At Kadeau by Nicolai Nørregaard: One of 2025’s Finest Dining Experiences

In 2007, on the remote island of Bornholm, Nicolai Nørregaard and two childhood friends set up a small restaurant that felt more like a notebook than a business. Kadeau was born as a way to record life as they lived it: fish caught from the sea that very morning, herbs and roots gathered just beyond the shoreline, days that shifted pace with the seasons. From the very beginning, Nørregaard’s guiding principle was simple — that flavour belongs first to the place that gave birth to it, and only then to the person who interprets it.

In 2011, in Copenhagen, Kadeau’s philosophy found new ground to grow. The discipline of preservation — the need to store, transform and make use of Bornholm’s seasonality and its winter limitations — evolved into an art form of its own. In the jars, the smokehouses and the fermentations, a vocabulary took shape that would define not only the restaurant but also a large part of modern Scandinavian cuisine.

The dining room at Kadeau speaks the same language: wood, stone, clean lines — a sense of purity that feels more like landscape than restaurant. It’s designed to let the food stand before you without distraction. Within this setting, service takes on a special significance. It’s precise without being rigid; impeccable yet warm and unpretentious. The team guides you through the evening in a way that feels effortless, as if you were a guest in their own home. This balance of professionalism and intimacy is as much a part of Kadeau’s identity as its cooking.

Kadeau Copenhagen lives with two faces. In winter, when Bornholm freezes over, the restaurant becomes a laboratory of preservation. The jars, the smokehouses and the fermentations keep the kitchen alive, turning scarcity into creativity. It’s the season of patience, of deep flavours, of quiet focus.

In summer, the same kitchen shifts its rhythm. The dishes open up, freshness takes the place of intensity, and the menu breathes with the air of the season. The energy changes — the experience becomes lighter, more direct, more luminous. This constant alternation between winter discipline and summer vitality gives Kadeau a rare dynamism: each visit captures a specific point in the circle of the year.

The restaurant describes these phases as the Preservation Season and the Growing Season. The first, from September to May, focuses on the strength of preservation techniques, transforming the gifts of spring and summer into concentrated flavours. The second, from June to late August, unfolds in freshness and energy — in dishes that reveal the kitchen at its most immediate. That’s when I visited, in late August: a kitchen at its most alive, full of tension yet lightness, as if writing summer in real time.

The restaurant is now once again in its Preservation Season. I first experienced it during my initial visit, back in 2021 — the season in which I encountered the smoked salmon, one of the kitchen’s signature dishes. It’s served both warm and cold, smoked in two different ways, and set against a delicate line of lavender. The simplicity of its appearance conceals a level of technical precision that borders on the obsessive: the exact smoking time, the temperature, the texture that remains translucent yet full and rich. It’s a dish that encapsulates the entire philosophy of Kadeau.

On my most recent visit, in late August, the kitchen was deep in the Growing Season. Here, technical complexity takes on a different face — not in preservation, but in freshness. The salad with sprouts and mahogany clams looked deceptively simple, yet behind it lay a precision of structure, an exact balance of texture and acidity.

The raw shrimp with rose petals and Japanese quince showed what it means to work at the scale of a millimetre: sweetness, acidity, iodine — each measured with extraordinary delicacy. Then came the squid, served with new potatoes and strawberries. The new potatoes — the early summer harvest, with their fine skins, moister flesh and greener, sweeter flavour than mature ones — grounded the dish beautifully, anchoring it between sea and land.

The squid was tender, sliced with meticulous precision, its bite firm yet never tough. The strawberries brought brightness and acidity. The result was a symphony of textures and balance — a dish that made you feel as though you were rediscovering squid itself for the first time. An absolute masterpiece, and one of the finest dishes I’ve ever tasted.

The restaurant now feels fully mature, ready to stand among the greats of our time — and, in my view, ready to open the door wide to its third Michelin star.

The lobster was served as a diptych. In the first part, the claw came atop a delicate tartlet with tomato and wild plum. The fruit’s acidity heightened the tomato’s sweetness, allowing the lobster to shine with purity and elegance. In the second, the tail was cooked with saffron, blue mussels and a broth made from the roasted heads. The flavour was full and aromatic, the saffron adding depth, the mussels softening the sea’s intensity with their natural sweetness.

Two interpretations of the same ingredient: one bright and refined, the other rich and rounded. Together they showcased the kitchen’s ability to take a single element and express it in different tones.

Equally impressive was the dry-aged pork from Lillegaard Farm, with juicy flesh and a depth of flavour developed through weeks of ageing. Alongside it came the so-called “herbs & preserves” plate — garden herbs paired with ingredients prepared earlier in the season through pickling, fermentation, smoking or drying. It felt like seeing the same season in two versions: the immediacy of the moment and the imprint left by time.

At this point, it’s worth pausing to mention the remarkable work the team at Kadeau does with wine. Surrender yourself to their pairings and you’ll leave delighted — and perhaps, as a friend of mine once put it more poetically, a little blissfully drunk.

Compared to my first visit in 2021, Kadeau has made remarkable strides. Its cooking now shows greater clarity and depth; its technique has become more precise and more daring. The wine pairing converses with the food with rare sensitivity, playing with both classic and unexpected combinations.

The restaurant now feels fully mature — ready to stand among the greats of our time, and, in my view, ready to open the door wide to its third Michelin star.

All of this has one explanation: Nicolai Nørregaard.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Wildersgade 10B, 1408 Copenhagen

www.kadeau.dk

+45 33 25 22 23