A welding hall, a bronze door, and a sky you can rewrite

The island

Refshaleøen is reclaimed land on the eastern side of Copenhagen harbour, built up in the nineteenth century and given over for most of the twentieth to the Burmeister & Wain shipyard. When shipbuilding ended, the island was left with enormous industrial volumes and no purpose — which is precisely the condition under which cities get interesting. It filled with studios, climbing halls, a street-food market, festival grounds and, in time, restaurants that needed more room than the old city could offer.

Arriving is part of the effect. You leave the postcard version of Copenhagen, cross water, and end up on a flat industrial edge where the wind comes off the Øresund unobstructed. The transition does real work: by the time you reach the door you have already left the ordinary evening behind.

The door

The entrance is a pair of monumental bronze doors, heavy enough that opening them is an event rather than an action. It is the single most efficient piece of design in the building. A threshold that requires effort tells you that what is on the other side operates under different rules, and it does so before any staff member has said a word.

Every good piece of theatre solves the same problem: how to get an audience to agree to believe. Here, the door does it.

The dome

The central dining space sits under a hemispherical dome used as a projection surface. It is the reason most first-time guests describe the room as a planetarium, and the element that most changes how the food is experienced.

Two things make it more than a screen. First, it is continuous — the room is never simply lit, it is always depicting something, which means the kitchen can change the emotional temperature of a course without touching the course. Second, it is above you rather than in front of you, so it behaves like weather rather than like television. You stop noticing it as a display and start responding to it as a sky.

The other rooms

The dome is one movement of the evening, not the whole of it. Guests move between spaces with markedly different acoustics, scale and light — some intimate and low, some vertical and cold. The contrast is deliberate: an evening spent in one room, however beautiful, flattens after two hours.

The building also houses the parts guests do not sit in — laboratory and development space, an art collection distributed through the circulation areas, and back-of-house at a scale closer to a theatre than a restaurant.

What it means for you

• It is dark, and that is a design decision. Photographs will disappoint. Most people are happier once they accept this in the first ten minutes rather than the last.
• You will move, stand and sit repeatedly. Wear shoes you can spend six hours in.
• The island is exposed. Between October and April the wind is a genuine factor on the approach; bring a proper coat even though the room itself is warm.
• Transport is worth planning. Refshaleøen is well served in summer by harbour bus and bicycle, and much less obviously served at one in the morning in winter. See around the harbour for the options.