Tony’s, Havnegade 47, 1058 Copenhagen, Denmark

An irreverent industrialisation of the Nonna's drive to feed

Between panicked bouts of smashing Alt+F4 when The Editor would walk into our bedroom or angling my phone screen away from her when hanging out on the sofa, weeks of secretly planning a gluttonous campaign to Copenhagen for her birthday resembled the most entry-level attempt at infidelity.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, and after our first meal at Barabba, it felt like being the first one out of the landing craft only to sprain your ankle immediately. I’d also failed to glean from all my research that Denmark’s restaurants largely hibernate for much of January.

Luckily, The Editor is a Pathfinder; relentlessly practical, able to be dropped into any theatre and find targets of opportunity. Faced with another closed restaurant despite opening hours to the contrary and low blood sugar drawing in the Fog of War, she finds Tony’s, mercifully around the corner.

Inspired by the Italian restaurant in Lady and the Tramp, Tony’s prides itself on a ‘family-style’ experience with a ‘feasting option’ featuring ten plates, picked at the kitchen’s discretion. Rather than trying to dazzle you with trick shots from bespoke arsenal, Tony’s has invested time on the range working to nail the fundamentals of marksmanship, ensuring it can deliver accurate, sustained fire using standard rounds. Not without the occasional stray, however.

One of the Italian battle groups in a vast culinary army under the company command of Madklubben Restaurants, Tony’s makes no secret that it’s here to serve at volume and speed. Triple-stacked rows of cutlery-mounted plates and glasses gleam on the peripheries, ready for deployment.

Spying vitello tonnato, I plead with the waitress for it to be one of the courses, acknowledging my deviation from The Formula. “I’ll ask and hope for you”, she says, as I imagine tuts and eye rolls in the kitchen.

Formations of plates begin to settle in for their attack runs to our table. Although slightly under-proved, the focaccia sparkles with salt flakes and grassy olive oil, wreathed with fistfuls of rosemary.

A bowlful of stracciatella, heavily freckled with Espelette pepper, is adorned with an unfurling of lightly pickled pumpkin and a spill of its toasted seeds. Served with a gradually sinking spoon, the implication is to consider this less a course and more a condiment. This, as they say, is what I’m talking about.

Slices of perfectly serviceable coppa, with marbling of refracted light in gory waters, are joined with green olives that, like a delinquent teen, have been destoned with a brief smack. Fat-dappled wild boar salami has a black truffle-grade funk, finished with a sprig of fresh basil; the sort of thing Rick Stein would do to remind you (or himself) that he got the recipe from Italy. The next salvo soon arrives, with a beaming smile from the waitress.

“You have been blessed”, she says, which isn’t something I regularly hear from anyone. Avoiding litigation by calling it ‘tuna creme’, the vitello tonnato is really an emulsified tuna mayo surrounded by a ruff of rosy veal, scattered with fried capers. By definition, it’s not the best, but here, that’s sort of the point.

Despite Tony’s pride in seasonality, I have no idea where it gets fresh figs in January. Thick slices weigh down a drey of perky rocket laced with a gorgonzola dressing, strewn with chives and roasted pine nuts, concealing honeyed pancetta lardons. It’s the sort of thing Pret’s R&D team would come up with if told to ‘blue sky’ a salad.

There’s something panicked about roasted cauliflower on a menu, as if inadvertently betraying a prioritisation for meat. Whilst not the strongest dish, Tony’s has put some effort into swerving this; a hulking motte of cauliflower is plunged into a bailey of ricotta under a shale of toasted crushed almonds and a scrim of sparky gremolata. The most alluring part is a moat of verdant olive oil—the sort you might imagine King Charles insists on servicing his Aston Martin with.

Due to Tony’s industrialisation of The Nonna and a fairly varied menu, you might expect anything labour and time-intensive like ragù to be first among the casualities on an armchair general’s spreadsheet. Instead, it’s been promoted.

Fresh rigatoni, warped to suggest being the last few handfuls at the bottom of a huge vat, clings with brawny, supple beef ragù of a depth only achieved by giving it the doting it deserves. A hefty splodge of stracciatella, presumably drawn from a portal in the kitchen somewhere, finishes the dish rather than the more typical drifts of hard cheese; the last few bites are a swirl of Big Lasagne Energy.

There’s a corniness to the course of two fat meatballs, the type you’d expect to see in those bleary images on laminated menus designed to appease the British tourists in Benidorm. Teeming with roughly chopped garlic, it’s that sweet spot of being loosely-hewn enough to take on sauce but close enough to carve with the side of a fork.

Underselling the dessert of ‘apple, cinnamon and vanilla’ is most likely a way for the kitchen to improvise, adapt and overcome; a noncommittal way to give the gist without dictating form. Chunks of caramelised apples are elevated from their duffle coat depths with fresh thyme, under a deluge of vanilla cream, thatched with crisp Cinnamon Graham-like pastry shreds.

Biscoff crumbs fill the gaps as if, whilst lamenting the lack of extra crunch, chef found a pack lurking in the cupboards and duly smashed them up for a laugh. They could’ve called it a ‘deconstructed strudel’, but as you might’ve twigged, it’s not quite Tony’s style.

Meaning anything from ‘perfect’ to ‘good’ to simply ‘okay,’ there’s a coded humility in Tony’s usage of this as a logo—an irreverent managing of expectations that both absolves and gloats. It’s a true summation of the Tony’s experience.

This in-built self-esteem reminds me of London’s Brutto, Italian for ‘ugly’, abiding by a mantra of ‘not fancy, don’t expect too much.’ Where this sentiment and the industrial-scale, quasi-nationalistic operation found in Ikea’s food halls intersect, is Tony’s.

In a world where the Small Plates Racket™ and Taster Menus™ make cynical attempts on our appetite and intelligence, the apparent success of Tony’s is arguably a byproduct of so many falling short. You might decry conglomerates, but sometimes, hunger is best defeated with conventional armies, not artisan forces.