Done with Iceland, on to the second part of my trip – on to Denmark. Being gluten-free in Denmark is MUCH harder than being gluten-free in Iceland, as I found out the hard way. Gluten free Copenhagen was not easy, which was a surprise! But we’ll get to there. Make sure you check out my Iceland Recap Post if you want to see all about the first part of my European Vacation this spring!

Our first day we flew in to Copenhagen from Iceland we really only had the late afternoon to explore things.

Copenhagen

Restaurants close earlier here, and people recommend you go to dinner between 6:30-8 at the latest, even though it’s still pretty bright outside until about 10pm. We walked around the most tourist-trappy (though totally beautiful) place in Copenhagen, and probably the first picture of anything you see when you’re planning a trip to Denmark: Nyhavin. 

NYHAVIN

This. place. is. gorgeous. Though a huge tourist trap for sure, and apparently all the extremely aesthetically-pleasing restaurants along the canal are way overpriced for the quality of food you’re getting. We grabbed happy hour there one day, which wasn’t a bad price and had a great view with it, but we were told to avoid those restaurants like the plague because they’re clearly catering to tourists who want the view…by overcharging them for sub-par food. EXCEPT…

Vaffenbageren

I got a handful of recommendations for this place, from our tour guide and a couple other of you guys who wrote me! Hooooly WOW. Here they have a ton of flavors of ice cream, gelato, and something they call “soft ice” – which is soft serve ice cream that tastes more like a thick whipped cream. It’s DELICIOUS. I also remembered at this moment that I can handle dairy a lot better in Europe for some reason than I can in the states, so I went for it. It was totally worth it. Took some of my digestive enzymes that I always bring with me on trips to be sure, and I felt fine! They also had an allergens menu on the wall so you could be sure what was gluten-free and what wasn’t (all the ice cream flavors were fine except one or two!).

They also make all their own waffle cones and it smells like heaven when you’re walking past the place. And if you don’t have issues with gluten (like my lucky brother), you can actually get ice cream or soft ice ON TOP OF a homemade Belgian waffle. Ummmm brb dying was actually really sad I couldn’t eat that.

Cafe Oscar

Found this cute little restaurant near the place we were staying, not really expecting much, but we were not disappointed! Four of us had this absolutely delicious grilled salmon (with crispy skin!) with a spring saffron risotto + asparagus. EHRMAHGERD VEGETABLES give me them all please after days of burgers + potatoes in Iceland. Spoiler alert: there were more of those to come.

GLUTEN FREE COPENHAGEN: harder than I expected.

Here’s the thing about restaurants in CPH (and the only other parts of Denmark I visited on this trip) – they don’t always have English menus, so it’s hard to look up places online to know where you can actually eat. It’s not *quite* as expensive as Iceland, but it’s still expensive. Not everyone understands what gluten-free is either. There were actually a few places that had gluten-free bread and stuff, but never markings on the menu (except this one Australian place we went, but i’ll get to that later!) You have to be really clear about what you mean when you say gluten-free. If you want, you can download the Danish Celiac Travel Card (like I did for Iceland!) and show that wherever you go and you’re not sure.

Copenhagen free walking tours

Another time I was surprised by how fun the city walking tour was (just like Iceland!) Our tour guide’s name was Luis, and he was hilarious + extremely knowledgeable. He’s from Peru, has a South American accent, and it was pretty funny to see him try to teach this group of English speakers some Danish. Apparently, if you’re correctly speaking Danish it sounds like you’re choking on a potato. Definitely mildly offensive, but hilarious (just the way I like it). To be fair when you’re coming from the US, it probably sounds like we have super nasaly voices and all sound like valley girls. Oh well.

Anyway, the walking tour was great. Highly recommend it. It’s about 2.5-3 hours with a 10 minute break in the middle; starts at end of main shopping street by the Tivoli gardens, and ends by royal palace – and we got to see the changing of the guard too! We went down the oldest street in the city, learned about how fires have totally ravaged the city multiple times and basically, a building isn’t considered ‘classic’ unless it’s burned down 2 or more times.

We saw Hans Christian Andersen (well, where he lived and worked at national theater), Fredericks Church, which is based off Vatican, the Parliament building, the royal residencies, and a ton of other cool sights too, with some humor from Luis along the way. Loved it.

Babette Guldsmeden Restaurant

We hit up this cute little all-organic restaurant by our place for lunch before we headed out of town for the wedding (the whole reason we took this trip in the first place)! Super easy to be gluten-free here, and we actually ended up eating here twice on the trip because we were having trouble finding other restaurants that were open on the Monday holiday when we got back to the city! But it was convenient, and good. I had the grilled chicken with kale + apple salad which had a delicious mustard dressing on it, and some kind of lime-ade soda on the side which reminded me of kombucha. So good!

