4: A Confession, and a Love Story Involving Dumplings

by Lisa Abend and Lars Bjerregaard

If you’ve been following Bord since its inception, it has perhaps crossed your mind by now that we have no idea what we’re doing. And right you would be. We have a lot of experience writing, reporting, and editing, and we know a good story when we hear one. But running a newsletter? With its attendant concerns about open rates and subscription churn and CTAs? Not a clue. 

A case in point: in studying up on Substack and other newsletter platforms, we kept reading about how important it is to make readers feel like they have a voice in the publication. So we came up with an idea. (And by ‘we,’ we should probably clarify that we mean one of us who prefers, in her humiliation, to remain anonymous.) We already knew that we wanted to hold our editorial meetings at restaurants. And we had already decided that we would feature one dish from those meetings in our recurring segment, Mise. Now we decided to try posting a few selections and let our readers vote for the one that we would write about. “We can drive audience engagement,” someone may have said in a veritable frenzy of start-up bro lingo, “by posting a CTA on SoMe.”

It worked. Over 20 of you took the time to respond and vote for the dish you wanted to learn more about. There was just one problem: you voted for the wrong dish. (To be fair, some very wise souls had warned about this very possibility. Did we pay attention? No we did not.)

It’s not that Dish C, the winning Swedish kiwi with wasabi and kelp is wrong, of course. In fact, it is startlingly delicious, based on a recipe that Kristian Baumann prepared during a four-hands dinner in Seoul and recreated here in Copenhagen once he found a Swedish farmer growing kiwis not 100 kilometers from Koan’s door. But Dish A, the mandu, is a better story, as we hope you’ll agree when you read the Mise below. 

For everyone who took the time to vote, only to have their vote cast aside like so many Trump ballots dumped into a Wisconsin river (NOT!), we can only say: we’re sorry. But no one ever said this was a democracy, snowflakes. 

--Lisa Abend

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Mise: Koan’s Mandu with Fjord Shrimp and Gochugaru Peppers, or A Love Story About Dumplings, in Three Acts

Act One: Near the royal palace in Seoul, South Korea

It is a frigid day in January. The temperature hovers around -20 even when the air is still, which it never is. Kristian Baumann and his soon-to-be bride wander near the palace clad in thick ski jackets in a futile attempt to ward off the bitter cold. Normally, this part of town, dotted with historic buildings and souvenir shops, would be crowded with tourists, but in this weather, it is nearly abandoned. The couple turns a corner onto a narrow alleyway, where steam billows dramatically. Desperate to warm themselves, they rush toward it, and find themselves in front of a family-run restaurant so small that there’s no room in the kitchen for the giant steam baskets so the mandu—Korean dumplings--are cooked out front on the street. The couple is welcomed in, and gratefully, they squeeze themselves around a low table in the tiny dining room. One of the owners brings them cups of hot tea to warm themselves.  No one speaks English, but the menu, pasted to the wall, has pictures. The couple point to the mandu. “They were huge—each one 6 or 8 bites,” Baumann recalls. “And to be honest, they weren’t the best dumplings of my life. But the whole thing--the family, the small shop, the steam, the hot dumpling--it was such a beautiful moment.”

That’s what we’re all after, isn’t it? Those Ratatouille moments, when food and love and memory combine. But in Baumann’s case, there was another strand that would keep the mandu vividly alive in his memory. And it wasn’t entirely beautiful. 

Act Two: A former warehouse on Refshaleøen

When the end came, it was swift. Baumann had opened 108 in 2016 to great acclaim and intense media scrutiny thanks to its billing as “Noma’s little sister” (it was the first spin-off launched by René Redzepi and his partners). The restaurant succeeded beyond Baumann’s wildest ambitions, earning a Michelin star in its first year. But 108 was also a victim of its own success; the award  raised the public’s expectations for what was originally intended to be a more casual, almost bistro-like place, and it quickly found itself on the international foodie circuit, frequented more by tourists than local Danes. And like many new restaurants, it struggled financially. But a few years in, things were starting to turn around. Baumann says 2019  was a great year, and 108 would have paid off its remaining debt in 2020 “if it had been a normal year.” But of course, 2020 was not normal. The international clientele upon which the restaurant depended heavily disappeared, and by the end of August, Noma announced it was closing 108. A month later, the restaurant was gone.

Yet barely a week after that, Baumann opened Koan in the warehouse space that houses Empirical Spirits, the distillery founded by Lars Williams and Mark Emil Hermansen. It was unlike anything Copenhagen had ever seen before: a pop-up that combined proper tablecloths and refined cooking with Empirical’s rock-and-roll cocktails and, for Baumann,  a somewhat more adventurous attitude. He had long wanted to express himself more fully through his cooking, which for him, meant expressing his Korean heritage. For although he had grown up in Denmark with Danish parents since he was the smallest of babies, he had been adopted from South Korea when he was just four months old. 

