Geist
Kongens Nytorv 8
1050 København K
Denmark
Tel.: +45 3313 3713
Overall rating: 5/10
Date of visit: May 2015
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Geist is the new restaurant of Bo Bech, who used to run the Michelin restaurant Paustian in Copenhagen.
We were ten people here this day, and our opinions of this restaurant ranged from good to “meh”, with most of us unfortunately falling into the “meh” category, myself included.
The service was great, though. More about that later.
So, we had an array of dishes, but I’ll focus on the ones I had, as I didn’t try the other dishes.
My first dish was scallops with peas, horeseradish and dill, priced at 165 kroner (€22). I assumed this meant a couple of fried scallops nicely presented with peas on the side, but it looked like this:
The taste? Nothing special. I’m a sucker for peas and scallops, but I didn’t care much for this dish.
My next dish was baby pork with crispy jerusalem artichokes (wrongfully advertised as artichokes), priced at 185 kroner (€25). The meat seemed very fatty and blubbery, but not a bad dish (but simply not so special either):
My dessert was a rhubarb dessert, priced at 80 kroner (€10.70). I honestly don’t remember this so well. If I remember correctly it was a bit too acidic for my taste. I’m very, very fond of rhubarb but know from hard-earned experience that they require a lot of sugar, and the amount varies from plant to plant.
I’ll quickly run through the dishes of the rest of the party:
Turbot with fennel ravioli on gruyere cheese sauce (priced at 195 kroner (€26)):
Ramson and asparagus:
Poached egg:
I think this was calf’s heart with sorrel and grapes:
I can’t remember what this was:
Octpus or squid with black trompet mushrooms:
Lemon tart, which the person eating called too acidic:
One of us also had a beef dish that I don’t have a picture of. She was also the person who was the most happy with the food. So, overall we felt the food was simply just okay, but at the price simply lacklustre. Two of the people in our party had been here before and had then also felt the dishes were hit or miss.
I had three dishes and shared a bottle of white wine with three others, which came to 110 kroner for the wine, landing at 540 kroner (€72) in total for me. As I had asked for tap water, I wasn’t charged for water, whereas some of the others who just asked for still water when prompted, was charged for bottled water, which lightly upset at least one of us. For me it was too expensive when you look at the food served, and for less money (477 kroner (€64) to be exact) you could have three courses and a glass of white wine in Rebel. In Cofoco you could buy this for 285 to 320 kroner (€38-€43). And in both Rebel and Cofoco the food was better.
So, let’s move on to the service, which was great and almost Michelin star level. Our waitress was knowledgeable, forthcoming and helpful. We were ten people, and it was no problem to take care of us all. A small detail that I really liked was that when she brought the bill she gave each of us an indiviual bill , and she had divided the price of the bottle of wine by four and added one quarter to the bill of the four of us who had shared it, so we didn’t have to sit there and figure it out for ourselves.
So, if only the food had matched the service level, I would have been happy to have come back here, but as it stands now, then probably not.
