This Amarkaner Life: Mad About Amager

Yngve Fobian: “I live in Amager, which I have done for almost 23 years now. All my friends were, like, Amager is the worst place with the worst people, don't ever go there. But Amager has some things that you don't find in the rest of Copenhagen.”

Hello and welcome to episode five of This Amarkaner Life — Archipelago’s all-new season of stories from and about the island of Amager in southern Copenhagen.

I’m your host, James Clasper, and in this episode, we’re going to meet the chef who’s trying to put Amager on the culinary map — quite literally.

Yngve: “You can see what the distance is to the food I'm gonna have. The distance to the apples is 550 metres.”

And whose restaurant is as much about local culture…

Yngve: “We talk about all the local history because we are in a very, very historical place of Copenhagen.”

… as local cuisine.

Yngve: “I had no idea that we have so many different kinds of wild mushrooms in Kongelundsgaard.”

UPSOUND: Dining room

It’s a Friday evening in late autumn — and at Øens Spisested, dinner service is in full swing.

UPSOUND: Kitchen

In the kitchen, head chef and owner Yngve Fobian is basting pumpkin in brown butter.

The orders are coming in thick and fast — and little wonder.

Yngve has a full house — and the majority of guests have gone for the set menu.

UPSOUND: Dining room

On the face of it, the dishes they’re getting wouldn’t look out of place anywere else in Copenhagen.

There’s fermented carrots, pickled herring — and, this being Denmark, roast pork.

But look closer — the set menu has a name — Øen Rundt, meaning “around the island” — and as each dish is presented, Yngve’s partner Pernille explains the provenance of the ingredients.

Pernille: “So, in the right corner, you have what is called an Amagermad, which is named after the island you are on right now. We've made it with some deer from Kalvebod Fælled, the area on Amager as well. Above that one, you have eel that we've caught down by the beach. And these birds are then different kinds of birds that we get from outside y the airport. We've made it with two different kinds of apples. The ones you have on top, the pickled ones, are from Amager Fælled.”

Indeed, from the fish caught in the icy waters of the Øresund to the veggies grown in fields near Dragør to the apples foraged from the common, the majority of ingredients come from Amager.

Take it from me, in a city crammed with copycat restaurants whose definition of local often strains credulity, Øens Spisested is a genuine revelation.

But here’s the thing. The restaurant wasn’t always like that.

To understand how it’s changed — and why — you have to go right back to the beginning when Yngve first decided to open it.

Yngve: “I'm a gardener, and then I was a chef and worked many places. And then I like to have my own place, and then I'm starting up here maybe five years ago because I think it was an interesting place to start up.”

UPSOUND: Gymnasium and bouncing ball

Interesting is certainly one word for it.

You see, Øens Spisested is located in Prismen, a sports and culture centre.

The building whose was designed by architect Dorte Mandrup. Its name translates as The Crystal, and according to the Danish Architecture Centre, it’s “wrapped in an opalescent polycarbonate envelope” — which sounds impressive, though I suppose that could be Google Translate having an off day.

In any case, a sports hall filled with sweaty people playing five-a-side football isn’t the most obvious of venues for ambitious chefs.

But Yngve decided to go for — in part, because of PB 43, a creative community located in a former paint factory just across the road.

The artists who worked there would surely be a captive audience for his casual cuisine, he thought.

And yet…

Yngve: “The same day that I was taking over and signed my contract, it was closed down, and it's very, very bad. We got no people who are just walking by.”

Indeed, PB 43 is long gone now.

It was replaced by a self-storage facility — a windowless block that is just about the worst view I think I can imagine diners having.

Or, as Yngve puts it…

Yngve: “When you look out of the windows, it's actually concrete jungle all around us.”

In other words, he needed a plan B — and for that, he turned to the power of a good yarn.

Yngve: “We need to tell a story so people can see the different kinds of Amager and the different kinds of our place.”

And believe me when I say that Øens Spisested has more stories than you can shake a stick at.

