by Jo Piazza
Guests stuffed their faces with rådhuspandekager, the famous town hall pancakes, made in the hall restaurant and served on paper plates. The top secret recipe for the butter-fried pancakes covered in soft vanilla ice cream and apricot jam is kept locked in the town hall safe, and it isn’t unusual to see flower girls wandering around the hall with whipped cream mustaches before they hand the bride her bouquet. (Imagine serving pancakes at your wedding reception. I had relatives who were aghast that I served macaroni and cheese.) After they’ve made the marriage legal and signed all the paperwork, Danes will have an intimate party in a café or a picnic along one of the city’s many canals. It’s sweet and civilized. It was warm that day for Copenhagen (in the high sixties), and it seemed as though the entire city had come out to revel on the cement banks around the canals, filling picnic blankets with bottles of wine, bricks of cheese, and large round loaves of bread.
“Let’s get married again,” Nick said, caught up in the merriment and the smell of top secret pancakes. “Seriously. I’ll marry you again right now.”
Our plan for the rest of the day was to get some hygge. That’s how the Danes described it to me, as if hygge were something you could fetch from the market like eggs or deodorant. But before we ran around Copenhagen trying to get it, I wanted to better understand what “it” was. Hygge has no translation in English. It’s supposed to encompass the concepts of coziness, contentment, comfort, and companionship all in one word. It’s about good living, happy living, and living with really well-designed chairs. At its core, hygge is about creating a pleasant life, consciously thinking about comfort and happiness in everything from what you eat to how you design your home to how you work and how you treat your spouse.
“It’s about taking pleasure in gentle and soothing things. Dinner with close friends is hygge. Large family dinners are hygge. It just plays into every aspect of Danish life. It’s about being kind to yourself and those close to you, and that also helps make you a better partner,” explained Helen Russell, the author of The Year of Living Danishly. Helen is a former magazine editor (just like me) who’d worked the grind in an incredibly stressful job that she loved (just like me) and gone off to search for advice and happiness in a different part of the world (the similarities were uncanny). She was a Brit who had moved to Denmark a few years earlier when her husband landed his dream job at LEGO. She’d promised she would give their Danish experiment a year, but now they’d been living there for three. Before they moved, Helen was working her ass off in London, and it took a toll on her family. For two years she’d been unable to get pregnant, enduring fertility treatment after fertility treatment. Just six months into “living Danishly,” relaxing into the happiest culture on the planet and getting some hygge, Helen discovered she was pregnant.
“Hygge can be anything, really. It’s about finding the happiness in small things.” In her book Helen talks about finding hygge by decorating her home with beautifully designed Danish chairs and deliciously scented candles. But it was even more personal than that. “For me, hygge is about being nicer to myself and I’ll be nicer to the people around me. You find yourself being less spiky to your partner,” Helen said, adding that one key aspect of getting hygge at the beginning of her Danish experiment was eating as many Danish pastries (with the Harry Potter–sounding name snegles) as possible.
Maybe that was how Nick and I would start getting our hygge—through Danish food. I’d only recently shown any interest in food preparation whatsover. Determined to be a master homemaker, I’d been pushing myself to prepare two meals (breakfast and dinner) a day to cut down on the number of times we were eating out during the week. It was just one of the ways I was trying to save money as we tried to pay off our mortgage. It was also much healthier, and to be honest, we’d both been getting chubby since the wedding. When we got married I could cook two things—pasta and eggs. I believed nachos were an acceptable dinner. My new strategy was to find dishes that looked pretty on Pinterest and attempt to re-create them using food-preparation videos on YouTube. If only the housewives of the 1950s knew the tools I now had at my disposal.
