The Lemon in Copenhagen Meredith Leigh

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” — Albert Camus

I am a nervous person, and so I almost didn’t go. It was my first day in a foreign city, my lodging was canceled as I navigated the airport, and so I wandered the streets of Copenhagen with a huge pack on my back trying to understand the public transportation, standing dopily in the bike lane, which I learned expediently that one does not do in Copenhagen. Five days later, I would be sketching the clever layout of the streets into my journal and texting my 13-year-old stepdaughter about the incredible public transit here, and the autonomy it notably provides to Danish teens. But for the moment, I was sweating, lost, and unglued. When I finally found my last-minute apartment rental after delaying my new hostess dreadfully, I collapsed on the unembellished sofa and thought I might never leave it. Embarrassed, I wondered if my entire stay in Copenhagen would be spent in this small, orderly space that might easily be a bedroom showcase nestled within an IKEA store. It started to rain.

But as I trolled the Rejseplanen, the magical Danish transportation app that allows you to type in your location and then shows you the timetables and modes of transit that will allow you to get there expediently, I began to loosen. Looking back, I think what hoisted me into my raincoat and out the door for the dinner reservation I had made almost a year prior was not the promise of food or ambience, but a healthy American skepticism about whether a bus and a train would actually materialize as this mystical app promised, if I just walked the two blocks to the conveniently located corner bus station. Boots on, hood up, I went out into the dusk and the rain.

Fifteen minutes later, rattled but amazed at my travel success, I stepped off of the metro at Kongens Nytorv, and wandered about the square trying to gain my above-ground bearings. I called the restaurant 18 to announce my tardiness. Wandering further in the wrong direction, my nervousness and self-doubt mounted. I stupidly circled buildings, in a delirious pattern that I now laugh at with gusto. Literally, when you step off of the metro at Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen, Denmark, you can see the restaurant Geist from the station. My disheveled, wide-open, travel-weary idiocy had gotten the better of me. Eventually I arrived, slightly damp, wearing an odd uniform of strappy silk overalls and rubber boots, and took myself out to dinner. Geist is all grays and slate hues, with scrambled geometry. Round tables, an angular bar with square chairs, cylindrical poles, giant arching windows. My intimidation soared. I sat at the bar, flanked by perfectly comfortable regular people and their regular wellbred companions. As their conversation flowed, I was the silent imposter creature, with bare rain-speckled shoulders and messy hair, opening the menu, my aura of isolation slowly thrilling me. No longer technically lost, as I had been all day, I had no idea where I was. I don’t remember what I ordered, but the “fuck it” came easily with the wine, and the coffee came with cotton candy, huge and cloud-like on the bar before me. I laughed out loud, easily, finally. But the thing that brought me back to earth was a lemon. The lemon is what I will always remember. Dining alone is a game for me. At a Michelin star restaurant it is like a personal tournament, especially for someone who lives within the food industry. Actually, maybe it’s only this way for someone who lives within the food industry who is decidedly non-upper class, who finds herself drawn away from her own profession by many of its airs, and thus is quietly engaged, perennially, in a hopeful search for it’s true heartbeat. Naturally, I became most interested in what was happening in the kitchen, which is open, and serious. A young woman appeared to be staging, her movement— repetitive circles between stations with every move watched by the chef—was like an ice dance. I imagined

thin pirouetting cuts in the restaurant’s floor. Amidst the gray surfaces, ceilings and walls, all the activity of the kitchen was amplified and illuminated, with the staff in white starched shirts and aprons to match the paint colors. Spotlighted. Then suddenly, one of the young chefs whom I hadn’t been watching approached a bench that faced me, though some distance down the bar. Firmly grasping a lemon, he bestowed it’s zest most efficiently over a plated dish, expediently, solemnly, calmly. Something about that lemon— the rapid rasp, the neon dust, the quotidian ephemera of the action, the cook turning away as nonchalantly as if he had just flushed a toilet, moving onto another task… I didn’t recognize the significance of it right at the moment, but I recognize it now. Now, Geist is indefinitely closed, as are many restaurants all over the world. The famous and the damned (and sometimes both), they are all shuttered in the strange and mysterious time of COVID. I find myself daydreaming in memories of dining out, and strangely this one is the one that has set softly within me. It was the first image that my brain manifested as one of my bewildered children lamented in the early stages of lockdown that all we seem to be doing is waiting. What are we waiting for? she asked. A tremendous question. I found myself telling her about the lemon, as if to say: we are waiting for nothing. Or, we are waiting for everything that seemed like nothing before. As I was rambling, I described the lemon by saying something about how in that moment, it had unexpectedly epitomized comfort. That in a way, I had seen myself in the lemon. The everyday, awkward lady hidden shyly yet somehow safely. Not at all out of place in a bustling venue of sociableness and sophistication. After all, regardless of whether we find our persona in a restaurant, a good one reminds us of our social self, no matter where we fall on the spectrum. And that is the essence of hospitality, isn’t it? The thing we really miss is the sense that there is a place for us here, whoever the hell we are. Come in, sit down, you can see and feel and hear it, you can taste it for yourself. It goes without saying that the simultaneous insignificance and utter professionalism of the lemon hits just as hard. I can barely imagine anyone would zest a lemon that way outside of the unalloyed spotlight of the Geist kitchen on a rainy night. But here was a man at work, on an extraordinarily ordinary day, performing this singular yet oh so mundane thing. A thing he and I happily took for granted at the moment. Now it emerges as a reminder that life moves in unexpected ways, and that the future is just as unpredictable now as it has ever been. In the great covid pause, I find myself terribly ambivalent about the restaurant situation. Some of the essays and social media appeals are hopelessly elitist, reeking of the terror of a threatened personal brand. And in this way, restaurants are important for a host of reasons that matter to just some people. But the lemon reminds us that there is at least one reason that matters to everyone: Restaurants can, if successful, help us remember and understand ourselves as human animals in a real world. And we miss them now not just for the food, the wine, the atmosphere, and the company, but also as bastions of our very social existence, our human experience, in a time of social destitution and confusion. I have zested at least ten thousand lemons in my culinary life. Since my trip to Copenhagen I have not zested a single one without thinking of that moment at Geist. I told the sad child: you just never know. It may be something you’ve seen a zillion times that someday suddenly thrills you. What I didn’t say is that I’ve been wanting to get to the bottom of that lemon moment for years. I think she understood. She is an artist, after all.

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