Those paying attention might have detected hints of that desire in his earlier cooking--at 108, for example, he toasted rosehip seeds to approximate the taste of sesame—but they were subtle, and largely sublimated beneath the larger agenda of Nordic cuisine.  Now, at Koan, Baumann began to give them freer rein. The ceramics came from Korea, as did the inspiration for the bread course, a savory version of the milk doughnuts that are an after-school treat throughout the country. There were dumplings too, stuffed with duck and maitake mushrooms, and neatly pleated into crescents. 

But it was only when Denmark went into its second lockdown that Baumann began making mandu inspired by the ones he ate on the icy January trip to Seoul. “We were forced to close and do takeaway,” he says. “And we wanted to do something that was super fun for the guests. I kept telling these guys about the mandu that we had at this small shop, and about how huge they were. So we said, ‘okay, how can we make like this, you know, huge mandu, and execute it in a way where we can take it 95% of the way and the last 5% people can do it at home?’”

They rolled out the dough, cut it into baseball-sized circles,  filled the dough with pork spiced with dried peppers, and partially pre-cooked the dumplings, then sent them out with a sauce made from caramelized onions and mussels. Their customers, who had only to re-steam them at home and heat up the sauce, loved them. 

But the mandu weren’t just fun and they weren’t just a tribute to that warming meal at the restaurant in Seoul. They were conceived in the moment of loss brought about by 108’s closing, and although they pointed a way forward to Koan--and Baumann’s—future, they also harkened back to his past, and an even greater loss. 

Six months after opening 108, Baumann returned to Korea. It was his first trip there as an adult, and it was different from the later trips he would take, when he would go  to cook a popup with chef friends or show his girlfriend around the country. On this trip, he went alone, and he went with a purpose: to bring to the orphanage where his birth mother had left him a photo diary his parents had kept of his life. It was an attempt to reach her. “I wanted to hand it over,” he says. “To let her know that I had ended up okay.” 

When his Danish parents adopted him, Baumann’s birth mother had already relinquished him to the orphanage, then reclaimed him, then turned him over once more. His adoptive parents were already in Korea, ready to bring him home with them, when she took him back again. “They turned up and were told, ‘he’s not here.’ Baumann recounts. “And then she brought me back and they called and said, ‘Okay, do you still want him?’”

At the orphanage, he turned the diary over to a staff member who helped him read what few papers remained from his adoption, then simply waited and hoped. Under Korean law, he was not permitted to contact his birth mother directly, and even the orphanage was allowed only to send a letter to the address she had left, and only then, every three months. He never heard back. 

Act Three: Jægersborggade

It was with some perhaps added poignancy then that, earlier this year, he found himself attempting another homecoming of sorts. Christian Puglisi, who had been his former boss when Baumann was sous chef at Relæ, was trying to figure out what to do with the space now that Relæ had also closed. He was in protracted negotiations with a property owner at the time over a potential permanent space for Koan, but as these dragged on,  Baumann, who calls work his ‘meditation,’ was eager to get back to the kitchen. So although he had some trepidation, he accepted the offer. 

“I was afraid it would feel like I was going backward,” he says of his return to the Relæ space. “But it hasn’t been that at all, it’s just really comfortable. After a couple of days I was greeting the drug dealers outside just like I had before.”

The tentative steps he had taken at the first Koan toward expressing his Korean heritage gave way to something a bit more direct. A kiwi sorbet with wasabi and kelp that he had developed for a four-hands dinner in Seoul reappeared on the menu. Black bean ice cream--a take on the red bean desserts he had struggled with as a kid--was added to the end. 

And as he continued putting together the menu, he found himself asking a now-familiar question. He meant it in reference to the previous popup in the Empirical space, but given his past, it’s not hard to read it as the central question of Baumann’s life: “What are the things we should take with us, and what should we abandon?”

The mandu, he decided, was one of the former. In Koan’s current incarnation at Relæ, where Baumann expects to stay at least for the next several months, he has scaled down the size a bit--it’s now three or four bites—and made the wrapper thinner. The sauce contains chicken wings in addition to those caramelized onions and mussels. And at the last minute, Baumann decided to swap the pork filling, spiced with gochugaru peppers, with fjord shrimp. He made the change primarily because of the season--fjord shrimp are at their peak in summer and given the heat, no one “wants to eat pork neck right now.” But in its current Korean-Nordic version, the mandu comes closer to who Baumann himself is. “It has this wonderful story, originating in my travels, through the takeaway and now to here,” he says, before nodding to a future for Koan that more fully incorporates the South Korea he has grown to love, the Denmark that is his home, and all the other parts of himself. “The journey we want to take now is just to continue to evolve.”  

—With gratitude for the masterful editing by Lars Hinnerskov Eriksen