Facebook X Email Print Save Story 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.