The Ørn Identity

A solstice soirée in a deconsecrated herring plant awash with biodynamic wine, marital froideur, and overseen by a PR officer who confiscates phones...

Barges blaze on the Øresund, carting straw witches to their symbolic cremation - souls bound, in folklore if not in fact, for Bloksbjerg, the devil’s Danish summer let. It’s Sankt Hans Aften - the solstice, the longest, most over-explained day of the year. Bonfires crackle on cue. Faces flicker. Champagne is decanted from carafes the exact same shape as the bottles they replace. I smile. I blend.

That I’m even here - at Ørn, Copenhagen’s most masturbatory restaurant-cult hybrid - is faintly ludicrous. I’m still paid in canapés, polite smiles, and the kind of ‘brilliant exposure’ which eventually leads not to employment, but to anaemia - an existence stitched together from RSVP acceptances and launch scraps. I’ve become something between a professional guest and the kind of ornament who’s only ever spoken to when blocking the fridge - often found caryatid-like, propping up the wall by the kitchen doors at soft launches, poised to spear a rogue blini like a desperate seabird, famished and overdressed.

The invitation was flung at me by an old timer at the Wall Street Journal who had wriggled out of the trip for a ‘paradise posting’ in Langkawi - poor, overextended lamb, sentenced to just-hatched Grüner Veltliner poolside and similarly scented towels while I snaffled at his crumbs. We first crossed paths years ago when I was pouring Dom Pérignon at the half-abandoned Commonwealth Institute, and he backed me into a corner like a dehydrated uncle at a dry wedding, demanding multiple refills with the braying entitlement of someone who mistakes accreditation for charisma. Against reason, we got on. Perhaps because, not so deep down, I knew I would become him.

Wearing a kipper tie which, he claimed, ‘predated Idi Amin’s rise to power’, he later arrived at a dinner party I’d spent a week preparing - a carefully choreographed bid for social advancement. The guest list included the adman behind that laundrette jeans commercial - now a design museum trustee and part-time viticulturist, a fabulously wealthy whisky distiller whose family practically invented duty-free but wore shoes so ruined the soles flapped, and self-anointed scribes like himself. The trustee had sent word via his assistant two days prior: ‘doesn’t eat nuts (not allergic) or truffles!’

He arrived early, asked for diesel money, then farted his way through the mains, like a faulty bellows. He left behind two rinsed bottles of borrowed Burgundy - both of which he’d largely polished off himself - and the lingering sourness of a man convinced his presence was a personal favour, bestowed with all the ceremony of a pope visiting a provincial garden centre.

The in-flight magazine said it best: ‘It’s easier to share a sauna with Queen Margrethe II than to get a seat at Ørn.’ True. And possibly more comfortable.

But here I am, ensnared in what was once a herring warehouse - a building conceived for the honest confinement of protein, where the stench of fish once declared its purpose with glorious, bilious clarity. Now gutted, deloused, and feng-shuied, it has been reborn as a temple of gastro-mysticism - a sanctified bunker of greys, devoted to the ritualised savagery of edible mulch, where plants are flayed in the name of pleasure, and meat is prefaced with an apology.

The maître d’ wears a hand-woven sisal smock - exquisitely tailored, comically penitential - the sort of monastic couture Monocle might design for a silent order of baristas outside Aarhus. It doesn’t rustle but accuses. His scent is pine, cracked pepper, and centuries of Lutheran self-loathing: Protestantism reduced to a vapour and dabbed with surgical precision behind each pristine earlobe. His expression is that of a man who’s audited your tax return, judged your parents, your partner, and your children, and conducted a structural survey of your soul, only to declare all non-compliant. He does not speak. His wrist flicks - brisk, bureaucratic, mildly homicidal - and we are shepherded through a door once built for barrels, now rebranded as the portal for the tastefully damned. A Scandi-noir supper club where the fish arrives raw, naked, and sobbing.

Inside, the silence is deafening - not peace but anaesthesia. The staff drift by like cenobites. Every movement is a choreography of servile solemnity - a danse macabre of curated hospitality for people too rich to be told the truth: that none of this matters, and that the fish want their building back.

