Copenhagen drinks on tiptoe

By Flavia Tomaello, https://flaviatomaello.blog/, Instagram @flavia.tomaello

A few blocks from Nyhavn, the most photographed and touristic canal in Copenhagen, and a stone’s throw from the royal palaces of Amalienborg and Christiansborg, there is a cobblestone street where several private houses were built during the 19th century. Over time, that same property operated as a hotel under another name, Hotel Opera, until in 2017 when a former first dancer with the Royal Danish Ballet bought the building, completely renovated it and renamed it Hotel Sanders. On its ground floor, among wicker, dark wood and red velvet, he set up TATA, a cocktail bar that ended up becoming one of the most sought-after nighttime addresses in the Danish capital.

The person responsible for the entire project is Alexander Kølpin, winner in 1993 of the Benois de la Danse Prize, the most important distinction in ballet at an international level. To renovate the building, he called on the London studio Lind más Almond, which combined colonial textures, bamboo and rattan with works of art specially commissioned from Dais Contemporary, many of them linked to movement, music and the human body, in clear harmony with Kølpin’s career as a dancer. The result is a hotel with barely fifty rooms that is presented, according to its owner, less like a conventional hotel business and more like a complete staging, where each corner fulfills a function within a larger story.

This story finds its most lively chapter in TATA, named in honor of the red curtain of the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, located meters from the hotel. Unlike other bars in luxury hotels, entry is free and does not require prior reservation, a decision that responds to the declared intention that the place works both for the guest who comes down to have the last drink and for the neighbor who enters directly from the street. Small tables, dim lighting and a central bar finish giving it the air of a small theater room, where any occupant can choose to watch or be watched.

A menu with a booklet and own surname

The current menu is called Pirouette, a tribute to the classic ballet turn, and is intended as a two-act program. The first brings together cocktails inspired by dance pieces. There appears Midsummer Night’s Dream, a vodka soda with cucumber and lemon foam inspired by Shakespeare’s comedy from 1594, along with Nutcracker, a shot of champagne with Veuve Clicquot, hazelnut and rosewood that refers to Tchaikovsky’s story from 1816. La Bayadère is added, a lassi with amaretto bianco, calvados and vanilla in reference to the ballet by Marius Petipa and Sergei Khudekov from 1877, and Don Quixote, a version of the Clover Club with Danish gin, red fruits and olive that takes up Cervantes’ novel from 1605.

The second act moves towards opera and theater. Love for Love revives William Congreve’s 1695 comedy in the form of the New York Minute, with mezcal, reposado tequila, sherry and banana. Life is a Dream, inspired by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, is served as a version of Milk & Money with scotch, honey, black tea and cream. Dinner at Eight, which takes its name from Edna Ferber’s 1932 novel, reinterprets the Cosmopolitan with Jes Kølpin akvavit, the spirit that honors Alexander’s father and partner in the hotel project, added to Cordusio liqueur, cranberries and kaffir lime leaf. Completing the list is a textbook Left Bank Martini, with Tanqueray 10 and elderberry wine, and The Beauty Part, a tiki based on SJ Perelman’s 1963 melodrama, with amber rum, pineapple, lime and eucalyptus.

That gesture of including the family name among the ingredients is not a minor detail. Jes Kølpin, an architect by training, is a partner in the project along with his son, and his presence on the menu functions as a discreet signature within a business that, ultimately, remains family-owned despite the size of its ambitions. That same family scale is repeated in the rest of the Kølpin hotel portfolio, with two additional properties on the northern coast of Denmark, designed with the same vocation for intimacy that distinguishes Sanders within the Copenhagen hotel scene.

The neighborhood that surrounds the hotel is also part of the attraction. A few meters from Tordenskjoldsgade, the street where Sanders operates, there are restaurants of different profiles, contemporary art galleries, museums and design shops, an environment that makes TATA an almost obligatory stop on any night tour through the historic center of the city. The proximity to the Royal Theater, in addition to justifying the bar’s name, functions as a constant reminder of Kølpin’s previous life, who used to cross those same cobbled streets on his way to the stage, long before he became a host.

The hotel’s gastronomic proposal does not end at TATA. Sanders Kitchen offers a menu of contemporary Danish cuisine during the day, and the rooftop terrace adds, in season, an outdoor version of the cocktail bar itself, with direct access without reservation from Thursday to Saturday. This multiplicity of spaces, all crossed by the same theatrical aesthetic, is what justifies why Hotel Sanders is usually described less as a traditional hotel and more as a complete experience, designed act by act.

Whoever wants to reserve a table, or simply stop by for a night without planning it, can find the bar inside Hotel Sanders, at Tordenskjoldsgade 15, in the historic center of the city. The hotel responds to inquiries by phone and email, and maintains an active presence on social networks, where it documents much of the nightlife that occurs, night after night, under that same red velvet that gives its name to the bar and that continues to function, thirty years after that dance award, like the curtain that Kølpin decided not to close completely again.

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