It’s the last week of January. While the heart of the city is heaving with fashionistas — marking the 20th anniversary of Copenhagen Fashion Week — across town, in the industrial eastern reaches of Refshaleøen, something altogether different is unfolding. No front rows. No paparazzi. No street-style peacocking. Just 60-odd of the world’s best chefs and a handful of renowned mixologists, flown in from every continent, converging on Alchemist for what is, quietly, perhaps one of the most significant gatherings the culinary world has staged in years.
In November 1973, something not entirely dissimilar happened in fashion. The Battle of Versailles — a fundraiser for the restoration of the Palace of Versailles — pitted five French couturiers against five Americans. The French brought elaborate sets, orchestras, Josephine Baker. The Americans came with backdrops that didn’t fit the stage, canned music, pools of light and Liza Minnelli. What followed was a recalibration of the entire industry. The Americans — looser, more alive, more democratic — stole the room.
It challenged the dominance of the French fashion establishment and marked a turning point: the night the world understood that great ideas don’t require a single capital.
Convergence, it turns out, is built on the same premise. Not competition, but contact, interaction, inspiration, and community. The idea that something happens when world-class operators from wildly different culinary traditions are placed in the same kitchen.
Chef Rasmus Munk, the Alchemist founder who initiated the event, put it plainly: the culinary world has something to say right now and Copenhagen is the place to say it.
Chefs from the top tier of international cuisine, all ranked in the World’s 50 Best Top 100, arrived from 26 countries and six continents, from established gastronomic centres such as New York, Barcelona and Tokyo to cities less routinely cited in this kind of company: Cape Town, Mumbai, Quito and Queenstown.
The concept: five collaborative dinners, 12 chefs and mixologists, every night, and the creation of dynamic, interesting menus. Not a collaboration so much as a collision — of technique, philosophy, geography, memory.
I was there for night three. The evening opened with Alchemist’s “Daisy” — a spherified pisco sour topped with a foam of Colombian mandarin and lime, delivered in a silver flower crafted by Danish goldsmith Nikolai Appel.
Though a dish on Alchemist’s actual menu, it was a particularly clever start, a statement of intent, of convergence: this is a space where the Nordic and the foreign can not only meet but also merge to form something greater than they are on their own.
What followed was a sustained argument, firstly, for the idea that cuisine, at its most serious, is rooted in place — demonstrated by the showcases of local pride and diversity of ingredients brought forward by each chef — and, secondly, that when excellence is the unifying thread, the most unexpected dishes can sit side by side comfortably.
From the Basque Mugaritz came “Nemesis” — flourless cocoa cake, Iberian-ham fat, and black winter truffle served atop a femur-shaped mannitol structure — and AMA, a tribute to the origin of life itself: sheep’s milk infused with hay, served in and to be sucked out of a breast-shaped mould. Andoni Luis Aduriz has always operated in the space between provocation and poetry, and both dishes reminded you why.
Chef Dominique Crenn — the only woman to hold three Michelin stars in the US — presented her “Scallop Rossini from Atelier Crenn”: a seared scallop basted in brown butter, covered in smoked pike roe, topped with foie parfait, glazed in beet Bordelaise, and finished with umami mushroom-yoghurt foam and white alyssums. It was Rossini reimagined through a coastal Californian lens — luxurious, precise, and quietly radical.
Much like Crenn herself. Singapore’s Labyrinth brought its “Chili Crab Pie” (referencing the McDonald’s apple-pie sleeve and the original chilli crab founder in a single, compressed gesture) alongside chef Han Liguang’s refined take on Singapore’s bak kut teh: a layered traditional Chinese soup with a dashi-based broth, Iberian ham, aged tangerine peel, and a dumpling of braised pig’s head with black winter truffle and red Kampot pepper oil.
Léo, from Bogotá, sent out two dishes sourced from the Colombian coast: a grilled oyster with free-range duck velouté from divers who still practise breath-hold fishing, and a piangua clam with coconut, plantain, and black basil, presented in threads of ink.
Peru’s Kjolle presented a scallop dish described as an extract of the “Amazonian forest, Pacific Ocean and Andean altitude”.
Celele’s “Caribbean Flower Salad” — edible flowers researched with the Cartagena Botanical Garden, cashew cream, cashew fruit and passiflora vinaigrette — was exuberant in the way in which chef Jaime Rodríguez’s expression of Colombian cuisine is quickly becoming known.
Bringing things back to Copenhagen, Jordnær’s langoustine — grilled over binchotan (white charcoal) and served with cherry-blossom beurre blanc and yuzu kosho — was simply sublime, a testament to exceptional ingredients.
Looking further across the map, New Zealand’s Amisfield contributed a deboned mallard foot stuffed with liver and edible truffle claws, and a wild-boar snout served warm on a boudin noir crumpet with liver butter.
Josh Niland of Saint Peter in Sydney — arguably the most revolutionary chef working with fish today — sent out a signature “Tuna Wellington”: a loin cut from a 40kg yellowfin tuna, encased in a parsley and seaweed crêpe layered with mushroom duxelle, cod tripe and Spanish black truffle, wrapped in sour-cream pastry and served with chamomile- and verjuice-glazed carrot darts, potato purée, and a tuna-bone sauce.
His “EYE” saw a dessert built entirely on fish: cod-eye choux, Kaluga-caviar canelé, tuna bone-marrow fudge, Murray cod-fat caramel, charcoal lemon meringue and cinnamon barramundi maw. An entire cosmology of fish, ending the meal on terms only Niland would think to propose.
And that was just a fraction of it all. These dishes are only a handful of what landed on the table on night three — let alone across the full five nights of Convergence. What made it cohere, beyond the extraordinary density of talent in the kitchen, was Alchemist’s front-of-house team. Orchestrating an evening of this complexity could easily have become chaos. Instead, it was seamless.
The service was not merely competent; it was showstopping, operating at the highest level. Each course was presented and paired with the kind of precision and warmth that reminded you that hospitality, at its best, is its own form of artistry.
The cumulative effect was somewhere between a music festival, a seminar and a culinary mecca: formally structured, technically extraordinary and genuinely moving in the way that happens when people do exactly what they are best at, in the same room, on the same night.
The Battle of Versailles changed fashion by making visible what was already true — that great design wasn’t the exclusive property of Paris, that New York and its designers deserved a seat at the table. Convergence, if Munk’s ambition holds — and he’s already committed to its becoming an annual event — might do the same for food.
What five nights in Copenhagen made impossible to ignore is that the centre of gravity in world cuisine is no longer singular. Lima, Cape Town, Singapore, Queenstown — the most exciting cooking on the planet is not concentrated in any one city or tradition.
Alchemist didn’t create this reality, but it did bring it all into their mesmerising, magical, ever-surreal dining room, for five incredibly special evenings.
From the April issue of Wanted, 2026
