Mary Gostelow visits the hotel in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen

Go back to the enewsletter

Flying into Copenhagen, I was immediately amazed by how easily the city runs with as few ‘workers’ as possible. Kastrup airport has everything, with more shopping and eating facilities than you could want in a lifetime, but if you need a person to help you, then you have a problem. Concentrate, do what you have to do, and you can find yourself with a one-ride ticket (much better value than a day-pass) on the train to Central Station. Cross Bernstorffsgade Street, using the pedestrian crossing in this law-abiding city, to the unique Nimb Hotel. Once checked in, use your room key to go out of the rear door directly into Tivoli Gardens – opened in 1843 and going strong ever since – past aficionados include Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney. Its many rides include Vertigo (voted best ride in Europe in 2014) and a virtual reality experience, plus there are daily live shows and nightly live entertainment and fireworks. The eight-hectare area, today owned by a publicly-quoted company, is meticulously maintained. Daily entry is Krone 120. Nimb Hotel guests have the big advantage of complimentary entry. Nimb Hotel, Copenhagen is a one-off – I had visited it a decade ago and remembered an adjacent dairy but that has now closed. What is the same is that Nimb, set into the peripheral Bernstorffsgaade wall of Tivoli Gardens, is still housed in the Moorish palace built in 1909 by architect Knud Arne-Petersen for the city’s top restaurateurs, the Nimb family. What had opened in 2008 as a 17-room hotel has now, since December 2017, been extended by New York architects Pei Cobb Freed & Partners into a 39-room luxury property – a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World.I was welcomed by former GM, Iben Marburger Juul, and by her successor, Maria Oldenbjerg and shown to suite 28, a 240-square-metre beauty in the new block. One long all-glass wall, with 1.5-metre-wide balcony, looked straight down into Tivoli Gardens. Inside, I had Danish oak floors with a few throw mats and, working to a mostly-blackberry mousse colour scheme, walls enlivened with mirrors and chinoiserie chosen by designer Rene Jasper. Although it was tempting to spend all my time in the suite I headed down to the basement Technogym, which will be moving to a new spa with hammams later this year. It was a beautiful sunny day and I lunched with Iben Marburger Juul in Gemyse, one of dozens of eating places in Tivoli Gardens. As GM of Nimb Hotel, which manages this restaurant, she wanted to bring the park into the dining experience. She talked with the gardeners, resulting in the entrance sign being flanked by tomato plants and other greenery. When the weather allows, many diners choose to forgo the attractive Scandinavian-simple indoor restaurant for eating in a big greenhouse, or simply outside. My shoulder was brushed by bean plants as we tried chef Mette Dahlgaard’s dishes, highly admired by the Michelin inspectors.Gemyse is not vegetarian as such but who wants meat when you can have grilled avocado topped with tomato relish, fried cucumber with peas and pickled lime, or broccoli sprouts blended with bambini pasta and homemade cheese? I especially like what are called ‘tasting fields’, which turns out to be a green salad with nasturtium flowers. The breads were twisted dough, exactly like the dampers we used to make as Girl Guides with flour and water, cooked over an open fire. Gosh, that brought back the kind of memory that no luxury hotel would usually think of; does anyone know a gourmet restaurant that would dare offer the delight of damper?Back at the Nimb, the third floor rooftop of the new block has a splendid outdoor pool, with lots of deck seating around, and a leased-out sushi bar. I discovered a cosy library nook but I had plenty of reading, anyway. I decided to dine in my room, starting with the signature 1909 cocktail: a Perrier-Jouët coupe holding Jensen’s Old Tom Gin, St Germain elderflower liqueur, fresh lemon juice, clover bitters and sage leaves. This went beautifully with the Nimb beef tartare, served with lettuce salad and superb skin-on fries. Olive oil, mayonnaise and tomato sauce all came in individual Weck glass jars with lids, and the still-warm brown bread roll was in a paper-lined metal dish.Room service dinner presentation should be a quality assessment factor for any luxury hotel and Nimb certainly excelled, with crisp white linens, a rose presented with sage leaves, Royal Copenhagen china paired with Arthur Kropp cutlery and C&S glasses, and plain brown wood Peugeot mills. Of course I had iced water, served in cut-glass, and wine presented in the bottle, before a glass being poured. This attention to detail was to be repeated at breakfast, in the indoor-out Brasserie which literally flows out into Tivoli Gardens, though a lot of plants seem to have found their way to the inside of the restaurant, too.I then took one of the hotel’s Velorbis bikes for a spin around town. Copenhagen seems to have even more bikes per capita than Amsterdam, but there is a big difference: Copenhagen biking is highly regimented, with none of the bike-anywhere ethos of Amsterdam, or cycling on pavements/sidewalks, as in any Japanese city. No, in Copenhagen you must stick to the dedicated bike lanes that flank every road in the city. You must go in the correct direction, and never veer into car lanes. You must stop at all traffic lights.That being said, no speed limit is mentioned so Tour de France comes into play. I had barely got five yards on my Velorbis bike before a furious ringing of a cycle bell had me swerving to one side. I was overtaken by a Bradley Wiggins-type professional on a contraption that had, in front, a wood cart with two kids – both pre-teenagers –sitting abreast. All the locals I spoke with agreed that cyclists in Copenhagen can be dangerous, so it’s no wonder that, when the weather allows, many opt out of the bicycle rat-race in favour of more leisurely transport along the city’s weaving waterways via boat.One enterprising kayak rental company clearly shows its community spirit by returning your rental fee if you come back with any plastic litter retrieved while canoeing. Such a brilliant gesture seems to be typical of the Copenhagen spirit: a day on the town was devoid of any sign of litter. The only eyesores were massive construction sites, such as around the new circular underground metro which will have 17 stations when it opens in July 2019. This metro will connect with existing radial lines so that no-one, anywhere in the hub of the city, will be less than ten minutes’ walk from a station (hey Delhi, London, New York and so many other places, are you listening?).All the metro trains, incidentally, are driverless, controlled by one central monitoring station, which reminds me once again that the Danes are pretty clever with minimising labour requirements. One exception does seem to be Tivoli Gardens: when I looked down from my balcony at 6.45am I could see dozens of workers inspecting manholes, checking that the automatic lawn mowers (reminiscent of oversized beetles) were ready to do their day’s duty, or simply checking anything in sight to make sure all is ready for the first tourists, waiting outside the various gates long before opening time at 11am.

Go back to the enewsletter