There were some successes (a particularly tasty Jerusalem artichoke soup, surprisingly airy scones) and plenty of failures (that time I melted a plastic bowl in the oven and the neighbors called the fire department). I wasn’t what you’d call a joyous chef. I’d developed a cultural bias against cooking and household duties as something inherently antifeminist. To be honest doing all those things made me feel slightly guilty. I felt like I was letting down all the sisters who came before me if I didn’t work one-hundred-hour weeks and eat tuna from a tin. I wanted to be good at cooking, but I felt guilty enjoying it.
There’s no way to properly convey just how delicious the cuisine in Denmark is. Sure, the city was home to the best restaurant in the world, but I can’t tell you anything about it because we aren’t Beyoncé and Jay so we couldn’t get a reservation there. It didn’t matter. Everywhere Nick and I ate, from the most modest coffee shops to the fanciest Michelin-starred restaurants, served food that blew our minds. Even the takeaway smushi (a combination of Denmark’s smørrebrød open-faced sandwiches and raw fish) was spectacular.
Going out to eat together, having date nights, can be considered a form of hygge, at least according to Danish psychotherapist and family counselor Iben Sandahl.
“When building up the relationship, you´ll find hygge-moments everywhere; candlelight dinners, walking in the parks, movie nights, and a lot of focused attention. Continuing to embrace hygge is a fantastic way to nurture your marriage,” Sandahl told us. “We all know the feeling of stressful days with very little time and energy to remember love for each other. Hygge can help you to find that again. If you want to hygge more with your partner, it means that you have to put the drama of everyday life to one side for a moment.”
Sandahl has even created a “hygge oath” that includes things like:
1. Turn off phones and iPads.
2. Leave drama at the door.
3. Share fun and uplifting stories.
4. Do not complain unnecessarily.
5. Make a conscious effort to enjoy the food and drinks.
6. Light candles if you are inside.
7. Do not brag.
8. Tell funny and uplifting stories. Retell those stories again and again.
9. Make a conscious effort to feel gratitude and love.
The oath could also be called “How to Have an Enjoyable and Mutually Beneficial Date Night with Someone You’ve Already Gone on 1,000 Dates With.” The ultimate goal of all of this is to create a sense of “hygger sig,” feeling “cozy around together.” That was the aim for our night on the town in Copenhagen.
“Do you both eat all the things in the world?” our waiter at the gourmet pizza restaurant Bæst asked when we solicited a menu recommendation from him.
“We do,” I replied.
“That makes me happy,” he said. The connection between food and happiness is something that can’t be ignored in Denmark. It’s a country that thrives on preparing excellent food and delighting diners with dishes that taste as good as they look on Instagram.Without having to ask, our waiter brought us a bowl of the meltiest, gooiest, most intricately flavored burrata I’d ever placed in my mouth.
“This is incredible,” I said through a mouthful of cheese. “Where’s it from?”
“Upstairs,” the server said. “We have a dairy up there. We make the cheese fresh every day.”
“Do you teach cheese-making classes?” I asked, using my finger to sweep up the remaining olive oil and cheese on my plate. Nick raised an eyebrow. We didn’t have that much longer in Copenhagen, certainly not long enough for me to learn to make cheese.
Our server scratched his dappled blond head and blinked at us slowly. “No. But you can probably just come up and we can show you how we make the cheese. Do you want to do that?”
Did I want to do that? Did I want to know how to make the happiest cheese on earth?
Hygge, in that moment, was learning how to prepare this particular burrata.
“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing Nick’s hand. “I’m going to make us buckets of burrata when we get home. Hygge!”
We made our way to the sweet-smelling second-floor kitchens. Bæst didn’t just make delicious cheese upstairs. They also prepared handmade charcuterie from some of the happiest pigs in Denmark. “The pigs stay with their mother as long as they like and they wander around in the fields their whole lives,” Bæst head chef Kris Schram told me after I barged into his dairy. “He kills them in the fields so they never need to leave the property. The pig is never scared. They live in a beautiful field on a beach. I want to live there. The same for the milk we get for the cheese. Our ingredients come from happy animals.” Of course, even the animals are happier in Denmark.
