Smørrebrød in Copenhagen: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

Smørrebrød means, literally, butter and bread, and the name undersells it. It is a single slice of dark, dense rye — rugbrød, sour and studded with whole grains — spread with butter or lard and then covered, edge to edge, with a topping that is the actual point. The bread is a plate you eat, not the main event. A good piece has more on top than underneath, and you eat it with a knife and fork.

It is not a Copenhagen invention in any strict sense. Rye with something on it is the oldest Danish lunch there is, and the plain version still travels to offices and schools all over the country in a lunchbox. What the capital did was make it a restaurant dish. The elaborate, composed piece — a topping, then a sauce, then two or three garnishes chosen to go with it — took shape in the city’s lunch restaurants around the turn of the twentieth century, and Copenhagen remains the place where the long, formal version is easiest to find. Elsewhere in the country you will eat it too; here it is an occasion.

Several pieces carry names with stories attached, and they are told as stories. The best known is dyrlægens natmad, “the veterinarian’s night snack”: liver pâté, salt beef, a cube of meat jelly, raw onion and cress, said to have been put together for a vet who ate late. No one has produced the vet. It is a name, and a good one, and the piece is worth ordering for what is on it.

What to order

The vocabulary is the menu, and most traditional places hand you a paper order sheet listing the pieces, on which you write the number you want beside each. Two or three per person is a full lunch; one is a snack.

The pieces worth knowing by name:

• sild — herring, the classic first piece. Pickled in a clear sweet-sour brine (marineret sild), in a curry dressing (karrysild), or fried and then pickled. Served with raw onion, capers or a slice of egg.
• æg og rejer — egg and shrimp: sliced hard-boiled egg under a heap of small cold-water shrimp, with mayonnaise and lemon. If the menu says håndpillede, the shrimp were peeled by hand, and it will cost more; that word is the one that justifies the price.
• stjerneskud — “shooting star”: one fillet of fried plaice and one steamed, shrimp, mayonnaise, often caviar-style roe and asparagus, usually on white bread rather than rye. It is the one piece built like a main course.
• røget ål — smoked eel with scrambled egg and chives. Rich and increasingly expensive as eel stocks decline.
• leverpostej — warm liver pâté, typically with crisp bacon and fried mushrooms. The everyday version is cold with pickled beetroot.
• flæskesteg — roast pork with its crackling, red cabbage and a slice of pickle.
• roastbeef — rare beef with remoulade (a mild yellow pickle-and-mayonnaise sauce), crisp fried onions and grated horseradish.
• kartoffelmad — sliced cold new potato on rye with mayonnaise, chives and crisp onion. It sounds like a filler and is often the piece people remember.
• tatar — raw minced beef with a raw egg yolk, capers, onion and horseradish.

The order matters and the Danes follow it: fish first, then meat, then cheese. Herring opens the meal, partly because it is the piece traditionally taken with a small chilled glass of snaps (aquavit) and a beer. Asking for herring after the roast pork is harmless and marks you instantly. So does lifting a piece with your hands: the plain lunchbox version is finger food, the restaurant version is not.

Toasting goes with the snaps — skål, eyes held on the other person — and nobody expects a visitor to drink the glass in one go.

What to avoid

The signal that matters is the bread showing. A properly made piece hides its slice; a topping laid in a thin strip down the middle of a wide rectangle of rye, with a band of bare bread around it, is a sandwich economized on, not a smørrebrød.

Pieces made hours ahead and sitting under plastic in a chilled cabinet are the second thing. The genre is cold food, so it survives better than most, but the crisp onions go soft, the lettuce garnish wilts into the sauce and the bread turns wet beneath it. A counter where the pieces are assembled when you order, or at least that morning, is a different product.

Be wary of shrimp sold as the cheap option. Brined shrimp from a tin are pale, uniform and taste mostly of the brine; hand-peeled ones are smaller, sweeter and uneven in size.

A “tasting plate” of miniature pieces, cut into bite-sized squares and arranged in a row, is a format for people who will try smørrebrød once. It is not wrong, but it removes the composition that makes each piece what it is.

Finally, the reinvented version — sourdough instead of rye, seasonal vegetables, a fermented something — is a real parallel tradition in the city and often very good. It is not the classic, and it is priced as cooking rather than as lunch. Know which one you are ordering.

Practicalities

Smørrebrød is a lunch dish, and the traditional places keep lunch hours. Many open late morning and close by mid-afternoon; few serve the formal version at dinner at all. Arriving around half past eleven gets the full list before popular pieces run out and before the office crowd lands at noon.

At a sit-down lunch restaurant, expect roughly 100 to 200 kroner a piece, with eel, hand-peeled shrimp and the stjerneskud at the top of that range or beyond it. A takeaway counter selling ready-made pieces charges noticeably less.

Cards are accepted almost everywhere, including small counters, and many places are effectively cashless. Service is included in Danish prices, so rounding up is a courtesy rather than an expectation.

The heaviest season is November and December, when workplaces and families hold their Christmas lunches and herring, pork and snaps run through long afternoons. Booking a traditional lunch restaurant in those weeks is worth doing.