after staring the dish down, I slurped up every last globule in the blink of an eye.
Munk, who is thirty-three, and has been in the kitchen full time for more than half his life, acknowledges that some diners will feel queasy scooping out a replica of a human eyeball, even if they don’t think twice about consuming a mouthful of gametes extracted from the ovaries of a fish. Such queasiness is part of the intention of Alchemist, which offers what Munk calls “holistic dining”—an experience that integrates elements of the visual and performing arts, through which a range of challenging social issues, including problems of food production and scarcity, are explored. A diner might be served a freeze-dried butterfly atop a crispy faux leaf made of kale, spinach, and nettle, balanced on a silver replica of a branch, while a server extolls the high protein content of insects. (In terms of flavor, the kale predominates.) A meatball made from Thai-curry chicken comes appended to the rubbery severed claw of a chicken, which a diner grasps, as if shaking hands, and extracts from a straw-strewn metal cage as nightmarish images of caged poultry in factory farms appear on the dome overhead. The eyeball dish is named 1984—all the dishes, which at Alchemist are called “impressions,” have names—and servers deliver it with a brief disquisition about the paradox of self-sought exposure on social media and unwelcome surveillance occurring on the same platforms. Hundreds of pictures of the dish have been posted to Instagram.
A dish called 1984 is served in a fake eyeball. The edible “pupil” is filled with minced shrimp, raw peas, roasted pistachios, and crème fraîche, then topped with black caviar suspended in a gel made from codfish eyes and razor clams, to simulate a wet cornea-like surface.
A meal at Alchemist costs at least eight hundred dollars a person, and the basic wine pairing brings the price to more than a thousand dollars. The most exclusive experience, called the Sommelier’s Table, goes for twenty-three hundred. Munk knows that this is costly, but, when we met in Copenhagen in August, he told me, “We try to create a place where you get more than just good food, and just the pleasure of caviar, and the highest-quality ingredients. At Alchemist, you don’t fly in for only that.” If contemporary visual artists and theatre directors are allowed to make their patrons uncomfortable, Munk asked, why aren’t chefs? “People talk about chefs being artists, but it’s always within this box of ‘pleasure,’ and ‘you need to be nice,’ ” he said. “There also needs to be a part of disgust in art, and something that challenges you.” The video sequences, which Munk conceptualizes along with the food, can be especially unsettling: what initially appears to be a dreamy vision of jellyfish swimming around a reef evolves into a visual reprimand about ocean pollution, with plastic detritus outlasting dying coral. Alchemist, which occupies the former scenery shop of the Royal Danish Theatre, introduces a theatrical dimension from the start: diners gather on the sidewalk, as before a play, and are confronted with a daunting pair of bronze double doors, reminiscent of Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell,” that depict the gnarled roots of a tree. Hidden cameras allow staff to observe their arriving guests’ confusion before the doors suddenly swing open.
Inside, there’s no natural light, and a soundtrack of New Agey electronic music creates an otherworldly atmosphere, leaving a diner as disoriented as someone entering a casino or a haunted house. Munk consulted with architects when designing the restaurant, he told me, but they all advised him to let light flood in, and to deck the place out with Nordically fashionable concrete and blond wood. “I was, like, ‘No, no, no,’ ” Munk said. “I wanted to create our own reality, so it could be anywhere in the world.” Munk is similarly unconcerned about signalling seasonality or emphasizing local ingredients: fatty, vintage Ibérico ham imported from Spain is served on “airy bread” made from croissant-like sheets of potato starch and topped with a foam that includes egg yolk and crème fraîche; it’s a symphony in animal fat which, depending on your taste, is either the best thing you’ve ever put in your mouth or gag-inducingly excessive. Munk is at least as interested in texture as he is in flavor, and he devises ways to make something that might seem off-putting—say, slices of raw jellyfish—into something appealing. (He places them in lychee-and-lemongrass-infused water, then adds a chili oil made, in part, from lactose-fermented habanero peppers.) The sophistication of Munk’s cuisine could be compared to that at Noma, Copenhagen’s celebrated culinary temple, which sits less than a mile away, alongside a lake amid Arcadian vegetable gardens. But going to Alchemist is more like attending a lurid Vegas extravaganza—or committing to a shaman-led adventure with psychedelics.