“Do you think it makes a difference in the taste?” I asked, feeling like I was in an episode of Portlandia. “The happy animals?”
He nodded. “It does. It matters. Being conscious about where your food comes from makes the experience of eating it even better.” His delivery was so sincere that I couldn’t help but believe him.
It’s not just meat that Danes cultivate with care. Their food-positive mind-set stretches to vegetables as well. Many restaurants in Copenhagen strive to serve veggies that are organic, biodynamically raised, and local. The vegetables aren’t just seasonal; they’re microseasonal, meaning that chefs shift their menus to serve whatever is coming out of the ground in a given week.
Kris is another American transplant to the happiest place on earth. He’s from the Hudson Valley of New York and worked as a chef in the Sonoma wine country, about an hour’s drive from our place in the Bay Area. Then he met a girl, a Danish girl. They moved to Copenhagen and got married.
“I wouldn’t be married, with her and this happy if I were trying to do this in the States,” Kris told me as we drooled over acres of fresh mozzarella being stretched and rolled into succulent balls.
“What?” I said, not sure that I’d heard him correctly. “Why wouldn’t you have a wife if you lived in the States?”
“In the States being a chef is a young man’s game unless you own your own place. Here we work hard, but you work less days, get more days for your family. We have five weeks’ vacation. I just had a chef go out on paternity leave. In Denmark you can be a chef and still have a life and a family.”
What comes first, the happy-making food or the happy family that makes the food? The concepts are so intertwined in Denmark that it’s like separating the farm-raised chicken from the joyously laid egg. What I began to realize, as I learned to make fresh mozzarella from scratch at a very fancy pizza restaurant in Copenhagen’s hipster neighborhood, was that creating happy-making meals for Nick and me was about more than just finding recipes on Pinterest that would look beautiful on Instagram. It was about being mindful about all of our food, where it came from, and how it was prepared, something Nick considered more than I did. For most of my adult life I shopped at the closest and cheapest grocery store. When I arrived in San Francisco, I bemoaned the high prices at Bi-Rite, the all-organic grocery store around the corner. But now seeking out better, healthier, and “happier” food sources seemed like a good use of our time. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t about to spend $10 for a basket of designer strawberries—I’m not a crazy person or a celebrity—but I did want to slow down, to take a breath and take care with what we purchased and ultimately cooked.
Back at our dinner table, nibbling on more mozzarella and crispy pancetta and asparagus pizza, Nick was getting irritated with me.
“What are you writing down?” he asked as I furiously scribbled in my notebook, listening hard to the music coming from speakers perfectly hidden in postmodern light fixtures.
“This playlist,” I said. “It’s the best playlist I’ve ever heard. So well curated. It rises. It falls. It’s not pretentious. Listen. They’re playing ‘Hungry Eyes’ from Dirty Dancing. And before that Stevie Wonder and the Temptations and Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer.’ We need to create dinner playlists. This is happy-making music. This is hygge. We’re getting hygge right now from this playlist!”
“Now that we have it, let’s enjoy the rest of dinner.” Nick allowed a smile to turn up the corners of his lips.
I’m accustomed to multitasking while I eat, glancing at my phone, responding to e-mails, clicking on news alerts. I looked around the restaurant. No one, except for me, had their phone on the table. Surely that couldn’t be normal? Everyone brings their phones to dinner, right?
Wrong. Wasn’t that the first tenet of Sandahl’s hygge oath? Put away your damn phone.
Treating our phone like a fifth appendage is not a uniquely American phenomenon. The French and British are just as bad. And the Russians? Forget about it. You can’t get them off Facebook at the finest of fine-dining restaurants, but no one can dispute that the constant preoccupation with our electronic devices during what should be quality time is causing an erosion of civilized conversation and satisfied relationships.
“Is part of hygge keeping your phone off the table at dinner?” I asked one of my Danish friends. “When you’re eating with your husband or your friends?”