Ejby + Middlefart, Denmark

That afternoon we drove about 2 hours down to Ejby, where the wedding would be the next day. There is NOTHING in this town, it’s basically like a cluster of farms somewhat close together. The Danish countryside was gorgeous driving down though!

The closest normal-ish sized town is called Middlefart. Yes, Middlefart. We all laughed multiple times and apparently the Danes laugh too whenever Americans say it.

Restaurant Fænøsund

Anyway. We headed to the best restaurant in town according to TripAdvisor, and WOAH was it good. You guys. I wish I had taken a picture of my meal because it was one of the best I’ve ever had. Seriously. In the middle of nowhere, aka farmville, in a tiny town in Denmark. Meaning I will probably never ever have it again – so you’d better believe I savored every single bite.

What I had: a cooked-to-perfection beef filet with pickled shallots, a demi glaze, caramelized onion purée AND extra caramelized onions on the side. Some herbs on top for garnish and freshness. BEST BEEF OF MY LIFE you guys. Uuuugh and that demi glaze. The sauce. I’m salivating on the plane ride home just remembering this dish. And the caramelized onion purée – literally where has this been all my life? I was honestly wishing for gluten-free bread with this meal because I could’ve sopped up every single speck of sauce on my plate. My dad did, practically licked the dang thing.

The perfectly seared beef paired so insanely well with the salty, savory, and creamy demi glaze – which was mixed in with the caramelized onion puree, and balanced out by the freshness and crispness of the pickled shallots.

One day, I will learn how to recreate this dish for you guys. Mostly for me. But also for you, of course. Because it was THAT good. uuughhh.

Hotel (Bed & Breakfast) Fjelsted Skov Kro

Like I mentioned in my Iceland post, it is so, so much easier to stay allergen-friendly on trips if you stay in a place that has a kitchenette or something. This time we didn’t, but we were in a place that had a breakfast buffet with plenty of gluten-free options, so that was a perfect start to our day. Enjoyed plenty of assorted meats, soft-boiled eggs, fruit, and even had some yogurt + gluten-free muesli!

Café Razz

The next day we went exploring in ‘downtown’ Middlefart – which is a really gorgeous little town that had live music outdoors, some kind of holiday was going on that weekend, and people were out celebrating and enjoying the extremely nice weather; which is apparently really rare in Denmark!

We stumbled on a little outdoor café on the water called Café Razz, and you guessed it – I got a burger. Also, sidenote: after this trip I am completely even more obsessed than I was before with mayonnaise, on anything and everything. Specifically used as an aioli on burgers and potatoes. Obviously.

This burger was a surprise though. I always order bundles because I never assume places have gluten-free buns, and even when they do (unless the menu specifies it’s homemade) I always just assume it’s going to be not great. Because *most* store-bought gluten-free things restaurants have are gross. But boy, was I proved wrong. Had a mini freakout when my burger came out with a bun and the waiter wasn’t sure it was gluten-free – after all, I wasn’t trying to die before the wedding that night! But he showed me the order ticket and it said “glutenfri” (GF in Danish) and YOU GUYS. Hands down best gluten-free bread/bun I’ve ever had in my whole life. It was crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, just like any great burger bun should be, and it tasted like a mild sourdough. The gems you’ll find in these tiny Danish towns, I tell ya!

WEDDING TIME

Speaking of farms and being in the middle of nowhere. My friend Marie, the one getting married, was marrying a Danish guy who grew up on a working family farm that also doubles as a bed & breakfast, and has a huge outdoor space in the back that they apparently use for parties all the time. THAT is where we had the wedding. And my god it was freaking gorgeous.

We ate, drank (not me this time!) and danced our butts off, and learned a ton of Danish wedding traditions that included a bunch of stomping, yelling, cheersing (skoll!), dancing, all the men getting up in a line to kiss the bride and vice versa for the women and the groom, and finally, all the men practically assaulting the groom to cut the tops of his socks – symbolizing that he can’t run off with any other women anymore. Lol!

Emphasis on the dancing our butts off. I was actually sore from so much dancing the next day. Well done Dana, well done.

Oh PS – this wedding had a gelato bar for dessert. File that in your back pocket for whoever’s wedding you’re helping plan next because IT WAS AMAZING.

BACK IN COPENHAGEN

After the weekend’s festivities we drove back to the city. Unlucky for us, it was a Monday – and a ton of stuff is closed in CPH on Mondays, as we quickly found out. It also happened to be some kind of holiday, which meant even more stuff was closed. Oops. This is why we ended up going back to Babette the second time and basically walking around the whole city until we dropped later that night!

