Three Months Out, the Eighth Floor, and What Fish Costs Here
Rasmus Kofoed and Søren Ledet's pescatarian room above Parken is a DKK 4,400 menu you book on SevenRooms up to three months out.
The elevator to the eighth floor doesn't work until ten minutes before service. You stand in a stadium lobby, watching other diners arrive, until a light changes and the doors open. Then the room reveals itself: floor-to-ceiling glass over Fælledparken, the treetops at eye level, and a wax-sealed menu waiting at every place setting. You can crack the seal or leave it and let the courses arrive as surprises.
Rasmus Kofoed and Søren Ledet opened Geranium in 2007 at the King's Garden, closed it in 2009, and reopened here in 2010, on top of the national football stadium. Three Michelin stars since 2016. Number one on the World's 50 Best list in 2022. The menu is pescatarian — vegetables, fish, seafood, no meat — which is a decision that shapes the entire evening.
The eighth-floor room and the salted herring are the reasons to book, and the ramsom pancake is the reason to hesitate.
Editorial Deep
The salted herring lands early — Danish tradition, the menu calls it — cured fish tucked into a shell of crisp algae, dill stems arranged like a small hedge, a shot of aquavit alongside. It reads as museum-piece Nordic and eats as something older and more direct: the fish has weight, the algae shatters, the aquavit resets the palate. Later comes potato and peas, which sounds like an insult to the room and is not. Two ingredients, worked to a point where the potato tastes like the deepest possible version of potato and the peas carry a green sharpness the plate needs to stay from tipping sweet. The bleak roe course is the other one worth remembering — small orange spheres delivering a saline pop that recalibrates everything that came before.
Conversation at a normal volume works. Two people across a circle table can talk without leaning in, and the couple at the next table stays audibly separate. There is no music in the traditional sense — the sound is cutlery, low voices, the occasional soft narration from a server who has walked over to explain a plate.
Reservations open on SevenRooms, through geranium.dk, up to three months ahead for parties of two to six, and a deposit of DKK 1,500 per guest makes the booking final. Parties of seven or more go by email. If the calendar shows nothing for your date, email the restaurant rather than assuming it is fully booked — party-size mismatches sometimes leave gaps the calendar hides.
The cheapest honest visit here is lunch on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday: the 4,400 DKK menu, the entry-tier pairing at 2,300 DKK, and the same eighteen courses the evening room serves. That is a serious number for lunch, and one Kadeau, across the harbour in Christianshavn, undercuts with a similarly regional, similarly seasonal argument. Would we send someone to do exactly the Geranium lunch? Yes, but with the caveat that the room and the view carry meaningful weight in that decision; if the reader is coming for the food alone, the gap between the two rooms is smaller than the price gap suggests.
The condition currently unmet is a menu with less fish in it. The pescatarian frame is the house identity and it is not changing, but after fourteen consecutive courses built around seafood, the palate wants a pivot the kitchen has decided not to give. A return makes sense when the seasonal menu turns — Kofoed's autumn and winter progressions lean harder on roots, fermented vegetables, and preserved fruit, and the fish courses read differently against that backdrop than they do in high summer.
What to eat
Don't miss.
The tasting is the tasting — no à la carte. Leave the wax seal on the menu intact and let the salted herring, potato and peas, and bleak roe arrive as surprises.
“A three-star room that earns its altitude on vegetables and cured fish, and asks the palate for more faith than it should on the middle-menu seafood.”
Go for the salted herring, the potato and peas, and the sunset over Fælledparken. Skip if you want meat, if you cannot plan three months out, or if fourteen fish courses in sequence sounds like a test rather than a menu — Kadeau in Christianshavn makes the regional Nordic argument with less money on the table and more textural range on the plate.
The Verdict