She gave me a strange look. “It could be. I guess. But really, isn’t it just a better way to live? Why do you need to check your phone during dinner?”
“Don’t you want to Instagram your food?” Even though I was a novice in the kitchen, I still derived great joy from Instagramming everything I ordered in a restaurant.
“No.” My Danish friend shook her head and looked at me as though I had recently arrived from a faraway, less civilized planet. “We just want to enjoy the food with the person we’re eating it with.”
Plenty of research shows that real-life interactions suffer when one partner is constantly on their phone rather than interacting with the other. “Studies of conversation both in the laboratory and in natural settings show that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on a table between them or in the periphery of their vision changes both what they talk about and the degree of connection they feel. People keep the conversation on topics where they won’t mind being interrupted. They don’t feel as invested in each other. Even a silent phone disconnects us,” the author and academic Sherry Turkle wrote in the New York Times Sunday Review. In a 2015 poll by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cell phone owners admitted to using their phones the last time they gathered with family and friends. Of those, 82 percent said they weren’t happy about doing it.
Baylor University’s business school even gave a name to the phenomenon: “phubbing,” which means snubbing someone for your phone. “What we discovered was that when someone perceived that their partner phubbed them, this created conflict and led to lower levels of reported relationship satisfaction. These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, led to lower levels of life satisfaction and, ultimately, higher levels of depression,” James A. Roberts, a member of the research team, explained.
Both Nick and I are guilty of spending too much time on our phones, but he’s much more self-aware about it. While I dive into a rabbit hole of Instagram or panda videos, he’s much better at quickly checking his e-mail and then putting the phone away at the dinner table.
I stashed my phone and notebook in my purse and enjoyed the rest of our pizza dinner.
Danes value good design more than almost any culture in the world. Since they tend to get married later, couples often come to a marriage with their own nice chairs, dishes, potted plants, and picture frames made of blond wood. Nick and I were plenty old when we got married, comparatively at least, but since I’d moved all the way across the country and Nick lived in a small studio prior to our cohabitation, neither of us came to our union with grown-up furniture or home accessories. Our home wasn’t just un-cozy, it was empty. We couldn’t afford anything new yet.
Creating a cozy home is one of the central tenants of hygge, and it was time
we embraced it.
“In Denmark, we are very much indoors—I guess mostly because of our changeable weather. Therefore creating a cozy home, which is personal and relaxing, means a lot to us in relation to feeling good,” Iben Sandahl informed me. “I would argue that many of us are trying to create the ‘invisible’ cozy spirit that characterizes hygge in our homes, because we need that place to relax. If you enter into a cozy home, you enter at the same time into a good and lovely energy that makes you happy. If you are happy when you come home from work, it rubs off positively on your spouse.”
That’s why our next hygge-gathering mission took place in Copenhagen’s Østerbro neighborhood, on a search for beautiful things for our home that would fit in my one suitcase—yummy candles, throw pillows, and soft blankets. I discovered a beautiful blond-wood birdcage meant to house the toilet paper in one’s bathroom and a garlic press chicer than all of my shoes.
My first purchase was a set of geometrically interesting blond-wood napkin rings. When Nick was growing up, his mother, Patsy, was insistent that family dinnertime include cloth napkins folded neatly into napkin rings, and Nick seems to still agree with her. I wanted to make a practice of sitting down together for dinner a regular thing even before we had kids. We didn’t do that in my house when I was growing up. My dad was rarely home in time for dinner, and I often balanced my plate on my lap in front of the television with my mom. Nick recalls plenty of family dinners; I remember episodes of Married…with Children and The Simpsons.
Like the Asters, the Danes are also focused on sitting down to dinner together, and it’s one of the reasons that most offices let their employees out of work by four, or at the latest five, so they can make it home in time for dinner with their families. “The desks are empty way before six,” one tech executive in Copenhagen told me.
