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FrançaisDanish food runs from simple, rustic peasant cooking (rye bread, pork, potatoes) to the globally influential New Nordic movement that grew out of Copenhagen in the 2000s, and the dishes below cover both ends of that range. Denmark’s cuisine shares deep roots with Sweden, Norway and Iceland, but dishes such as smørrebrød, frikadeller and stegt flæsk med persillesovs, Denmark’s official national dish, are distinctly its own.
A brief history of Danish food
Danish cooking started as simple, rustic peasant fare built around meat, fish, rye bread and potatoes, shaped by a farming economy rather than by trade routes or spice markets. That rustic base carried through the Industrial Revolution largely unchanged, since preserving food for winter (curing, pickling, smoking) mattered more than variety for most of Danish history.
Two later shifts reshaped the picture. From the mid-20th century onward, Danes travelling more widely brought back Mediterranean and international recipes, and the arrival of freezers and fast food chains pushed home cooking further from its rustic roots, prompting real concern that classic Danish dishes would disappear from everyday tables. In 2004, a group of Nordic chefs responded with the New Nordic manifesto (covered in more detail further down), which pushed the country’s fine-dining scene back toward local, seasonal ingredients, even as everyday home cooking kept leaning on the same rye bread, pork and potatoes it always had.
Stegt flæsk med persillesovs
Stegt flæsk med persillesovs, fried pork belly with parsley sauce, is Denmark’s official national dish, chosen by public vote in 2014. Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries ran the poll that year, and stegt flæsk med persillesovs won decisively with 27,893 of more than 63,000 votes cast (44%), well ahead of the runner-up, smørrebrød. The dish itself is thick-cut pork belly fried until the fat turns crisp, served with boiled potatoes and a butter-and-flour parsley sauce poured over the top.
The dish also has a place in Danish political slang: “valgflæsk” (“election meat”) is a joking term for empty campaign promises, since candidates have traditionally handed out fried pork on election night to court voters.
Smørrebrød
Smørrebrød is Denmark’s open-faced sandwich, built by piling toppings onto a single slice of buttered rye bread rather than closing it with a second slice. Common toppings include liver pâté, boiled egg, fried or pickled fish, cold meats, potato and various salads, all served on Denmark’s dense, dark, slightly sour rye bread (rugbrød). A more elaborate version, called stjerneskud (“shooting star”), layers fried and poached plaice fillet with shrimp, white asparagus, lettuce and caviar. Lunch restaurants specialising in smørrebrød typically offer a printed menu of 20 or more standard combinations, since the topping-and-bread pairing is treated as a fixed recipe rather than something diners assemble themselves, and ordering “a selection” of three or four different types is the normal way to try smørrebrød for the first time.
Frikadeller
Frikadeller are Danish meatballs, usually made from a mix of pork and beef, though a fish version, fiskefrikadeller, is also common. They’re pan-fried rather than boiled, which gives them a browned crust, and they’re served hot with potatoes and a parsley sauce, cold on top of smørrebrød, or with a remoulade on the side. Frikadeller is one of the dishes most Danes would call genuine everyday home cooking, rather than a special-occasion food.
Flæskesteg
Flæskesteg, roast pork with crackling, is the centrepiece of a traditional Danish Christmas Eve dinner. The pork’s skin is scored and roasted until it turns into hard, crisp crackling, and the meat is served with caramelised potatoes, plain boiled potatoes, red cabbage and gravy. Leftover flæskesteg is commonly turned into a cold sandwich called flæskestegssandwich, piled with the roast pork, pickled gherkins, and crackling in a bun, sometimes finished with extra gravy.
Rødgrød med fløde
Rødgrød med fløde, red berry pudding with cream, is a classic Danish dessert made by cooking mixed red berries (commonly redcurrants, raspberries and strawberries) into a thickened compote and serving it with a generous pour of cream. Its name has become a well-known Danish tongue-twister for non-native speakers, since it strings together several of the language’s soft “d” sounds in a row.
Risalamande
Risalamande is a rich, cold rice pudding served at Christmas, made by folding chopped almonds, vanilla and whipped cream through cooked rice pudding, then topping it with a warm cherry sauce. Traditionally, one whole almond is hidden in the batch, and whoever finds it in their bowl wins a small prize, usually a chocolate pig or marzipan treat, which makes it as much a Christmas game as a dessert.
Pølser (Danish hot dogs) and stegt medister
Pølser, Denmark’s hot dogs, are a fixture of street food in Copenhagen and beyond, sold from freestanding carts and typically topped with a combination of fried onions, raw onions, sliced pickles, remoulade, ketchup, brown sauce and mustard. Stegt medister is a different, larger sausage dish: a spiced, minced pork sausage often made in a single coil roughly a metre long, pan-fried and served with potatoes, red cabbage and a pan sauce. Both dishes sit at opposite ends of Danish sausage culture: pølser as the grab-and-go street food eaten standing at a cart, and stegt medister as a sit-down dinner dish that turns up on home-cooking menus and in family kitchens rather than at hot dog stands.
Danish pastries (wienerbrød)
What English speakers call a “Danish pastry” actually originated in Vienna, which is why Danes themselves call it wienerbrød, meaning “Vienna bread.” Danish bakers adopted and refined the laminated, buttery pastry after it arrived from Austria in the 1840s, and it has been a fixture of Danish bakeries ever since, in forms such as the spiral-shaped “snail” pastries filled with cinnamon or rum-soaked raisins.