Tonight’s hosts: Svea Kallistrata Halberg and Lars Mads Vedel, the minds behind Ørn’s interiors and one another’s emotional undoing. Former lovers, current collaborators, they are the sort of ‘interior architects’ who claim not to care about location - which is perhaps why they obstructed the only pitch-facing window in a restaurant built inside the national football stadium, leaving guests to force nonchalance over the score. They orbit each other with the kind of glacial restraint which suggests something went very wrong in Finland that winter. This is their twelfth visit. A number neither finds remotely comforting.

Svea, with a gold mane which suggests a lioness mid-divorce, and a Danish laugh which ricochets off the timber beams like polished gunfire, orders more champagne before speaking. She wears something voluminous and sharply draped, the colour of dried blood or wet clay - impossible to photograph and therefore deeply exclusive. Lars, darker, architecturally stubbled, has the sort of face which looks designed rather than grown - all planes and precision, like something approved in prototype. He watches her with the faint regret one reserves for a lost flat deposit, or a discontinued Lumitron lamp.

My fellow press guest - unnamed, for reasons which will become clear - is hunched beside me. Tweed, tiredness, and the faint whiff of something herbal he probably picked up from his assistant, Narnia. Narnia has appallingly fragrant body odour - the kind which suggests she believes showers are an assault on the microbiome. She smells like the most pernicious natural wine never bottled: volatile, mousy, barnyard-adjacent. A living, breathing skin-contact experiment gone horribly, hauntingly wrong. She never notices; everyone else does.

‘I was shaving,’ he says, dabbing his forehead with one of the damp flax pads we’ve been given - part of a gentle coercion to abandon cutlery and eat with our hands. ‘And I heard her laughing in the next room.’ He doesn’t blink. ‘It wasn’t for me.’

He found out about his wife’s affair an hour before leaving for Heathrow this morning. It landed - cleanly, like a guillotine. He takes a long sip of something brown, oxidised, fungal even, and proudly biodynamic. It tastes, presumably, like betrayal in ceramic.

‘I’ve inherited a house in Norfolk,’ he adds. ‘A pile. There’s a phone which rings, but no handset. A mooring, too. And a boat. I think I’ll just go there.’

It isn’t yet a plan. And it’s addressed to no one. I take a sip of still white from the land of Champagne - wine mugged of its party trick - and think of the vines: trained into submission, dutifully aligned, stoically fruiting for strangers. Like the restaurant, it has all the right pedigree without the pulse. The idea of celebration stripped of the inconvenience of joy.

Until that moment, the plant pot had sat innocently at the centre of the table. Then, minuscule to the extent she almost disappears into her smock, a mute waitress with the expression of a person privately amused hurls it down. No preamble. No context. ‘Soil’ and shards scatter across the bare table. We are handed gloves - thick, horticultural ones - not for safety, but complicity. We are instructed, by mime, to forage. The pot, we are informed, is edible.

And then, from the wreckage - steamed, and dressed in llama fat - it appears. A single sautéed Limfjord mussel. Uncovered, like evidence. It glistens with a haunted sheen. The others chat idly, unaware. But I lean closer. Something moves - not visually, but in presence. And then I hear it. A whisper. Not loud, but precise. In Danish. ‘Alt dette for en blåskimmelost?’

All this for a blue cheese?

No one else reacts. No one else notices. The mussel falls silent. I stare at it. It does not blink, but it might as well. Silky. Saline. And apparently sentient.

We’re passed petals, pebbles, and buckthorn leather which evokes a Wine Gum long forgotten in a Volvo footwell last seen towing a GRP tender to the shores of Ærø. A quail’s egg, smouldering in hay, bursts theatrically. Then, a second ovum is presented. Raw. We are told - in the voice of someone who has delivered this line to several uncomprehending stagiaires - that it was extracted from a near-extinct duck native to a migratory weather system hovering just off Skåne County. We are instructed to fry it ourselves in a miniature iron pan slick with ‘carpenter’s oil’ atop a slab of metal hotter than Satan in a sauna. It smells like half-remembered farm trauma. The duck, we’re told, is fine. The implication is that we may not be…

A beeping timer, also egg-shaped, is placed beside us - a metaphor, an instruction, and an intentionally infantilising humiliation. When the egg-shaped egg tells us to stop cooking the egg, we’re expected to behave like competent adults, not the pampered, performative pilgrims of managed taste we so obviously are.

