Last year, it was ranked the best restaurant in the world and it is currently taking reservations for May. Which is to say, unless you know a bread guy from Hanover who interned there, good luck getting in. If the news that the best restaurant in the world is in Copenhagen surprises you, it shouldn't. Copenhagen is the birthplace of what's known as the New Nordic Cuisine.
This soft-spoken Scandinavian capital is the world's hottest food destination. Even the soccer stadium has a one-star Michelin restaurant. Our tour began on a snowy Sunday in late November. Not three hours after the plane's wheels touched down on an ice-fringed Danish runway, I experienced my first New Nordic moment. It was a piece of pork, and there wasn't much new about it: a heritage breed of pig raised in a heritage style, lightly spiced and grilled.
Yet it was among the most memorable pieces of pork I have consumed, expressing a porky savouriness I'd never before experienced. New Nordic moments kept coming. In the days to come, I would eat the best hot dog of my life see Andersen Bakery below , sample year-old apple and plum cider vinegar aged in eight different kinds of wood, eat thinly sliced grilled veal heart, smoked fish and chips, and uncountable slices of epically good bread, all of it made from 19th-century varieties of Danish wheat.
Retro wheat is big in Denmark right now. Copenhagen has undergone a culinary revolution. I mean that literally. Danish chefs and foodies routinely begin sentences with the phrase: "Before the revolution…" The revolution they are referring to is the creation of a document known as the Nordic Cuisine Manifesto.
It was signed, in , by 14 top Danish chefs. You might think of it as a culinary version of the 10 commandments. Lines include: "To express the purity, freshness, simplicity and ethics we wish to associate with our region," and "To develop potentially new applications of traditional Nordic food products. If it sounds the scripture of the eat-local movement, it is. But take note: Denmark has taken the concept of eating local and added several zeroes to it.
Eating Danish isn't about reducing greenhouse-gas emissions or about pride of place. It's about flavour. After decades of importing Italian truffles and French foie gras, the country is on a mission to find out how it tastes. The answer is Denmark tastes good. How can I describe my wife's face the first time she saw me shove a fat hog of chewing tobacco into my lower lip? Picture the face Rosemary made when she first glimpsed her demon baby.
Revulsion, nausea, incomprehension. Or else imagine the face your spouse might make if you said, "Would you try on these panties I found in my sister's closet? Furrowed brow, curled upper lip, squinty eyes.
It was a face that gave me far too much immature glee. But I get it. In my social circle, chewing tobacco elicits universal disgust. It brings to mind marrying your second cousin, jaw cancer, and cups of warm brown spit at awful frat parties long ago.
In much of the rest of America, smokeless tobacco is huge and getting huger. By , about six million Americans regularly stuffed tobacco in their mouth, and sales were rising by about 6 percent a year. As you might imagine, a large number of users are baseball players and good ol' boys.
But according to my admittedly unscientific research, it's also catching on among Wall Streeters. I've met several finance guys who semi-secretly keep a tin in the back pocket of their suit. Smokeless tobacco is big enough that it's the target of a crackdown. By , ten major league stadiums will have banned it.
My editors—who are all from Texas, for some reason—were shocked that a Yankee like me had never tried it. They prescribed a fix: Take oral tobacco street name: "dip" or "chaw" for a month and report back. So on a random Thursday morning, I take a cherry-sized pinch of Skoal Classic Mint and tuck it next to my gum. Tastewise, I'm prepared for the worst. One helpful Internet commenter warned that dip tastes like "Big Foot's dick. The clean taste of mint mixes with the dirty tobacco—it's an odd paradox, like I'm licking an ashtray filled with Tic Tacs and Marlboro butts.
Physically, it's more of a challenge than I thought. The tobacco stings my cheek like orange juice on a canker sore. And I have no control over my wad. It's supposed to stay compact, but strands of tobacco migrate all over my mouth.
The spit builds up fast. I put my empty Poland Spring bottle to my lips and do my best. But instead of the bullet I've seen ballplayers emit, I let loose a messy, chin-dribbling drool. As for the feeling: It's fantastic, until it isn't. For the first five minutes, I feel like someone is pumping helium into my cranium. One of the best head rushes I've ever had. I can't stop smiling, like a demented flight attendant. Then, with alarming speed, comes the nausea.
I don't throw up—a common dipping-tobacco rite of passage—but I feel profoundly uneasy, like I'm in a two-seater airplane bouncing through a snowstorm above Buffalo. I sweat. Light hurts my eyes. I space out, staring at my iPhone and trying to remember why I took it out. I burp repeatedly. I obviously need some guidance.
I search the Internet for "How to Chew Tobacco. The Web is loaded with images of receding gums, caramel-colored teeth, missing jaws, and white patches called gator lip, along with testimonials on how smokeless tobacco is absolutely, positively not a safe alternative to smoking. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reminds us that it might contain delicious arsenic, lead, and mercury.
But the public has a right to know. So I forge ahead. I stumble onto a YouTube channel founded by a man who calls himself the Dip Doctor.
The Doctor is perhaps not the best person to dispel chewing-tobacco stereotypes. He wears a camouflage cap adorned with a Confederate flag. He owns a company called Mud Jug that sells portable spittoons with names like Backwoods Badass Outlaw. But still, he's passionate and knowledgeable, so I call the Dip Doctor real name: Darcy Compton to get some dos and don'ts.
He's got plenty. I tell the Dip Doctor about my wife's less-than-enthusiastic reaction to my experiment.
His response is immediate: "Don't ever quit dippin' for a woman. It's been four days and I'm getting bolder. I've been dipping wherever I go: the subway, the street, Starbucks, picking up my kids from school.
I work at one of those shared offices where a bunch of twenty-two-year-olds are beta-testing new social-media platforms while downing bok choy smoothies and discussing yoga studios. I sit in the corner and quietly spit my chunky tobacco juice into a thermos.
I feel rebellious and dirty and unhealthy. Skoal Long Cut Wintergreen, a type of moist snuff made by the United States Tobacco Company, had the highest nicotine level of 11 brands analyzed: 3. How long should you keep a dip in? I usually keep it for about 45 minutes. For me it seems like it's lost all its flavor and is completely spit saturated by then. One thing I've done to prolong flavor and nicotine absorption after the 45 minutes is to push the dip out of my lip and into my mouth and sort of mix it up with my tongue.
Why do people dip? Users spit often because the saliva builds up while tobacco is in their mouths. This sucking and chewing allows nicotine to get into the bloodstream through the gums, without the need to swallow the tobacco juices.
How do you pinch dip? Place the dip you've just pinched in between your lower lip and your teeth; make sure the tobacco is packed tight because you don't want any loose chew floating around your mouth, in your teeth, or worse: being swallowed. Then, pack the dip with your tongue to make sure it's loaded into place. Why do baseball players chew tobacco? Early ballplayers likely chewed tobacco for the same reasons as other American men, but they soon discovered baseball-specific benefits.
It spurs saliva production and lubricates the mouth in the dusty infield environment. How bad is dip? Dips contain irritants that can cause gum disease, teeth staining, cavities, tooth loss, among other oral health issues.
Smokeless tobacco also causes gum loss, and your gums don't grow back after dipping. What does dip taste like? Regular long leaf tobacco has a sweet taste. Aside from the flavor and stimulation of having something in your mouth like chewing on a pen or a piece of gum , chewing tobacco is used for the nicotine that is absorbed into your bloodstream through the soft tissue of your cheek or bottom lip.
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