Denmark is set to explore if gastronomy can be recognized as an art form

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Imagine dining on “edible plastic” made from algae and collagen from fish skins. While you ingest the dish, ocean-borne plastic pollution seemingly floats above you, projected across the restaurant’s huge domed ceiling. It’s an experience — and dish — inspired by large garbage patches found in our seas.

In Denmark, chef Rasmus Munk doesn't offer dishes at the Alchemist restaurant. Instead, he whisks guests on an “immersive dining experience” combining performance, music, projections in its planetarium-like domed dining room, and, of course, food.

Opened in 2019 at the site of a former industrial harbor area in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, Alchemist was named the world’s fifth-best restaurant in 2025. It has two Michelin stars, signifying excellence in cuisine, out of a maximum three possible for one establishment.

Guests at this restaurant can experience 50 “impressions,” most of them edible. Dining there means trying various foods — a large eyeball dish featuring caviar and codfish eye gel, nettle butterflies served atop cheese and artichoke leaves — over many hours, in a slow process that invites reflection on the food and surrounding projections.

“We convey messages through our food, our food is our medium of expressing ourselves,” said Munk, whose dishes also explore issues such as state surveillance and animal welfare.

Gastronomy as art

Once known for bacon, herring, and rye bread, the Scandinavian country’s cuisine has been in ascendancy since 2003 when René Redzepi’s world-beating Noma first burst onto the scene, preaching a “New Nordic” philosophy that celebrated foraging, fermenting and Scandinavia’s seasonal larder.

Emboldened by the success of the New Nordic movement, Denmark's Michelin-starred restaurants are now asking a new question: Can gastronomy be art?

Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt said in January that Denmark would explore whether gastronomy could be formally recognized as an art form. If realized, it could become the first nation to legally place cooking — or at least the highest versions of it — on a similar pedestal to painting.

It's not clear how the culture ministry’s plans will be impacted by the country’s March 24 general election.

Munk, 34, who says he spent almost a decade honing his “artistic practices,” has been a driving force behind the move and described it as a “big milestone.”

“I don’t think all food is art … I think the craftsmanship needs to be on the highest level,” he said, noting that ultimately it's a political decision what gets called art and what not and that, for now, “this is a closed society for chefs.”

The change, still in its exploratory phase, would eventually require a vote in Denmark’s 179-seat parliament to reclassify gastronomy from craft to art.

It could also make the country’s chefs eligible for state subsidies and funding from private foundations — like writers and musicians — to get their projects off the ground.

A dining destination

Other nations with famed food cultures, including France and Japan, haven’t made similar moves. Last year, UNESCO granted Italian cooking cultural heritage status.

Denmark has previously expanded what constitutes art and culture, for example by awarding a lifetime national arts honor to heavy metal act King Diamond. Last year, the Sonning Prize, Denmark’s largest cultural award, was awarded to French gastronomic artist and chemist Hervé This.

The Nordic nation of 6 million people has become a dining destination, home to 37 Michelin-starred restaurants, including Copenhagen’s two-star Kadeau, which was opened in 2011 by head chef and creative director Nicolai Nørregaard.

“I approach it like I would approach making a piece of art, like an artwork or a piece of writing,” Nørregaard said. “It’s about getting sort of an experience.”

The 46-year-old head chef, whose recipes reference the seasonal flavors of Danish island Bornholm, said that such recognition would be a “big step.”

“To acknowledge that this can also be looked upon as art … that’s what’s important for me,” he said.

'It doesn’t make any sense'

But not everyone, even some within the industry, are toasting the idea.

Nick Curtin, the American executive chef and owner of Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred Alouette restaurant, argues that art and gastronomy are fundamentally different.

“Art’s sole purpose is expression. It’s to evoke emotion. Food must be consumed,” he said. “(Art) can evoke disgust or disappointment or pain or sorrow or joy or longing. Food actually can’t express all of those things. It can, but it shouldn’t.”

Some in Denmark’s art scene also have expressed concern that such a change might see greater competition for funding between chefs and more traditional artists like painters.

Holger Dahl, the architecture and art critic at Denmark’s 277-year-old Berlingske newspaper, is more blunt: “I think it’s quite silly, there’s no use, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s a little bit like a bicycle and a car — they have round wheels, they’ll take you from one point to another point, but it’s not like a very good bicycle all of a sudden turns into a car," he said. "It doesn’t happen.”