First of all, of course, there is the story of Amager itself and the historical importance of food — not only for the island but for Copenhagen as a whole.

Yngve: “Amager, this island — they have so much history about how we eat and how we get supplies of food into Copenhagen.”

Yngve: “Copenhagen, it really started because we have a market in Dragør, a fish market in the Middle Ages. You should imagine it was like Roskilde Festival — 15,000 people from all over northern Europe coming to buy herrings. Then we have all the vegetables. In 1521, Christian III was taking the Dutch people in to grow Amager, so we could get Brussels sprouts, onions, potatoes — all kinds of new vegetables we didn't have before.”

Yngve got the year right — but it was actually King Christian II who, in 1521, invited 184 Dutch farmers to settle on Amager and use their agricultural know-how to supply Copenhagen and its court with fruit, vegetables and flowers.

And to this day, there are farmers with Dutch heritage — and Dutch names — ploughing the fields of southern Amager.

Most days, in fact, Yngve does the rounds of them, collecting freshly picked veggies for his kitchen.

UPSOUND: Yngve sorting vegetables

Yngve: “I love the smell. Celery. And it's so fresh. This is, like, when you're being a chef, it's amazing to just know they’ve just picked it out of the dirt. It's so great, and it’s so satisfying for me. I know where everything is grown. I know where the birds are shot. I know where the fish is caught. I mean, I’m so glad every day I go to work and say, oh, you can actually run a restaurant when you know where all your foods are from.”

As we just heard, that food includes not only fruit and veg but fish and fowl…

Yngve: “In Amager, you are allowed to hunt all year because we have the airport.”

What he means is that, in order to keep reduce the risk of birdstrike around Copenhagen airport, hunters can take aim at the local pigeon, duck and geese population, all year round.

And that’s not all.

Yngve: “Then I have deer from Kalvebod Fælled, which is the new part of Amager, seven kilometres from the main centre of Copenhagen.”

He’s talking about an area of land taking up roughly a quarter of the island. Kalvebod Fælled, or common, was developed on a reclaimed sea bed in the 1940s and now comprises tidal marshes, forests and pastures of livestock and game.

During service, Yngve and his front-of-house team are only too happy to tell inquisitive diners about Amager’s gastronomic bounty.

A story also features prominently on the dining room wall.

Yngve: “Then we have, like, a map, an old sea map I find.”

Indeed, on display alongside several Danish artworks and a framed football shirt marking the local team’s most famous victory, is a map of Amager showing where each ingredient came from. 

Yngve: “You can see the distance to the food I'm gonna have. The distance to the apples is 550 meters. And then we have the longest distance, that’s the celery, 10 kilometres to Store Magleby.”

Looking closely at the map, I noticed that the closest ingredient — marigold leaves — was foraged exactly 133 metres away. That the apples had, in fact, come from a nearby allotment, and that the rhubarb came from “Jonathan’s garden”.

I asked Yngve about this, and it turns out, his cuisine is local in more ways than one.

Yngve: “If they have something they're not gonna use in the garden, or they go out and pick something in nature, they just bring it up here, and I make something out of it, and then they get a free meal for it.”

For instance?

Yngve: “There came a young girl with her dad with 10 kilos of pears, and I would pickle them for our cheese, and then they get a free meal. Then there was a lady who was picking up chestnuts, and then I made some kind of thing with the chestnuts, and she got a free meal.”

At this point, I was curious about what had inspired Yngve’s culinary approach.

Turns out that the past couple of years of lockdowns had shifted his thinking.

Yngve: “In a very global time, what Corona was showing us was that people really like the local thing. They really like, what's next to me? It's very important when, when everything's closed down, oh, it's beautiful that we have a fish 800 metres from here and we have vegetables, and then we can like make a history out of that and serve it.”

And yet, at Øens Spisested, food isn’t the only thing on the menu. Amager itself is too.

Yngve: “Inside here, we talk about all the local history. Because we are in a very, very historical place of Copenhagen — a very black history.”

A case in point is the very road the restaurant lies on.

