Host
The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: HOST: IN COPENHAGEN
December 27, 2018
You visited Host, a Copenhagen restaurant flush with TripAdvisor stars, willing to be pleased. Seeing the place lit from the outside on a dark, cold night, pleased you. The bustle within pleased you as did the rather rustic decoration, plain furniture, unvarnished wood shelves.
You ordered the five-course tasting menu and immediately fell down the hole of batch cooking. Batch cooking can work well, or even brilliantly, for relatively small groups, but for the number of people at Host, it’s asking for trouble. The kitchen cooks for customers all climbing the rungs of the same set menus at more or less the same time. So, the kitchen cooks fifty of this dish, fifty of the next dish, and so on, in the manner of an assembly line. This is quite a different operation altogether from focused chefs cooking individual dishes, most customized and timed to each customer, each an individual artistic creation requiring many complex steps.
First course: Witch Flounder with cauliflower and blue mussel sauce. The flounder was completely (completely) flavorless and mushy. The coating of cauliflower crumbs and sunflower seeds, designed no doubt to make it easy on the busy chefs (no need to take the time for a delicate sauté), tasted like fish you’d get in the home of a health-food zealot that you’d push underneath your mashed potatoes. What you mean to say is that you’d push the fish underneath the mashed potatoes, not necessarily the health-food zealot. Though, given the paltry taste of this dish, perhaps you would push the health-food zealot under the mashed potatoes as well. Frozen-fish sticks that you ate as a child, defrosted in the oven, are tastier. The blue mussel sauce tasted little if at all of mussels, and was more a vague brininess. This is an ignominious dish to serve in a city that is purportedly one of the world capitals of haute-cuisine
Second course: Scallops with horseradish and apple. The scallop was raw and sweet and flavorful. It was covered in a horseradish cream (which, while tasty, is so common that it amounts to a cliché) with bits of apple. This is the sort of thing you get at many sushi restaurants. It was tasty, but, again, obviously designed to be easy on the chefs. It came nowhere near thrilling. Also, there was far too much sauce, drowning the scallop. The serving was measly.
Third course: Norwegian Lobster with buckthorn and carrots. Buckthorn, it turns out, is a tart berry that’s reasonably tasty. The carrot was lightly pickled, quite delicious. (Two tart garnishes does seem redundant.) There was perhaps an ounce of lobster, the smallest serving you’ve ever seen in your life (of less volume than the carrot garnish). It was covered, like the scallops, in a cream of some sort. Once again, easy stuff for the chefs, no real skill involved, culinary Legos designed for crowd feeding. The dish was okay, nothing better.
Fourth Course: Cod with lingonberries and roast chicken skin. The cod was as flavorless and mushy as the witch flounder. You speculate that it was baked with a batch of other fish portions. It was topped by a thin disk of kohlrabi which sounds innovative, but was, in essence, quite similar structurally to the cauliflower on the flounder. You tried to cut through the tough kohlrabi with your fork and all you ended up doing was crushing the mushy filet below. On top there were bits of crisp chicken skin, the garnish du jour, which did no harm, but, then again, little good. Additionally, the top was covered in shreds of raw kale as though the chef had some around and decided to throw it in. This dish was actually somewhat off-putting and a waste of ingredients that could have been otherwise used to advantage. There was a sauce of some sort, but of little interest. It was served, as were a number of sauces, from elegant little copper pots, which had the affect of haute-cuisine but no more.
Bread: Two types, served on hay. Two homemade sourdough rolls were served along with two that were dark and malty. Both were just shy of excellent. You wish they’d been warm and that the butter hadn’t been cold. This is little stuff, of course, but in a restaurant that casts itself as top-of-the-line, not irrelevant.
Dessert: Birch Bark ice cream with stuff. The ice cream was sweet, but it was simply impossible to distinguish a birch bark flavor whatever that may be. At best you might say it was anodyne. There were a few other elements that were completely forgettable and you’ve forgotten them.
Chocolates: Various brown chocolates served on brown chunks of bark. The chocolates were no better than what you can buy in a drugstore. One was filled with blueberry mousse with little or no detectable blueberry flavor. The problem is that they looked almost exactly the same as the bark chunks. In the low light you bit into several pieces of bark, mistaking them for the chocolates.
Amuse-bouches. A number of amuse-bouches. One of them was a flowerpot of living thyme with chunks of mushroom fritter lying atop it that tasted like nursing home food. How could this be? You don’t know, but there it is. The mushroom fritters within the thyme bush reminded your wife, usually of delicate sensibility, of poodle turds in the grass.
Wines: Lots. The dessert wine was delicious, a ‘Monbazillac’, Semillon & Muscadelle, Chateau Barouillet, Sud Ouest. It had the virtue of great flavor without being syrupy. However, the starting wine was undrinkably sour, a ‘Lil Buteo’, Gruner Veltliner, M Gindl, Weinvertel. You left it untouched and your waitress didn’t even think to ask why. She just took it and robotically brought the next wine. At any other restaurant with a well-trained, caring staff, you immediately would have been asked if there was a problem with the wine. But, to almost quote Robert Frost, “she had miles to go before she slept, miles to go before she slept.”
The service was polite, but rushed. Certainly, it could not be called warm, caring, or even friendly. It felt as though the wait-staff was overworked. You felt sorry for them.
You’re well aware that this review comes across as a blanket denunciation. It is the fiercest review you’ve ever written. But you’re impelled by truth. This is a poor restaurant posing as a fine one. Serving food on hay and bark chips is not the same as haute-cuisine. Serving sauces in little copper pots is not haute cuisine. How about all the TripAdvisor stars? Well, perhaps you’re wrong in your evaluation. Perhaps it was a bad night. Then again, perhaps the emperor wears no clothes. Instead of “chef’ing” individual portions, Host cooks in batches like a school cafeteria and combines food simplistically in a manner best suited to many customers eating roughly the same items at roughly the same time. Batching can work (see my reviews for Amber and Little Kitchen in Hong Kong or Restaurant Floreyn in Amsterdam), but it surely doesn’t here. The food is poorly conceived, remarkably flavorless, and served in insultingly small portions. All of the mains that were supposed to be served hot, came lukewarm (as you would expect from batch cooking). The value for dollar is perhaps the worst you’ve ever encountered, $250 USD for two. Ugh.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 1
Ambiance: 3
Service: 2
Overall Value: 0
HOST
Nørre Farimagsgade 41, 1364 København, Denmark