8: The Jutlander making Copenhagen just a little spicier
Hi there,
This week’s issue brings you another addition of Mise, in which we tell the story behind one of the dishes currently making Copenhagen such an exciting place to eat. The recipe in question is Donda’s aguachile, a spicy, fruity, sweet and briny dish that tastes 100% like something you might eat on a beach in Mexico but was created by the restaurant’s young Danish sous chef, Oliver Benn.
A reminder: this is the second-to-last issue before we set up the paywall. In the meantime, we’d like to request your help. For a future issue of Bord, we plan to focus on one of the side effects of the current staffing shortage: poaching. We know this is a contentious issue: some owners and restaurateurs who can’t afford to raise wages find it unconscionable for others with deeper pockets and big investors behind them to lure away their staff. Others, especially if they’ve kept their staff on throughout the lockdowns only to have them leave for a new gig, feel betrayed by the lack of loyalty. And still others argue that this recent turn of events is a much needed corrective for low salaries and poor working conditions that have long been a problem in the industry.
We want to learn more about how it’s affecting you. So if you’ve got a story about poaching—if you’re an owner who has lost waiters to another restaurant offering signing bonuses or higher salaries, or a restaurateur who is simply doing what it takes to staff your kitchen, or a chef who has been offered a sweet deal to leave your current position (whether or not you’ve accepted)—we’d love to hear from you. You can DM us on Instagram, or email us at bord@substack.com. All information will be confidential.
Thanks so much. And as always, thanks for reading.
—Lisa and Lars
Mise: Donda’s Strawberry Aguachile
To the collection of unlikely events that have shaped Copenhagen’s cuisine, it may be time to make room for Oliver Benn’s encounter with Mexican food. When it comes to bringing authentic Latin American flavors and techniques to Denmark, his role has not been as critical or dramatic as Rosio Sanchez’s or Karlos Ponte’s. But by working in the kitchen of both those chefs, and now as sous chef at Donda, he has quietly played a part in introducing Copenhageners to the spicy, bright, charred flavors of the Americas. Which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment for a 26-year-old from Jutland.
Born in Århus, Benn eventually moved with his family to Copenhagen, where he attended culinary school. After graduation, he got a job at a restaurant, but quickly grew bored with the French cuisine he was cooking there. Heading south to Barcelona, he began working at Albert Adrià’s Hoja Santa, the avant-garde Mexican restaurant helmed by Paco Méndez until its corona-inflicted closing earlier this year. At the time, Benn had eaten a few tacos in his life, but this was his first introduction to what Mexican cuisine could be. That it came in Spain hardly mattered. It was love at first bite.
He spent two years working as chef de partie at Hoja Santa, before returning to Copenhagen and getting a job at Taller, where Ponte had just begun introducing Danes to Venezuelan cuisine. From there, he moved to Sánchez, which was the first to bring ambitious, creative Mexican food to the city, and worked there for the restaurant’s first year. When some of the guys who had helped open that place went home to Oaxaca, he tagged along, and worked for a few months at famed chef Enrique Olvera’s Criollo. When he returned again to Copenhagen, his brother eventually introduced him to Qasim Khan, who hired him as sous chef at Donda.
Khan, of Pakistani-Danish background, had also long been drawn to Latin American cuisine, and worked for a time as the chef at the Mexican restaurant Condesa. “But I thought it weird that people here, if they ate Mexican food, were only eating pork--cochinita and all that,” Khan says. “There’s so much fish and vegetables in those kitchens, and I wanted to present that part, like the food you’d get at an open-air beach restaurant in Mexico.” When a space opened on Strandgade (which translates as Beach Street), it seemed like fate.
Donda opened in the fall of 2019, which meant it only had a few months to get its footing before the first lockdown hit. But these days find it packed, full of Copenhageners eager for the bright hot flavors that Khan and Benn coax from Danish fish and produce. “Usually what happens is Qasim will come to me with an idea--wouldn’t it be fun if we made this-- and I’ll just work with my palate, freestyling and tasting until I get to something that reminds of what it was when I was working in Mexico,” Benn says of their process.
A good case in point is the bright and beautiful strawberry aguachile now on the menu. It started life as a ceviche,“and people responded nicely to it,” Benn says. “But everybody knew ceviche, and we wanted to do something that was different, and closer to our own knowledge.” When Khan brought in a photo of an aguachile verde, made with cucumber and apple, they knew they had found their solution.
Aquachile uses many of the same ingredients of the Peruvian dish—raw fish, lime, chiles—but rather than marinating them for an extended period to “cook” the fish, tosses them quickly together. It’s also less acidic, substituting some of the citrus for sweeter fruits.
At Donda, Benn’s current iteration tosses haddock in the “chile water’ made from strawberries, lime and apple juice, and a Peruvian chile called aji limo which is spicy enough that guests—especially the Danish ones—get warned about it when ordering. The dish is then garnished with more ripe Danish strawberries, some cape gooseberries for their similarity to tomatillos, a bit of cilantro oil and cress, a few nasturtium leaves, and some salicornia for the briny flavors it adds.
Here in the waning days of Danish summer, those strawberries are nearly out of season, so Benn will soon substitute them with blackberries, and then another fruit after that. “I’ll just keep mixing stuff until something clicks in my brain,” he says. “ I think,’ if I can serve this and people I know in Mexico who have tasted an aguachile can recognize it and recommend it,’ then, okay, I can be proud of it.”
He likes having to take that imaginative leap. “The flavors and techniques are so different from here--when you make a salsa in Mexico, for example, you burn the vegetables, but in Denmark we just boil them,” he says. “But that’s the joy for me—that they’re so different.”