For some, the Alchemist effect is exhilarating. “It was one of the top five experiences of my life,” Kristen Segin, a dancer with the New York City Ballet, told me after she visited the restaurant on the same evening that I did. Segin and her dining companion, Harrison Coll, another dancer in the company, both had the night off from performing at the Tivoli Concert Hall, and both reported being thrilled by dishes like The Scream—a postcard-size reproduction of Edvard Munch’s canvas made out of kudzu starch and milk proteins, and flavored with saffron, Cointreau, licorice, and mandarin—and suitably disturbed by the caged chicken. Coll said, of the chicken meatball affixed to the severed claw, “It was so good, but I was going down it gingerly, because I didn’t want to eat the leg.” Coll admitted to being so distracted by the general spectacle that, when he was served Danish Summer Kiss, a silicone replica of a human tongue, smeared with tomato-and-strawberry tartare and garlanded with flowers, he bit into it rather than giving it a French kiss, as the servers advise. (My own encounter with the slathered tongue left me feeling that, like many an unanticipated French kiss, it was best chalked up to experience.)
Cartoon by Jared Nangle
The service is scrupulous: by the time diners have emerged from the lounge bar and entered the domed dining room, the waitstaff have observed whether they are right- or left-handed, and arranged utensils and dishes accordingly. And the images on the dome, such as a pulsing heart, become more charged through their association with Munk’s food. Around the moment at which my 1984 dish was served, the dome filled with video footage of recognizable figures (Mark Zuckerberg, Edward Snowden) alongside surveillance images of the diners themselves. It felt like an enthusiastically didactic submission to the Venice Biennale. The choreography is impeccable: at one showstopping instant, the already dim lights were extinguished, so that the diners could simultaneously be served a coconut-and-honeydew concoction that glowed in the dark, courtesy of a powdered extract from bioluminescent jellyfish. There were gasps all around as each guest raised an eerie, glowing blob. I saw only one person who, after hearing a request that cell phones not be used to capture the moment—dozens of illuminated screens would ruin the effect—decided, like the dickish, doomed foodie in the horror-comedy film “The Menu,” that the rules didn’t apply to him.
Timid eaters might be advised to cross Alchemist off their bucket lists altogether. One celebrated offering is pigeon meat cured in a casing of beeswax and served suspended, like a ham, with the bird’s feathered head intact. Another is ice cream made from pig’s blood and filled with a ganache of juniper oil and deer-blood garum. (“Fatty, with a weird umami aftertaste,” in the judgment of a food blogger.) Not all diners appreciate being scolded during their meal. “I care deeply about climate change, yet I don’t necessarily go to a restaurant to worry about it even more,” Jeff Gordinier wrote in Esquire. “I go to a restaurant to get away from the awful news for a few hours.” One night, a guest threw the chicken cage across the domed room, declaring that he hadn’t signed up to be lectured by Greenpeace. But that was in itself a satisfying moment of theatre. On only three or four occasions has a diner walked out in disgust.
When a visitor shows up at Alchemist expecting a more conventional experience and is visibly unsettled, the team adjusts—for instance, offering silverware to a guest who isn’t comfortable eating with her fingers, or switching out the blood ice cream for raspberry. Certain dishes, though, are never modified. “We always give out the tongue,” Munk told me. “It’s putting a question mark: what is cutlery? If you put the tongue kiss on a plate—a beautiful tomato salad with flowers—you won’t have any problem eating it, but it will not resonate that long with you. But when you have to put that tongue kiss in your mouth there are so many other things happening to you. If we stopped doing that, we would compromise our philosophy.”
Alchemist isn’t the first restaurant to challenge the limits of a visitor’s comfort. At Dans le Noir?, a restaurant chain originating in Paris, the dining room is completely dark, and the servers blind or visually impaired; at Ithaa, in the Maldives, the dining room is submerged five metres underwater, and has a barrelled glass ceiling; at Sublimotion, in Ibiza, twelve diners per night eat dishes that are served dangling from wires above the table, and wear virtual-reality headsets for part of the meal. (The experience costs more than seventeen hundred dollars a person.) But no other restaurateur has expressed his idiosyncratic creativity as lavishly as Munk has. The first space a visitor to Alchemist enters is an anteroom that establishes the theme of the evening, as conceived by Munk. The night I visited, the theme was identity; the anteroom was lined with mirrors and occupied by an antic mime in a black leotard and spangly makeup. She silently beckoned me onto a raised platform, so that I could regard my own multiple reflections, then offered me a black box containing the début “impression” of the evening: a membrane-thin square of apple leather. Meanwhile, a voice piped in through a speaker asked alarmingly existential questions: “How do you see yourself?”; “Are you free?”; “What are you ashamed of?”; “Are you having fun?” Segin and Coll, the dancers, told me they’d embraced the mime’s invitation to join in the performance, but, though Alchemist attends to customers’ dietary restrictions—a computer screen in the kitchen tracks food intolerances and prohibitions—little accommodation is made for diners who, like me, are allergic to audience participation.