Tarteletter
Tarteletter are small puff-pastry tart shells with a savoury filling, most often built around mushrooms, chicken, or seafood in a cream sauce. They first appeared in Denmark in the late 19th century and became a party-food staple, and they’re still commonly served as a starter or snack at Danish gatherings and celebrations today.
Koldskål med kammerjunker
Koldskål is a cold, sweetened buttermilk soup, made from buttermilk, egg, sugar, vanilla and lemon, and traditionally topped with crunchy kammerjunker biscuits and sometimes fresh berries. It’s eaten as a light summer dessert, a snack, or occasionally a simple dinner on a hot day, and it’s one of the more distinctly Danish dishes on this list, since it doesn’t have a close equivalent in neighbouring Nordic cuisines.
Drømmekage and other Danish cakes
Drømmekage, “dream cake,” is a Danish sheet cake known for its sticky, caramelised coconut and brown sugar topping, baked separately from the sponge and then spread over it while both are still warm so the topping partly soaks in. It’s a home-baking staple rather than a bakery or restaurant dessert, closer to a family recipe passed between generations than a dish you’d order out. Alongside drømmekage, a plain strawberry tart, made with a shortcrust base, pastry cream and fresh strawberries, shows up in nearly every Danish bakery in summer, when local strawberries are in season.
Danish liquorice and chocolate
Liquorice (lakrids) is eaten far more widely in Denmark than in most other countries, in forms ranging from soft, mild sweets to intensely salty salmiak liquorice, and it also turns up mixed into chocolate, ice cream and even spirits. Danish chocolate, separately, has built a strong reputation of its own in recent decades, driven partly by a wave of small-batch chocolatiers in Copenhagen working with single-origin cacao rather than mass-market blends. Together, liquorice and chocolate make up most of what Danes reach for as an everyday sweet, well outside the cake and pastry side of the country’s dessert culture.
Krebinetter
Krebinetter, also called karbonader, are breaded and pan-fried pork patties, dipped in egg and coated in breadcrumbs before frying until golden. They’re a homestyle dinner dish, usually served with boiled potatoes and green peas rather than at restaurants or special occasions.
Oysters and other seafood
Denmark’s long coastline supports a genuine wild oyster fishery, particularly in the Wadden Sea and the Limfjord in northern Jutland, and Danish oysters from these waters have a reputation for a firm texture and clean flavour. Guided “oyster safaris” let visitors wade out at low tide to gather their own, often followed by shucking and eating them straight on the beach. Beyond oysters, Danish seafood commonly includes pickled herring, cod, plaice, and crab, much of which can be bought fresh and inexpensively straight from harbourside fish markets. Pickled herring in particular comes in dozens of regional cures, from a plain vinegar brine to versions flavoured with curry, dill, or mustard, and it’s traditionally the opening course of a Danish “frokostbord” (lunch spread), eaten before moving on to warm dishes and then cheese.
Brændende kærlighed
Brændende kærlighed, meaning “burning love,” is a simple dish of mashed potato topped with fried bacon and onion, traditionally served on Valentine’s Day despite its plain, homestyle ingredients. The name refers to the visual contrast of the pale potato against the browned bacon and onion rather than to any particular spice or heat in the dish itself.
Beer
Denmark is known internationally above all for Carlsberg, founded in Copenhagen in 1847, but the country’s beer scene now extends well beyond that one brand. Denmark’s craft-brewing sector expanded sharply over the past two decades, and the country is now home to well over 200 microbreweries producing everything from pale wheat beers to barrel-aged sours. Copenhagen itself has become a genuine craft-beer destination, with brewery taprooms and bottle shops concentrated in neighbourhoods such as Vesterbro and Nørrebro, and many breweries running their own tasting flights or short tours for visitors who want to try a range of styles in one sitting rather than committing to a single pint.
The New Nordic movement and Noma
The New Nordic movement began with a manifesto written in 2004, following a Nordic Cuisine Symposium organised by the Danish food entrepreneur Claus Meyer and chef René Redzepi, and signed by around a dozen chefs from across the Nordic countries. The manifesto committed its signatories to cooking with local, seasonal Nordic ingredients and traditional preservation techniques such as pickling, drying and fermenting, rather than importing Mediterranean-style ingredients, and it reshaped how much of Scandinavia’s fine-dining scene approaches food. The movement’s influence reached beyond Copenhagen too, inspiring New Nordic-inspired restaurants as far away as New York, and pushing a generation of Nordic chefs to build menus around foraged herbs, root vegetables and cold-water seafood rather than the French-influenced fine-dining conventions that had shaped most high-end Nordic restaurants before 2004.
Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant most associated with that movement, is not currently operating as a conventional, nightly-reservation restaurant. Noma closed its original dinner-service format in early 2024 and has since run largely as “Noma Projects,” a test kitchen with occasional pop-up residencies rather than a restaurant you can book on a normal night, and it did not appear in the 2026 Michelin Guide. If a trip to Denmark includes trying to eat at Noma specifically, check its current booking status directly rather than assuming it operates like an ordinary high-end restaurant, since its format has changed substantially since the restaurant first became famous.
Planning a food-focused trip to Denmark
Comparing hotels in Copenhagen is worth doing early if your trip is built around trying these dishes, since the capital has by far the widest range of restaurants serving both everyday Danish cooking and the New Nordic style. If you’re planning to see more than one Danish city, checking Flixbus routes between them is often the cheapest way to get around.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh. The team covers Denmark for independent travellers, including the food, sights and places to stay worth booking, and updates this page when facts change.
