Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Chinatown that really isn't



I have something of a fetish for cooking with odd ingredients. One of the side effects of this is a fascination with ethnic markets of any stripe, but I have a particular soft spot for Asian food stores. While I've found a few small Asian markets scattered around the city, I'd yet to find some of the more unusual foods that I'd been able to easily source elsewhere. Sunday I decided to do something about this. I'd been hearing rumors of a Copenhagen Chinatown somewhere near the train station, but had yet to come across anything like this in the few times I'd been there.

On a beautiful sunny day, we pulled up behind the train station. Shouldn't be so hard to find. So we parked the bikes and walked. And walked. And walked. Hmm. How could a large Asian neighborhood just disappear? After a quick phone call to Brian, my own incredibly patient human google map, we saw our first Asian store. Then a second and third. And then... nothing. Apparently Chinatown in Copenhagen consists of exactly three small markets, one of which is named, conveniently, Chinatown.

We did see some guys playing boules in a road median and got saluted by a random drunk, plus it was a beautiful sunny day, so one could hardly complain. Although if anyone out there knows some hidden massive asian market, complete with live geoducks and turtles and weird racks of hanging meat, please let me know.

1 comment:

ScamSlayer said...

I love cooking asian food as well, and it has been difficult for me to get ingredients. Some stores in Copenhagen sell the basics like: soy sauce, white/brown rice, egg noodles and so on. However, Im from California and am used to buying cute asian stationary and whatnot. I have yet to find these stores and doubt their existence =(