Den Vandrette

Khachapuri at the pass

A serrated knife opens the khachapuri while the filling is still loose. Dave Harrison, Executive Chef at Den Vandrette in Copenhagen, keeps that Georgian bread close to the center of the kitchen, not as a borrowed flourish but as a repeatable station discipline. His route to this basement pass is spare and legible: Head Chef at Au Passage in Paris from 2017, Head Chef at Den Vandrette from 2018, then Executive Chef here, with the remit widened from service control to the direction of the kitchen itself. The signature has its own small lineage inside his work. Khachapuri and tarragon khachapuri are both tied to Harrison, a familiar form adjusted by herb, temperature, dough, and filling rather than by reinvention. At Den Vandrette, that suits the room. The place is a wine bar before it is a restaurant in the formal sense, but Harrison cooks as if the pass still has to answer for every plate.

A small-plate kitchen built for wine

The method here is not a long menu trying to prove range. It is a shared-plate kitchen that changes with the market and the cellar, using local, seasonal, organic Danish ingredients beside Georgian and Nordic forms. Potato mille-feuille has carried lovage and Worcestershire; Danish new potatoes have been set with garlic cream, ricotta, and coffee oil; mushrooms have been cooked in duck fat until they eat closer to meat than garnish. The named signatures say much about the program: khachapuri, lobster arancini, scallops with sea buckthorn kombucha, potato mille-feuille. The wine list gives the kitchen its frame. Rosforth & Rosforth import the natural and biodynamic bottles that define the house, including orange wine and terroir-led selections with enough grip to meet cheese, fermented notes, spice, and fat. Harrison’s food does not sit beside that list politely. It gives the glass something to work against.

Half a floor below Havnegade

The room sits half a floor down at Havnegade 53A, near Nyhavn, with the city and harbor above rather than around it. Inside, arched ceilings carry dried flowers; candlelight moves across plaster, oak, concrete, vintage rugs, and wooden benches softened with fur throws. It is quiet enough to hear the table read a bottle, and close enough to the counter for the kitchen’s pace to register without becoming theatre. Den Vandrette is small in scale, but the work is not cramped. Plates pass through the room as wine does, in increments: bread, cheese, acid, smoke, broth, something crisp, something fermented. The cellar gives the evening its spine. The pass gives it weight.

The house that Rosforth built

Den Vandrette belongs to the Rosforth & Rosforth world, and that matters because the bottles are not decoration here. Sune Rosforth is named with the house, and the import side supplies Copenhagen restaurants that take natural wine seriously. If the next course changes, the anchor remains Harrison’s khachapuri.