Kadeau Bornholm
Kadeau Bornholm Review at-a-glance
Awards: 1 Michelin star
+Dazzling setting on the shores of Bornholm with great views that help you feel more connected to chef Nicolai Nørregaard’s cooking
+Unique cuisine that better balances taste and hyper-local sourcing than most New Nordic restaurants
- The setting is great but it is not exactly easy to get to (but very much worth the trip). Costly but not by Nordic standards.
Rating: 93.5/100
Verdict: New Nordic cooking has never been my favorite. The meals are long and the technical skills on display are impressive but too often the chefs want to show how clever they are instead of making great-tasting food. I don’t give bonus points for using seaweed in a dessert and making it platable when all that skill could have gone to making something less bizarre and better. Thankfully, none of this applied to Nicolai Nørregaard’s cooking at Kadeau. He unashamedly showed off the bounty of Bornholm without forgetting food needs to taste great. One of his signature dishes, Hot & Cold Smoked Salmon, was one of the favorite things I ate in 2020 and on par with the smoked salmon I had many, many years ago at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island which set the bar for all smoked salmon dishes. Perhaps even more impressively there were no duds on Nørregaard’s tasting menu - the only real misstep being cabbage combined with caviar but even that was not bad.
On our trip to Denmark I also visited Geranium, the only three-star in the country. While the Geranium meal was impressive in its sheer length and the amount of skill that went into it, I have to say I liked the overall experience at Kadeau better. The food was more approachable and its beachside location on a perfect summery day in Bornholm is hard to compete with.
Price I paid: 1650 DDK / €221 for the lengthy lunch tasting menu
Value: 10/20 (higher if you apply Danish pricing standards)
Kadeau Bornholm Background
If you are going to the Bornholm location, Kadeau is not an easy restaurant to get to. Bornholm is part of Denmark but actually a small island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden. If visiting from Copenhagen you can fly or take a ferry - either an overnight one from Copenhagen or a shorter one from Ystad, Sweden which is about a 1.5-hour drive from Copenhagen. When we visited the overnight ferry was closed due to COVID so we opted for driving through Sweden which was a nice enough trip and included driving over the Øresund Bridge, the longest bridge in Europe but one with a hefty €50 toll. Besides having Kadeau, Bornholm is a wonderful place to visit for a relaxing summer vacation. If you do find yourself in Bornholm I highly recommend also stopping by Sandvig IS Kalas - it has some of the best ice creams I have ever had. It draws long lines in the summer for a reason and we visited almost every day we were in Bornholm.
The restaurant sits all the way at the southern tip of the island, directly on the beach with fantastic views of the sea. Words do not really do this setting enough justice and it really adds to the overall experience - Kadeau (and New Nordic cooking in general) is about showing off local ingredients and everything the Nordic climate has to offer and you feel much more connected to that ethos sitting on the beach in Bornholm than in the middle of a city (even a great one) like Copenhagen. I can’t comment on what the Copenhagen location is like but even if the food is really better as Michelin’s ratings suggest, I would still visit the Bornholm version of Kadeau for the idyllic setting alone.
Kadeau’s chef and co-owner is Nicolai Nørregaard who purchased the Bornholm restaurant with business partner Rasmus Kofoed in 2007, opening Kadeau in its seaside location a short time later while also starting up its sister restaurant in Copenhagen during the winter months. Despite Nicolai not having formal training, Kadeau Copenhagen received a star in 2014 with a second following in 2016. The Bornholm location is similarly accomplished, earning a star in the first Nordic region guide in 2016.
Nørregaard was born in Bornholm and his cooking pays homage to what the island offers - making ample use of the island’s wealth of meat, dish, berries, vegetables, herbs, and mushrooms including the restaurant’s own garden. Nicolai’s cooking at Kadeau is certainly the new nordic style but I found it much more sensible than other versions - more focused on producing good-tasting dishes than being clever. While this type of cooking has not resulted in climbing as high as Noma/Geranium on the Worlds 50 Best List, it has resonated with Nørregaard’s guests, leading to high rankings on the OAD100 lists which is how I discovered the restaurant.
As with most other Michelin restaurants in Denmark, Kadeau is a tasting menu only affair with the dinner menu running at close to 2200 DDK / €295 or a slightly shorter menu costing 1650 DDK / €221. Drinks cost about what you would expect in Denmark so roughly 2x what you would pay in the rest of Europe. We visited for lunch and I can recommend you do the same - the menu is still plenty long enough and you can take advantage of the great views in the daylight.
