#fortunen

Fortunen, Copenhagen

Brunch is surely one of the world's more civilised concepts.  It's like lunch for the impatient - why wait til 13.00 when you can sit down at 11.00 and eat breakfast cooked by someone else AND have the option of some alcohol too?  Despite what some friends believe, I'd never have a glass of wine with my cornflakes but a beer with brunch... now that's tempting...  This also probably accounts for it's popularity in Denmark, where brunch at weekends seems like a national obsession - you can't move in Vesterbro on Saturday mornings for groups of families and friends saying skål over a breakfast platter.

Having said all that, Fortunen, the latest and hopefully most successful of a series of tenants in the attractive corner building at Ved Stranden 18, isn't just a brunch place - it's actually open from breakfast through lunch, dinner and then into the small hours for ate night drinks.  But, on a chilly post-New Year Saturday, we had that mid-morning carbo-loading urge that had us cycling into the city in the search for a bacon sandwich or some cheese on toast.  Preferably both.

We arrived just after noon but there were already quite a few people in the dark, semi-basement space - a few shoppers, the obligatory singles sat in a row with their MacBooks and a group of guys slumped round a table looking like they hadn't actually made it back home after last night's Friday bar.   In true Danish style, there seemed to be at least a hundred candles and lots of low-hanging shabby lamp shades housing the dimmest bulbs available to man.  The stylish but understated decor looks like it was thrown together casually but undoubtedly is totally considered.  So far, so cosy.

We perched up on a couple of vintage looking stools at the curvy high-table that snakes around the front  of the space and did our best to read the menu in the darkness.  There was a selection of different breakfast combinations based around bread, marmalade, boiled egg etc but we needed something heavier than that - I was a vegetarian for over twenty years and still feel the need to catch up on my lifetime's bacon and ham quota.  Richard order a steak sandwich (once again memories of the seventies providing a comfort blanket) and I got the kitchen to gender-reassign my Croque Madame to a Monsieur.  I did actually flirt with the idea of a beer but New Year's resolutions (since abandoned) kicked in and we opted for tea and a Fritz-Cola (de rigueur in anti-globalisation cafes in Copenhagen and actually very nice - herbier and less sweet then it's American cousins).  When it arrived, my cheese-and-ham breakfast was simple but lovely - gooey and rich between nice thick toasted bread and bechamel sauce proving that you can never have enough fat on one plate.  The steak sandwich was a bit awry in the bread-to-steak ratio but tasty enough.  We left an hour later, blinking in the daylight outside, vowing to cycle home again at twice the speed to burn off the full day's calories we'd just consumed.  But surely, brunch isn't supposed to be healthy, is it??

(By the way, apologies for the overly dramatic video at the beginning of this.  Carl Orff would give me indigestion over brunch but O Fortuna was the only thing I could think of that related to the name of the cafe and I do like to give you something to listen to as you read.  And it IS a bananas video.  Bad taste disclaimer over....)

Fortunen Ved Stranden 18 1061 Copenhagen K