But not before we went back to Vaffenbageren for some ice cream. I had a scoop of mint chocolate chip this time, which was much less sweet (a good thing!) than the soft ice I had the first time.

Speaking of walking around and seeing everything we could – one thing that was totally underwhelming about the sights here was the Little Mermaid statue. You would think it would be a pretty big statue since it is such an important icon in popular culture and is so important to the city…but not so. She’s actually just the size of a regular person, and it would be super easy to miss the statue if there weren’t about a hundred tourists and tour buses right at that spot. According to our tour guide it’s the 3rd most underwhelming European tourist attraction, after the Mona Lisa in Paris and the Mannequin Pis in Brussels (but I think that one is cute!!)

BOAT TOURS

Another tour I’d highly recommend in this city because you get to experience the sights by boat! Totally worth it on a nice day to see all the great sights from the water. Just beware if you hadn’t slept a lot the last 2 nights due to a wedding, because the warmth and the boat may just lull you to sleep for a few minutes…not that it happened to me or anything. Totally not me. (okay maybe.)

Something else to note – you can either do a hop-on, hop off style tour, or an hour ‘grand tour’ which is much less expensive. We did the grand tour and I’d recommend that one – then you can see all the sights and plan out where you want to walk and go later, because the whole city is totally walkable!

TIGHT Australian Restaurant

Yep, we went to an Australian restaurant in Denmark. So sue me. Back to that point about it being hard to find places with 1) English menus and 2) gluten free options at 3) not extremely expensive prices? This was one of them. Totally unexpected, and totally delicious. And this one actually had GF markings on the menu too!

I had a seared cod over a salad with marinated potatoes, tomatoes, and asparagus. MORE VEGGIES PLS AND THANK YOU. My parents and brother all got the Schnitzel, which was so good that again, my dad was practically licking the plate. Highly recommend this place – it’s right off the main pedestrian shopping street.

Fredericksbourg Castle

Our last full day in the city we visited this monstrosity of a castle that’s about a 40 minute drive from CPH, but worth it if you have time to make the trip! You’re not only learning about the history of the castle and the monarchs who reigned there, but it’s also turned into a history exhibition of art and culture in Denmark through the centuries…starting around the 12 or 1300s I believe? There’s also a podcast-guided tour that you can download on your phone and go through the whole thing. Be sure to explore the gardens – they’re modeled off Versailles (as was the grandeur of a lot of the castle when it was re-done, you guessed it, after a fire) and definitely did it justice.

The Free Town of Christiania

This part of Copenhagen was unexpected and definitely a little weird. It’s like a little hippie haven, apparently like the Vatican – it’s its own free town. You can definitely tell something has changed even just when crossing the street into Christinania (because that’s all that separates the free town from Copenhagen – crossing the street); due to all the really cool graffiti and paintings all over the walls. The town has a weird vibe though, so even though we went searching for food there (and whomp, couldn’t find anything) we didn’t end up staying for long. But it was really cool to see!

Cafe California at BroensGaddekokken

We ended up grabbing lunch at a little open air food market just over the kissing bridge from the main part of the city with multiple stands that remind me of the beer gardens in Germany mixed with food trucks along the sides. Tons of cute options here, from a breakfast place with congee and chia pudding, coffee and ice cream places, burgers, Indian food, a Mexican stand, and of course lots of bars! Because I forgot to mention this before, but you can walk around the city with a drink in hand.

I ended up getting a salad from Café California called the San Diego bowl which was loaded with kale, spinach, a carrot + cabbage slaw, tomatoes, chicken, quinoa, avocado, sunflower seeds, cilantro, and a lime dressing. Sooo good you guys. The veggies were needed.

If you think I keep saying that a lot, it’s because most of my breakfasts in CPH were basically crackers and peanut butter. Not kidding. After 2/3 of my meals being snacks in Iceland and the other 1/3 being unless burgers or fish with potatoes, I needed all the veggies I could get in my life.

Christiansbourg Palace

After lunch we climbed to the top of the parliament building, called Christiansbourg Palace (I swear, everything in this country is Frederick this or Christinans-that. Kind of like in Italy where it’s Maria everything for all the churches. Makes things easy, but definitely a bit confusing when you’re trying to differentiate between castles, churches, and free hippie towns). They told us it was 480 steps up – it’s not. You actually walk about 20. But the view was so cool, a 360 view of the whole city (and I think you can even see Sweden too)!

