Free the Danish hygge living inside of you

Gammel Kongevej 5; 1610 Cph V; open 11:00-24:00, (kitchen open 12:00-21:30), closed Sundays; 3331 6510; www.spishosfridas.dk; set menu for 128kr

A visitor to Denmark soon discovers the concept of hygge, or coziness. This can be the feeling by the hearth of a family’s home, or a Christmas meal at a restaurant such as Frida’s, across the street from the Planetarium on the Vesterbro edge of the lakes in central Copenhagen.

You step into the hyggelig dining room at Frida’s and soon forget the dreary December weather. Everything is aglow inside: red napkins and tablecloths adorned with holly leaves and stars, wicker lampshades, ivy wreaths, pine sprigs. Nissemen, the foot-high magical trolls most active in the Christmas season, dangle from a rack of copper pots and golf clubs. Hearts and stars hang by red ribbons from the ceiling.

My date and I took our seats at the row of tables running down the centre of the room, flanked by rows of booths. If you’re as shy as the Danes, you might be uncomfortable bumping elbows with the stranger beside you, but a shot of schnapps takes care of that.

‘You’re a lucky girl!’ said an old woman with silver-capped teeth to my date. ‘He reminds me of my husband of 40 years. He wasn’t always faithful, but it was worth it.’ We thought she was talking about a past relationship until her date came back from the bathroom and she told him: ‘We were talking about you.’

The motto on the menus at Frida’s is: ‘Good food takes time - we serve only good food.’ That’s no lie, though it’s hard to notice the wait when there’s wine, beer and schnapps to think about, and skals (toasts) to be made. We raised our glasses to each other, and to a neighbouring Spanish father and daughter who had biked from Madrid for the climate conference.

The special Christmas menu comes with English translations. It’s your choice of herring to start off with. There’s a pickled herring with onions and capers for 49 kroner, but we chose the curried herring with eggs, onions and capers for 59 kroner. (There’s also a smoked eel with scrambled eggs for 89 kroner.)

Next we had three delicious flounder filets (98 kroner), two toasted and one steamed, with caviar, shrimp, and pickled asparagus. (The Danish taste for pickled foods stems from the long winters and the days before refrigeration, when foods were stored through pickling or smoking.)

Perhaps the lynchpin of the Danish feast is the open-faced sandwich: a slice of bread, a meat, and garnish. Just as succulent as the fish was the Danish version of the burger, a minced beef steak with raw onions, chopped beets, horseradish, served over toast, with an egg yolk you pour over the top (98 kroner). The combination would never have occurred to me, but I was glad someone had figured it out, because it works. You can feel all the disparate tastes coming alive in your mouth. Clear it off with a sip of red wine and go in for more.

Wait a minute. A Danish traditional meal without pork? Impossible. This is the land with more pigs than people. Our stomachs opened secret chambers for the tender pork roast with crackling and homemade red cabbage (69 kroner). Among the other pork options are the aebleflaesk, which is a Danish classic: layers of pork and baked apples topped with crispy bacon.

In the interest of Danish culture, we were forced to top it all off with a delectable bowl of rice pudding with chopped almonds and cherry sauce. In the Danish Christmas game, the person who finds the one intact almond in their mouth wins a prize.

The eponymous Frida opened the restaurant in 1954, and Lene Palmberg and her buxom daughter, Camilla, took over in 2000. Mother and daughter were both working the day we were there, adding a family touch to the hyggelig ambience.

You may not see the sun while you’re in Denmark, but everything’s shining in Frida’s. If you’re still able to get on a bike with all this holiday merriment in your stomach, you’re a better Dane than I.