Day 48 -- Blåt Guld

Yesterday Collin and I embarked on a four-hour Gastro Cruise celebrating Blåt Guld, or "Blue Gold" mussels. This cruise included a canal tour around Copenhagen stopping at 6 different restaurants for a dish featuring mussels and a glass of wine (or beer).

We started our tour in the "Black Diamond" atrium which is a part of the Royal Danish library, and also houses the restaurant Søren K which was our first culinary experience.

After an introduction (in Danish, of course) we followed the crowd out to our boat where we had a glass of wine and our first dish courtesy of Søren K, en route to our next stop.  I will include pictures of each dish thanks to the brochure they gave us.  The first was blåmusling and frittet kartoffel, or blue mussels and french fries.

 The sauce was a mustard mayonnaise combination and quite tasty.  Sadly the potato was cold, but could have been delicious if hot.  Here is Collin getting on the boat (sadly you can't really see the boat -- its in the distance behind the sailboat, lots of low windows) and then enjoying our first glass of wine.  Some sort of white wine from France called "La Lune" with a unicorn on the label.  It was quite good.

We took the boat to the opera house where our next dish was  fried panko-encrusted mussel with delicious onions and some sort of gelé.  The opera house was pretty cool.  We only saw the atrium but I am excited to go back at some point for a full tour.  

From the opera house, we traveled further north -- passed the Little Mermaid statue which Collin finally got to see -- to one of our favorite stops, a restaurant called M/S Amerika.  This place had a really cool vibe.  Here we ate some sort of chopped mussels with a potato puree and chips on top...one of my favorites.  The wine here was also quite good.  A Reisling from New Zealand called "Old Coach Road".

 After M/S Amerika we headed back towards the center of Copenhagen to stop at the Marriott.   Due to "construction" in the waterways we couldn't dock in front of the Marriott but instead had to dock farther away and walk.  To keep our spirits up on the walk they supplied us with hot toddies.  As everything is conveyed in Danish I thought by looks we were given tea, so was very surprised when I had my first sip.  It did keep us warm on the walk though.  The Marriott is in a fabulous location right on the water.  Here we had our most traditional dish of steamed mussels and veggies in broth with a slice of toast.  It was neat that they did it in parchment, and it did taste very good, but was a bit boring compared to the other dishes we were having.

After the Marriott, which by the way was the only restaurant where the food was explained in English -- yay!! --  we went across the water to a neat restaurant built on a docked shipped called Restaurant Viva.  The guys sitting next to us said last time they were there they were served "dill on snow".  We did not receive anything so crazy.  instead it was Blåmuslinger i frikassé.  That's what the brochure says anyway, but ours didn't look quite like this picture.

It was mussels and lightly cooked veggies in a rich cream broth.  The broth was delicious, the veggies could have been cooked longer.

Our final stop for the night was a very small restaurant farther north called Lumskebugten.  Here I made the unfortunate mistake of using the men's room.  In my defense, the doors to both rooms were open and therefore the men and women signs were blocked and no one was in either when I went.  I thought they were unisex.  When I came out I realized they definitely were not, and it was quite crowded.  Oh well, I will never see these people again.  Here we ate a mussel soup baked in a ramekin with puffed pastry on top.  It was good and reminded me of the beef and guinness pie I made for a previous food challenge.  They paired it with beer instead of wine.

This completed our gastro tour.  We boated back to the Black Diamond and then walked home.  Despite the entire tour (minus our time at the Marriott) being in Danish, we had a fantastic day.  The weather was perfect, the food was delicious, and we had some good conversations with our fellow cruisers throughout the day (Including translations when it was necessary).  I would definitely attend another event by this group.

Skål!