Tolbod bodega

For our last dinner in the city we finally got some authentic danish food. My dad and brother got the daily special which was this fried pork with cabbage, pickled cucumbers, and potatoes (which they LOVED) – his girlfriend Avery and my mom got a cod-salmon duo that had some delicious mousse on it, which they also loved! My meal unfortunately wasn’t great. I had to make a lot of modifications to a steak dish (like really? Isn’t it just grilled meat?) and it ended up being overcooked and dry. But at least it came with some vegetables.

Kaffetereit Coffee Shop

Today, we go home! Took us long enough to stop in this little coffee shop that was right next to our hotel but we finally did on the last day and it was adorable. I had a chai tea latte with oat milk and it was delicious! Avery loved her oat milk latte. She is now obsessed with oat milk and is casually sneaking some back in her suitcase as I’m writing this on the plane. Not sorry. Apparently it’s super expensive back at home? Weird.

The Union Kitchen

For brunch on our way out of the city we hit up Union Kitchen. It’s a super cute little restaurant that also serves lunch and dinner and it’s not in the tourist-trappy part of town so it isn’t insanely expensive. They do have GF bread here, so I had some avocado toast with poached eggs on top! Fam loved the breakfast croissants, the pulled pork bowl, and my brother went whole hog on the brunch plate – which had everything from skyr with granola and fruit to scrambled eggs, bacon, a mini waffle with nutella, a croissant, and I think there was even some kale with truffle salt on it! Service was preeetty slow though, and we ended up leaving for the airport like half an hour later than we wanted to. So that was a little stressful. But we made it!

Langeheusen (Bakery)

I should probably give an honorable mention to this famous bakery in Denmark even though I never ate there. My fam was OBSESSED. They went there two of the three days we were there for breakfast and absolutely loooved all the pastries they had. I even saw one day that they had gluten-free bread! But holy moly cross contamination would probably have been super high so I didn’t want to risk feeling super crappy on vacation. They also can do coffee, lattes, and tea with oat milk!

Adventures in Denmark + Gluten Free Copenhagen

Were super fun! Even though it was definitely not as easy to be gluten free in Copenhagen or the rest of Denmark as Iceland, I still had a really fun time exploring the city and all it had to offer. And the tiny towns in Denmark that I’ll probably never visit again. And now, time for some vegetables. Keep calm and Hygge on!

COPENHAGEN TRIP FAVORITES:

• Copenhagen Free Walking Tours
• Grand Tour Boat Tour (leaves from Nyhavn)
• Nyhavn (go for happy hour and/or ice cream!)
• Christiansbourg Palace
• Fredericksbourg Castle (outside the city)
• The Glass Market (Torvehallerne) – we didn’t get here but I hear it’s amazing!

FAVORITE GLUTEN-FREE FRIENDLY RESTAURANTS

• Café Oscar ($$ – $$$, Copehnagen)
• Union Kitchen ($$, Copehnagen – casual brunch, lunch or dinner)
• Babette ($$, Copehnagen – all organic restaurant, casual lunch or dinner)
• Kaffetereit ($, Copehnagen – coffee + tea)
• Vaffenburger ($, Copenhagen – ice cream!)
• Tolbod Bodega ($$$, Copenhagen – authentic Danish favorite dishes, casual)
• Restaurant Saenosund ($$$, Middlefart – upscale)
• Café Razz ($$, Middlefart – casual)

OTHER RESTAURANT RECOMMENDATIONS I GOT FROM FRIENDS IN CPH:

• Noma (one day, I will get here!!!)
• Host ($$$, farm-to-table Danish restaurant)
• Cofoco restaurants
• Next Door Cafe
• The Living Room Café
• Café Pauldan (great for brunch!)
• Mad og Kaffe
• Coffee Collective (does iced coffee, and not just hot coffee with ice cream in it!)
• Bars: Bird and Church Key (mostly gin drinks), Balderdash, Ruby (cocktails!), Kassen, Boutique Lize

PRO TIPS:

• WATCH OUT FOR BIKES. They will not stop for you, and if you get hit, it’s your fault! If you’re up for it, you could rent bikes as a different way to see the city. But it may cause more stress than it’s worth depending how many people are in your group. Up to you!
• If you have to be gluten-free, do your research ahead of time for restaurants. Bring your celiac restaurant card if you’re worried about getting lost in translation.
• If the weather is warm, bike to the Brugge islands. There is an outdoor lap lane and wooden structure that you can jump off into the water!

 

YOU’LL LOVE THESE TRAVEL GUIDES TOO!

Gluten-Free Eats in Austin, TX + PaleoFX recap
Iceland Travel Favorites + Gluten Free Reykjavik
Las Vegas Gluten-Free Guide
Gluten-Free Eats in St. Pete, Florida
Eating my way through Portland + Bend, Oregon