SUSHI ANABA
… and the joy of difficult simplicity
Calling Sushi Anaba extraordinary barely does it justice: It’s Denmark’s first and only restaurant adhering to the strict care and craftsmanship behind Japanese sushi. It’s headed by Mads Battefeld, the only European to ever work in a sushi restaurant in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza district. And it’s the story about how far you can take traditional Japanese sushi when you are thousands of miles from its birthplace.
Time slows down when you enter Sushi Anaba. This intimate 13-seat omakase restaurant is hidden away by the quay in Copenhagen’s newly built Northern Harbour district. In fact, it’s easy to miss: There’s no sign outside, and curtains cover the panoramic windows, concealing what’s inside.
Although the place is busy with preparations for the arrival of this evening’s guests, there’s a certain air of calmness here. The staff here move and speak softly and with precision. None of them more so than Mads Battefeld, the 33-year-old owner and head chef of Sushi Anaba.
“With sushi, there are no heavy sauces or excessive garnish to hide behind, and your guests are right across from you. It’s incredibly difficult.”
“I am in love with the simplicity of sushi: The perfect slicing of fish, getting the rice cooked and seasoned just right, and serving it with the right timing and temperature. Any mistake you might make is completely out in the open. There are no heavy sauces or excessive garnish to hide behind, and your guests are right across from you. It’s incredibly difficult,” he says.
And he would know. After all, he has worked in some of the most demanding of places for an aspiring sushi chef.
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With his resumé and experience as one of very few “outsiders” to work with Edomae sushi in its authentic setting, Mads Battefeld could likely have gone anywhere in Europe and had success. He chose to go back to Copenhagen, and provided the city with a one-of-a-kind experience that gives it a clear edge relative to many other cities in Northern Europe.
We also admire Mads Battefeld’s aspirations to balance work and life, while at the same time reaching for the pinnacle of quality and craftsmanship.
10 years in the making
Sushi Anaba is the culmination of Battefeld’s vision: Here, he and his team serve traditional Edomae sushi with Danish fish and seafood. And according to him, it’s also the place he wishes to retire from many years down the road. However, it also took him more than 10 years to get here.
He first discovered Asian food on a family trip to China, and Japanese food specifically on a culinary trip to Barcelona, where he visited the legendary fusion restaurant Dos Palillos. A native of Northern Jutland, he knew he wanted to work as a chef from an early age. He cut his teeth at a few classic French restaurants in Denmark before having the chance to volunteer at Dos Palillos for six months.
“Tasting something for the first time, where the flavor and texture is so far from what I grew up with, sets off fireworks in my mind. I had that experience with Japanese food for the first time back then,” he says of his time there.
Out of funds, he returned to Denmark for a six-year run at gastronomic stronghold Henne Kirkeby Kro, where he quickly became sous-chef.
The off seasons gave him the opportunity to visit Japan for a month every year. After a particularly disappointing visit to a high-profile European sushi restaurant, his mind was made up: Japan was the place to go to learn the craft the right way.
Worlds apart
He had a connection to a sushi restaurant, Hakkoku, in the Ginza district of Tokyo, where he was invited to trial for 14 days. After that, he was invited back by sushi master Hiroyuki Sato for a full year on a working holiday visa. The first three he trained at a restaurant in Toyama, about six hours northwest of Tokyo. The remaining nine months were spent at the master’s own newly opened restaurant in Ginza – as the first European to ever work in a sushi restaurant here.
If you ask Mads Battefeld, the sushi served in Japan and what is commonly known as sushi here are worlds apart in terms of taste, quality and texture.
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“What they call sushi in Denmark is just a slightly more expensive fast food. It may look superficially like real sushi, but it has as much in common with a pizza when you realize the care and craftsmanship that go into the real thing. The key thing is the rice, which is very often of subpar quality and prepared wrong, which brings the whole thing down, even more so than a mediocre piece of fish,” he says.
That’s also why the nigiri, when done wrong, is a particularly miserable experience. It’s a type of sushi with a generous amount of hand-molded rice, and the fish hand-pressed on top of it. Almost as if to take up the challenge, Nigiri is the only thing on the menu at Sushi Anaba (along with various snack servings). They cook rice up to three times during service hours to make it as fresh as possible. It’s served warm and seasoned with a sake-based vinegar, giving it a dark, brownish color.
Aside from the sushi, the experience of being at the bottom of the hierarchy in a Japanese sushi restaurant was also worlds apart from life in Denmark: 110-hour workweeks, shifts that start at 6 AM and end at 1 AM, and months of hard work with everything but the actual making of sushi. It wasn’t until his final three months that Mads Battefeld was allowed to prepare and assemble sushi for the restaurant regulars – at one-third of the price.
Keeping it real
Back in Denmark, Sushi Anaba has become something of a phenomenon. Mads Battefeld estimates that around 10-20 percent of his guests over a year are regulars, meaning they have visited at least a handful of times. A staggering number by industry standards, and testament to the quality of the place.
The number of press inquiries has also prompted him to work with an external PR representative, to free up time otherwise spent on answering emails. He has even been approached about doing a scaled-back version of his concept with more volume and at a lower price point. Something he is inherently skeptical about:
“I’m convinced it wouldn’t work. Not just because of the price of the fish and other ingredients, but because of the sheer manpower needed to hit this level of precision and quality. On top of that, I want to run a business which is also socially sustainable, meaning reasonable working hours and pay. Even if you scale it up, the cost will remain pretty much the same.”
Instead, he prefers to distinguish between “Western sushi” and the real thing as separate kitchens and styles.
Mads Battefeld’s best tip
We asked all interviewees for their best advice based on their own experiences in the industry. Here is Mads Battefeld’s tip for you, if you’re a restaurateur, chef or entrepreneur within the restaurant business:
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I didn’t open Sushi Anaba with the explicit ambition of being “the best” at making traditional sushi in Northern Europe or even Denmark. I did it to see how far I could push myself and how close I could get to my own vision of matching the quality and level of respect I saw in Japan. The awards and accolades are a happy by-product, of course.