For an enfant terrible, Munk is surprisingly modest and self-effacing. When serving diners—he’s constantly leaving the kitchen and circulating among his guests—he’s approachable and warm, nothing like the stereotype of the tyrannical maestro. He is touchingly self-conscious, and would doubtless hate the interactive first course at Alchemist if he ever went as a guest. He told me that he has only once been seriously drunk, and has never taken drugs. Some guests at Alchemist seek to enhance their experience with hallucinogens; Munk does not approve. When he and his girlfriend of seven years, Lykke Metzger, who heads his waitstaff, recently toured Asia and visited dozens of renowned bars, Munk had to be pushed to sample anything more adventurous than a gin-and-tonic. He works incessantly, and, despite the theatricality of his restaurant, his own cultural experience is narrow. He has been to only one play in his life—several years back, he was invited to see a production of “Miss Julie” at the Royal Danish Theatre. He was alarmed when the actors addressed the audience directly, but he ended up enjoying the experience. “I’m inspired by the theatre, but, like, the feeling of it, that I’ve seen in movies, or seen on Google,” he told me. (Among his favorite films are “Avatar,” “Star Wars,” and “Silence of the Lambs.”) He’s never seen a ballet, or attended a concert of either pop or classical music. “I just listen on Spotify,” he said. Ed Sheeran ate at Alchemist, but when he invited Munk to attend a show the chef declined: the restaurant was open that night, and he never misses a service.
Fortunately for Munk and his financial backer—a Danish investor named Lars Seier Christensen, who also owns Geranium, a more sober Michelin-starred establishment in Copenhagen—the pool of sensation-seeking diners is enormous. Alchemist has a waiting list in the tens of thousands, and there are lively Reddit threads in which foodies try to exchange or sell reservations. Even though most Alchemist diners must also factor travel into the cost, not all of them are rich; Munk often meets diners who have saved up for years to afford their meal. (Segin and Coll told me that they’d paid for Alchemist partly by redirecting their meal allowance for the dance tour.) Still, anyone who can countenance spending four figures on one dinner belongs to a certain income bracket; as I waited outside the restaurant’s gates, I heard a conversation in which the term “angel investor” bubbled up more than once.
Diners of this sort were on my mind—and, indeed, were sitting nearby, in rolled-up shirtsleeves—when another singular creation was placed on the gray marble tabletop that snakes through the domed room. This dish came in a silicone vessel even more innovative than the fake eyeball: a replica of a man’s bald, pallid head, severed just below the eyebrows. Munk, who is stocky, with ruddy skin and a shock of strawberry-blond hair, served this course to me himself. With a surgeon’s delicacy, he lifted the top of the skull to reveal a morsel within: a crispy meringue, about the size of a golf ball, filled with cherry gel and lamb-brain mousse, and topped with a freeze-dried slice of lamb brain.
The lamb brains had been salted and poached before being chopped up and aerated, Munk explained, and the dish—at first glance, an homage to Hannibal Lecter—was intended to highlight the issue of food waste. “In Denmark, we produce a lot of animals, and over ninety per cent are exported. But still there are some cuts we don’t export—we just waste it, and lamb brain is one of those things,” he said. (In fact, Munk acknowledged later, the waste-product narrative doesn’t quite hold together: because the farmers from whom he buys lamb brains aren’t set up to process them efficiently, they are costlier to procure than tenderloin.) Munk discreetly left me alone for my moment of simulated cannibalism. As the brain ball melted on my tongue, sweet and meaty, my own skull reverberated with a revolutionary slogan: “Eat the Rich.”
Rasmus Munk grew up outside Randers, a small city in Jutland, Denmark’s rural heartland, where his father was a truck driver, his mother a care worker. Munk was bullied mercilessly in elementary school for wearing hand-me-down clothing and shoes. Once, some older boys beat him up and locked him in a closet. When he was about eleven, his parents divorced; his mother remarried and moved with Munk to the countryside, where his stepfather had a small farm. In his teens, Munk began working for an industrial-scale pig farmer, who instructed him that it was necessary to beat the animals with a shovel or they would bite. “One time, I saw him nearly beat a pig to death,” Munk told me, with revulsion. “So long as it was alive enough to go in a truck, you could get paid for it.” Munk, a sensitive child, preferred to be bitten.