Service was overall good with many dishes served directly by the chefs who passed their passion on to the guests. The one exception was one server who may have been the most outwardly unpleasant server I have ever dealt with. When I pointed out that a bee flew directly into my full beer she offered me a spoon to fish it out. When I asked if I could instead have a new drink her response was a look of contempt, a snarky remark that “I was the one who chose to sit outside and knew the risks” (keep in mind every single person was sitting outside), and a gruff grab of the beer which she dumped out in the bushes next to me. She did return with a new drink but proceeded to give a dirty look every time she walked by our table the rest of the meal. This did put a bit of a damper on the meal that was only picked up by how good every other server was.
What we ate at Kadeau
The meal started off with a trio of smaller snacks which from left to right included 3-year aged ham with dried strawberry and cherry blossoms, fire-cooked beetroot with quince and lyme grass and last but not least, a carpet clam with walnut and dried sauerkraut. This was an impressive start from chef Nicolai Nørregaard - I couldn’t think of a better way to start the menu. Each dish was a quick bite but had many layers of complexity, The aged ham had terrific nuttiness, the beetroot great smoke, and the flavors of the carpet clam nice and clean. My kind of snacks and the perfect start to the meal at Kadeau.
After the selection of Kadeau snacks came a dish of danish raw shrimp, fire-baked kohlrabi, and fig leaves. This was a smartly composed start to the meal, whetting the appetite for everything else to come. The natural sweetness of the shrimp came through nicely and Nicolai Nørregaard was smart to pair it with unripe figs which added a bit of tartness to the dish instead of the figs usual sweetness. The next dish was listed as a gigas oyster salad on the menu but was really more of a cauliflower dish. This included raw and roasted cauliflower paired with a creamy oyster emulsion sauce, various fresh herbs from the Kadeau garden, green gooseberry, and an oil made of lovage and black currant leaf. The end result was a complex dish with many layers of flavor, the cauliflower combining well with the brine from the oyster emulsion and herbs adding some relief to the richness. My only critique of the dish was the kitchen chose to leave some of the cauliflower raw, a choice I am not sure I agree with - it was a bit strong.
The best course of the night was a kadeau classic, cold and hot smoked salmon, rose & cheese. Smoked salmon is usually boring but not at Kadeau. The course starts with the presentation of an entire fillet of salmon that has been smoked in the house which is then carved and combined with a local danish cheese that tasted sort of like parmesan and a bit of rose. I would never have thought of combining salmon with cheese but this worked together in harmony, the salmon having a great texture and flavor and the rich cheese sauce being balanced out by the incorporation of cured elderflower.
A classic dish at Kadeau which they do many variations of is Palthaest, a Danish pancake, which today was paired with havgus cheese and many many flowers. The most instagrammable dish of the night, the artful array of flowers added tons of color to the well-made palthaest (sort of like a crepe). This was more comfort food than fine dining and there is nothing wrong with that. After the brief interlude of the palthaest, the meal went back to seafood with a dish of scallop, pumpkin leather, and walnut leaf. The scallop was top shelf but I am not sure I really understood the pumpkin leather - it added texture but it was not a texture I really wanted in my dish.
What looked to be a simple piece of cabbage actually turned out to have a nice spoonful of caviar tucked inside. While it was nice to have a nice bit of luxury in the meal from the caviar, the dish itself did not seem to be the best use of the ingredient. The cabbage was nicely cooked but the entire combination did not work very well for me. The main course was a nice chunk of pork, carrot, black quince, garlic which included a glorious fat cap on the pork that the waiter smartly pointed out if you did not eat it you would be missing out on the best part of the dish. The pork itself was slightly over but still nice and moist with plenty of flavor from the grill. This was served with a dehydrated carrot which was an impressive bit of technique from the kitchen that really intensified the natural flavors of the carrot.
Dessert at new nordic restaurants can be a bit of adventure but Kadeau did it right with a dish of goat’s milk ice cream, rosemary, pollen, and spring honey. The presentation was not remarkable but the flavor combinations were solid with a nice tang from the goats’ milk ice cream and the topping of rosemary and honey a classic combination but featuring very high-quality ingredients. Incorporating rosemary into a dessert can be a tricky balance but Kadeau nailed it. The last bite of the meal was honey cake and butter, a traditional danish treat that Kadeau kicked up a notch. According to our waiter, there is a danish saying that more or less goes “you put so much butter on the bread it sticks to the roof of your mouth”. I am not sure how the Danish stay so skinny with a saying like this but I happily piled enough butter onto the cake that it stuck to the roof of my mouth. The honey cake itself was perfection, moist, slightly sweet, and lightly griddled in some butter to give it crispy edges. Such a simple bite but one I’ll remember for a long time, just like my meal at Kadeau Bornholm.