Yngve: “We have this street called Holmbladsgade. We call it ‘the street without mercy’ because we have like 10 murders in the last 25 years, I think.”

I tried to confirm that morbid fact, but Wikipedia only went so far as to describe Holmbladsgade as “one of the most lively streets in the area”, which is close enough, I suppose.

In fact, it turns out the entire neighbourhood is pretty lively. Just after Yngve had shown me his latest vegetable delivery, he mentioned where we were.

Yngve: “We're standing here on the corner of Vermlandsgade, and we have this police murderer called Palle Sørensen, who, one morning in 1965, killed four police officers.”

If you’re curious, that infamous spot is visible from the dining room, just east of the monstrous self-storage centre.

But as ghoulish as it sounds, there’s a reason why these stories are part of the experience of dining at Øens Spisested.

Yngve: “It's told to the diners because we have no ocean view to look at. We have no expensive furniture. What we only have there is our history, memories and culture, and some of our guests call it part of a museum with food.”

For Yngve’s more intrepid guests, that museum-esque experience often continues after their meal, when they’re encouraged to visit the last remaining dive bars or bodegas on “the street without mercy”.

Yngve: “There were 20 bodegas. Now there are only two left with the same name. We have Jaguaren and John’s Kro. So a lot of times when people have eaten here, we have guests who are not from Amager, then they're also gonna have the bodega. So after here, they're going to Jaguaren and John's Kro, just around the corner, to have this real Amager atmosphere still.”

I’m pretty sure that’s a tongue-in-cheek comment because Amager is changing fast, and the real Amager — well, that’s very much in the eye of the beholder. 

After all, the very dive bars he sends guests to at the end of the night aren’t the same places he first stepped into a quarter of a century ago.

Yngve: “I know when I moved out here, and I was 17, 18 years old and said, oh, maybe I’ll try a beer in the local bodega and I went into Jaguaren. I go out again. It was tough, and people were looking around you when you come in, and you have dogs going around, and it was very tough. It's not like today with a student bar.”

And here’s the thing. While some of Yngve’s guests joke that Øens Spisested is a little like a museum with food, the restaurant isn’t about preserving the past as about reflecting how Amager has changed.

After all, its owner can well recall what its reputation was until very recently.

Yngve: “When I moved to Amager, I was 17 years old, and my mom and dad had died, so I had no place to live. So I have an uncle who lived in Amager. There were still very, very cheap apartments and it was very, very looked down. All my friends, they, maybe their parents had bought them an apartment, they were really like, Amager is the worst place with the worst people, don't ever go there. So it was not maybe the big thing in my life. It was not a career step-up when I moved to Amager.”

Yngve: “The rest of Copenhagen called us Lorteøen, which means Shit Island, so my restaurant has been built out of shit and murder.”

And I think this may be the key to understanding Yngve’s restaurant. Because while “built out of shit and murder” is hardly a strong slogan, putting Amager on the menu and making it a part of the guest experience is a reflection not only of Yngve’s local pride but of his desire to defy the snobs and naysayers who have looked down on Amager for so long.

And that may well make it the most distinctive restaurant in town.

Yngve: “Everybody has said, ‘No, you cannot do it. You cannot make a restaurant where you make decent food in a sports area. No, you cannot make this map around. No, we cannot make this table and go on and go on and go on. And so, okay, I need to show those assholes out on the other side of the bridge that we can do it here.”

OUTRO MUSIC

You’ve been listening to episode five of This Amarkaner Life, a new season of Archipelago all about the island of Amager.

If you’ve enjoyed listening to it, feel free to share it with friends and family or leave a nice review wherever you get your podcasts.

This Amarkaner Life is written, produced, and hosted by me, James Clasper.

The only thing I don’t do is the music.

That’s by two artists: Scenery and Squares and Triangles — and you can find links to their music in the show notes, along with a link to Øens Spisested’s homepage.

Many thanks for listening — and I hope to see you by the jukebox at Jaguaren soon.