I overdo mine. My neighbour undercooks his. Someone at the next table drops theirs entirely - it hisses off the iron - then retrieves it using the end of his Hermès tie, which is already stained with what I sincerely hope is beurre blanc. He nods to no one in particular, as though he’s just invented fire.

The chef behind it all, so famously obsessed with the shifting seasons that he once declared there are seventy-four of them, not four, didn’t realise today was the longest day of the year until I pointed it out. He nodded, slowly, as though it had just occurred to him that time might be linear.

‘Apparently,’ says our waiter, who proudly introduces himself as being raised in Honor Oak, which makes it sound almost plausible - ‘Kastrup Airport had to expand its private jet hangar to accommodate guests flying in to appraise this course. They love the idea of cooking an egg for the first time.’

He tops up our glasses from a dolls’ house-sized glass teapot containing something which definitely isn’t tea.

‘It’s really quite moving,’ he adds. ‘They try so hard.’

‘Do they get a certificate?’ I ask, eyebrow cocked to full condescension.

He pauses - just long enough to register disappointment.

‘No sir,’ he says, without blinking. ‘But they do get a bill.’

Lars and Svea flirt via small comments about ceiling heights and chair legs. She laughs too loudly. He listens too carefully. At one point she says, ‘This feels like old times.’ He replies, ‘Only better lit.’

Pretty lamb’s eyelid tartlets arrive on a plate hewn from terrestrial sandstones and gypsum, the sort of surface upon which rituals begin or confessions end. The waiter offers a soliloquy about ‘ocular terroir’ before disappearing into the dimness. We lift them carefully, like stolen documents. My fellow press guest glares at his, head tilted, as if awaiting an answer. Then, without ceremony, he lifts a squat carafe of cloudy juice from a nearby trough and drains it to the bottom, mistaking its chastity for alcohol. ‘It’s all very... liturgical,’ he says, lips glossed with suspected beetroot. ‘The chairs, the flaming boats, the little bundles of dried flora strung up like warnings... it’s theatre for people who think they’ve transcended theatre.’ He’s stopped taking notes. Later, I’ll notice my handwriting appearing in his review.

Dessert arrives with suspicious simplicity - strawberries, chamomile flowers, cream - unstacked, unfoamed, unpickled. Nothing explodes. Nothing pulses. No waiter strikes a match. There is no liquid nitrogen fog, no edible shell concealing an egg concealing a story. A single mint leaf trembles, as if embarrassed.

‘So Danish,’ says Svea, unbothered.

‘So English,’ I say, unwilling to blink.

We wait for the catch. And then it comes.

From beneath the dish’s porcelain lip, a scatter of greenfly begins to emerge. One pauses. Another follows. Then a third. Deliberate. Organised. As if they’d reserved under a pseudonym. They crawl across the strawberries, circling the cream with choreographed restraint. None seem to have the sense simply to fly away. One pauses on the rim of the bowl, then climbs delicately over the chamomile blossoms and disappears back inside.

‘So inevitable,’ adds Lars, watching the aphids with the expression of a man who’s just remembered something he meant to forget.

Then comes the final course. Not a dish, but a note. A white envelope, placed silently in front of me by a young man who speaks only in nouns, as though verbs might betray him. Inside: my name, today’s date, and a sentence handwritten in organic cuttlefish ink - the colour of cruelty, the texture of truth. ‘You were expected earlier.’

No signature. No explanation. No dessert wine. Just those four words, in a severe serif on what looks like recycled bank stationery - thick enough to carry weight, thin enough to disappear without trace. When I look up, the lights have dimmed. My glass has been moved. And the door I came through is no longer there.

