Land of plenty

At Svanholm, Denmark’s largest commune, residents don’t just cook and eat together — they grow and rear the ingredients for their meals too. And the produce is so good it has top chefs from Copenhagen and beyond travelling here to buy it

- RICHARD ORANGE

There can’t be many self-sufficient, organic communes with close ties to Michelin-starred restaurants, but at Svanholm, chefs popping by to pick up produce is par for the course.

Noma, four times named the world’s best restaurant in the respected World’s 50 Best lists, sources richly colored kale, carrots and organic beef here. And until its recent closure, Copenhagen’s renowned Relæ would send its kitchen staff to make the 50-minute drive across the flat, patchwork fields of Zealand and over the glimmering waters of the Roskilde Fjord each day. They’d turn off just before the stately tree-lined avenue leading to Svanholm Gods, a 700-year-old mansion turned-commune, to harvest vegetables from fields untouched by fertilizer or pesticides for more than 40 years, and to collect fresh, unpasteurized milk for making burrata.

When Christian Puglisi, the chef behind Relæ, held a Seed Exchange Festival at the commune in 2019, the grounds were overrun with international gourmands and some of the best chefs on the planet. There was Magnus Nilsson, head chef at Fäviken, then Sweden’s top restaurant; Daniela Soto-Innes, who had just been rated the world’s best female chef; and Claus Meyer, the entrepreneur who over the past 30 years has helped transform Denmark’s food scene.