Chef who serves £600 dinner at ‘Europe’s weirdest restaurant’ – where dishes have included blood ice-cream and caged chickens – is named best in the world
The owner and head chef at what has been dubbed the world’s ‘weirdest’ restaurant – which serves a dish called ‘Hunger’, made with rabbit carpaccio and a human ribcage replica to remind diners of starved communities in the world – has scooped the most prestigious award in the industry.
Rasmus Munk, who runs two Michelin-starred Alchemist in Copenhagen – a restaurant where every meal is designed to make diners think, even if it’s a profoundly uncomfortable experience – was named the world’s best chef 2024 at an awards ceremony in Dubai this week.
His quirky creations – which include models of human eyes to mimic the feeling of surveillance and a recreation of a human tongue – can be sampled at either the menu’s £600 ‘experience’ or its £1,826 ‘Sommelier Table’.
Elsewhere foodies might also enjoy the ‘Space Bread’ dish, the New Yorker reports, which features ‘freeze-dried meringue made with aerated soy sauce’, that was created with the help of an MIT researcher.
Diners on TripAdvisor have also had mixed feelings about the ‘odd’ dishes, which they say included ‘lamb’s brain, jelly fish, pig’s windpipe’ and ‘ice cream made with pig’s blood’.
Munk has wowed diners with his experimental restaurant-cum-theatre, which lies on a drab-looking industrial estate in Refshaleøen, on the fringes of Copenhagen, and took the accolade from last year’s winner, Spanish chef Dabiz Muñoz.
The eighth Best Chef Awards took place in the UAE on November 6th, with many of the biggest names in fine dining in attendance.
Behind Munk, Spanish chef lbert Adrià came second for his work at his restaurant Enigma, while third place went to Munk’s fellow Dane Eric Vildgaard for sustainable eatery Jordnær.
Danish superchef Ramus Munk, co-founder of Alchemist, a theatrical restaurant in Copenhagen, has been named the world’s best chef 2024 at an awards ceremony in Dubai
On Instagram, Munk said he was thrilled to find himself top of the chef tree, writing: ‘Just WOW! Unbelievable!!! Just awarded no. 1 in the World by The Best Chef Awards 2024! Incredibly proud!’
Diners visiting Alchemy can expert a two to three month wait for a table, with a meal costing around 5,400DK, just over £600.
Last year, Alchemist appeared on an episode of MasterChef: The Professionals, with judges Monica Galetti, Marcus Wareing and Gregg Wallace experiencing Munk’s food for thought concept first hand.
The trio were served up ‘caged chicken’ while footage of battery chickens, in metal cages, played out above them.
Wareing said of the dish: ‘This is cooked and full of flavour and yet in my hand I feel like I’m touching the raw claw of a chicken.’
He added: ‘This is the most thought-provoking thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life’.
The restaurant’s website has a manifesto on holistic cuisine, outlining its campaign to redefine dining ‘to create an all-encompassing and dramaturgically driven sensory experience’.
Munk opened the first incarnation of Alchemist in 2015, after catching the eye of the industry with a dish inspired by his grandmother’s Else’s lung cancer.
Munk beat competition from Spanish chef lbert Adrià and Munk’s fellow Dane Eric Vildgaard to win The Best Chef Awards 2024 – dinner at Alchemist costs around £600-a-head
Part of animals that aren’t ordinarily served up – such as tongue, brains and even windpipes – take centre stage at alchemy
A plate with blood-red ice cream and a QR code about blood and organ donation is designed to encourage people to donate
The dishes are designed to make diners think about worldly concepts – everything from famine to pollution
Some of the chef’s dishes – called ‘impressions’ – are more involved than others. One dish features a coffin-shaped candy bar while another resembles earthworms
‘Hunger’ is made with rabbit carpaccio and a human ribcage replica to remind diners of starved communities in the world
Theatre of dreams: Munk said he based the restaurant on the planetariums that he used to visit as a boy
‘The Ashtray’ dish contained ‘biodynamic’ potatoes, glazed onions and crispy bacon, and resembled a used ashtray.
Dishes are inspired by everything from the environment to blood donation and the food cycle. Waste products – eyes, blood, offal such as windpipes and brains, as well as rejected fruit, veg and seafood – all make their way to Munk’s 30-strong team of chefs.
What’s on the menu? Dishes, crafted in a kitchen-laboratory, are known as ‘impressions’, and are eaten while related 3D footage plays out in the domed planetarium-style cinema above diners heads.
A coffin shaped chocolate bar is designed to highlight child labour in the chocolate industry. A cod jaw dish comes wrapped in edible plastic, to hammer home the point about pollution in the oceans, meanwhile a drop-shaped red dessert asks diners to consider blood and organ donation.
The first part of the final of MasterChef: The Professionals in 2023 saw judges Monica Galetti, Marcus Wareing and Gregg Wallace eating at Alchemist
As the caged chicken dish is served up to diners at Alchemist, above them 3D footage of a battery farm plays out on screens
Alchemist is based inside an old shipyard building in Refshaleøen, on the fringes of Copenhagen
After diners push through doors covered with bronze sculpture, theatrical performers await
It works too, since the restaurant opened in 2020, thousands have opened the QR code that accompanies the dish.
First impressions count, and diners heading into the warehouse, a former shipyard building, for a £560 dinner – which doesn’t include wine pairings – are greeted by two forbidding doors, which are covered in bronze sculptures of many entwined hands.
Munk famously looks after his staff – a job advert posted last year on his Instagram account detailed a four-day working week, with no Saturdays included – a sharp contrast to the famously tough schedules many pro kitchens require.