Back on the quay, the fires still flicker. The Øresund is silent. Lars’s hand rests on Svea’s wrist now. They’re deep in conversation, bodies leaned in, her finger tracing the rim of her glass like a diviner. They are exactly where they’re meant to be. Finishing something they never quite started. I am not.

My fellow journalist has vanished. I find out later he returned to his painfully planned design hotel - a property so sadistically stylish it could only have been dreamt up by someone who believes comfort is a form of moral weakness. The lighting is motion-sensitive yet emotionally unavailable. The furniture appears to have additional corners. The bed, a pale slab of MDF on a dais, offers all the support of a LinkedIn endorsement.

He attempted to adjust the thermostat - a slender, circular interface designed not to be touched, only admired. It flashed a message in Swedish which roughly translated to ‘Why would you do that?’ and reset to six degrees.

After briskly walking into his own reflection, he wrapped himself in one of the throws - stitched from recycled hessian and the last hopes of interns - and engaged with the minibar’s lone bottle of Bollinger via a toothbrush glass, while perched on a design stool seemingly engineered to punish the human pelvis. Between gulps, he paced out looping monologues on betrayal and antique telephony, as though auditioning for a one-man play no one had asked for. The bottle, it later emerged, cost nearly as many Danish krone as his exquisitely choreographed tasting menu - though it offered more bubbles, fewer foams, and considerably greater clarity.

By Saturday, he will have comprehensively slept with Narnia. Within a month, he’ll be photographed in EUR, Rome - all travertine pomp and metaphysical symmetry - with a model-turned-racing driver. Not long after, he’ll be seen slipping out of Chiltern Firehouse with an actress named after a small, iconic British car - though she is nothing like it. Petrol in his loins, press in pursuit.

Apparently, the PR confiscated his phone earlier in the evening - the sort of discreet extraction usually reserved for ketamine at a wellness retreat. He’d been live-Instagramming close-ups of the waiters’ faces, accompanied by captions like ‘Could this man be trusted with your sorrel?’ and ‘The lips of terroir.’

He now claims he doesn’t remember posting them - only that Narnia told him ‘the light was right.’ She later reposted the entire series on her own feed, deadpan and dutiful, under captions like ‘Devotion, Framed’. One of the waiters adopted one of the images for his Snapchat profile, which, like bow ties and the fax machine, is surprising to discover still exists.

At breakfast, the PR hands me something folded into a napkin - a limp puff of walnut, pickled spruce tips, fermented lingonberry, and what may once have been eel tartare. ‘Leftovers from the table,’ she says, without irony. I take it. Of course I do. I am, after all, a leftover myself - still in the country after other guests may have flown home, still orbiting the warmth of their relevance. This is what exposure buys: the chance to loiter among the rich and perfumed, to subsist on pastry fragments which taste faintly of medicinal fruit and antique books - and to call it access.

I chew slowly. It begins, as these things often do, with disappointment and a sting of austerity. But then... it deepens. The spruce’s bitterness softens into warm citrus, the walnut turns velvety, almost truffled. The puff warms in my mouth like it’s remembering what it once was.

I swallow, look up, and - against my better judgement and every instinct of adulthood - request, ‘Could I have another?’ like Oliver Twist at a chef’s counter.

It’s unnerving. Perhaps like Narnia’s pheromonal smelliness, or the meal itself - initially hostile, abstract, faintly cruel - it has begun, treacherously, to taste rather pleasant.

It’s the jolie laide of cuisine, and perhaps even of botox: once dramatically ugly, now inexplicably compelling. I finish it before I realise I’ve stopped complaining.

I swallow. Not just the puff, but the realisation: I’ve acquired the taste. For bitterness, for exposure, for Ørn.

Weeks later, the journalist’s byline appears above a long, emotionally fragile ode to Danish chairs and crumpled metal ashtrays in a Sunday supplement. He uses my lines. My notes. Without a single mention of the mussel.

For reservations, betray someone.

Any resemblance to an actual place or person is purely coincidental.

Alternative Ending