Where to stay

Britannia Centrally located in the centre of South-west Jutland’s main city, this hotel furnished in classic Danish style offers excellent value for money. Double room with breakfast from £93.
Torvegade 24, 6700 Esbjerg, 00 45 75 13 01 11, britannia.dk

Henne Kirkeby Kro An updated historic inn offering stylish modern decor. The main reason for staying here though, is to enjoy a long and memorable tasting menu from one of Denmark’s top chefs, Brit Paul Cunningham. Newly awarded a Michelin star. Double room including a truly bountiful breakfast from £180. Strandvejen 234, 6854 Henne, 00 45 75 25 54 00, hennekirkebykro.dk

Henne Molle A Badehotel Built by one of Denmark’s most famous lighting designers, this simple motel is notable for its fabulously secluded setting amid dunes close to the sea, and a decent dinner table. Double room with breakfast from £80. Hennemolleavej 6, Henne, 00 45 76 52 40 00, hennemoelleaa.dk

Hjerting Badehotel A charming 100-year-old seaside hotel situated right on the boardwalk in a village to the north of Esbjerg. It offers spectacular sea views and serves local fare imaginatively prepared. Double room from £120. Strandpromenaden 1, 6710 Esbjerg, 00 45 75 11 70 00, hjertingbadehotel.dk

Hotel Arnbjerg Simple, cosy hotel in a parkland setting an easy walk from the town of Varde. Double room with breakfast from £119. Arnbjerg Ale 2, 6800 Varde, 00 45 75 21 11 00, arnbjerg.dk

Hotel Sonderho Kro Exquisitely preserved 18th-century inn on the southern Fano shore owned by one of the area’s best chefs. Dinner, bed and breakfast from £130 per person. Kropladsen 11, Sonderho 6720 Fano, 00 45 75 16 40 09, sonderhokro.dk

Travel Information

South-west Jutland is three hours west of Copenhagen. Denmark’s currency is the kroner, and the country is one hour ahead of the UK. In June the average high temperature is 16C and the average low is 7C.

GETTING THERE
British Airways serve Billund, the nearest airport, daily from London and three times a week from Manchester. ba.com
Ryanair flies to Billund from London Stansted three times a week. Flying time is about one hour and 35 minutes. ryanair.com

RESOURCES
South West Denmark Tourist Board has plenty of options of things to do and places to go in South-west Jutland. sydvestjylland.com/en

FURTHER READING
Paulfood (£18.95, Grub Street) documents Paul Cunningham’s favourite recipes over nearly a decade of cooking in Denmark.
The Year of Living Danishly (£12.99, Icon Books) humorously charts British journalist Helen Russell’s experience of the region and its customs, after moving to Jutland with her husband.

CARBON COUNTING
To offset your emissions use the carbon calculator at climatecare.org which uses donations to support environmental projects around the world. Return flights from London produce 0.19 tonnes C02, meaning a cost to offset of £1.46.

Where to eat

Chhat Food and Winebar Deli owner Claus Skov, took the building next door in the resort of Blavand to serve simple brasserie food with a modern Scandinavian vibe. Pick the terrace if the weather is good. Three courses, £36. Blavandvej 35B, 6857 Blavand, 00 45 21 33 53 33, chhat.dk

Henne Kirkeby Kro Paul Cunningham’s restaurant has just been given a Michelin star, serving a stunning tasting menu. Seven courses, £123. Strandvejen 234, 6854 Henne, 00 45 75 25 54 00, hennekirkebykro.dk

Herregardskælderen Basement dining with wine matching in the ancient vaulted kitchen of an elegant manor house with an exquisite country garden. Three courses with wine pairings, £67. Sonderskovgardvej 2, 6650 Brorup, 00 45 75 38 38 66, sonderskov.dk

Kellers Badehotel & Spisehus Pretty seaside cafeteria that has a large terrace which is perfect for fair-weather dining. Don’t miss one of 20 varieties of schnapps, these come infused with everything from beach herbs to liquorice and brown sugar, ideal to accompany a predominantly fishy menu. Three courses with half a bottle of wine, £47. Strandvejen 48, 6720 Fano, 00 45 75 16 30 88, kellersbadehotel.dk

Rudbecks Ost & Deli Delicious sandwiches, cakes and ice cream laced with local seawater in a gorgeous family-run daytime café with attractive mid-century decor. Local craft beer is the thing to wash it all down. Lunch including local beer, £22. Hovedgaden 90, 6720 Fano, 00 45 24 93 85 05, rudbecks.dk

Strandpavilionen A charming restaurant overlooking the sea on the outskirts of Esbjerg which serves fresh, local seafood imaginatively presented. Three courses, £48. Strandpromenaden 1, 6710 Esbjerg, 00 45 75 11 70 00, hjertingbadehotel.dk

Food Glossary

Bakskuld

Smoked common dabs

Rullepolse

Rolled pressed pork belly with herbs, served cold

Smorrebrod

Traditional Danish open sandwich

Marineret sild

Pickled herring

Vadehavsreje

Local Wadden Sea brown shrimp

Vadehavslam

Salt marsh lamb

Fano laks

Salmon smoked over beech on Fano

Stenbidder rogn

Lumpfish roe

Stjerneskud

Traditional plaice and shrimp dish

Food and Travel Review

In the watery flatlands of South-west Jutland, the beach creeps up through the dunes and sea-grasses to deposit its bounty onto your dinner table. Sand-crabs are boiled in tea-kettles to make a sweet shell broth, beach-mint is used to perfume chocolate fondant, and there’s even seawater in the local ice cream.

Marine treasure is the glory of this remote region which sits at the confluence of two great wetlands where the Danish North Sea Nature Park abuts the Wadden Sea National Park. The latter, a Unesco World Heritage Site, includes not only a wild and wonderful coastline but also the handsome port of Esbjerg, a clutch of seaside villages built on the prosperity of the spice trade, and the delightful island of Fano, a hidden jewel of Nordic heritage.

Families in search of wild nature have made South-west Jutland Denmark’s most visited region after Copenhagen, but now they are being joined by food lovers and fans of the country’s 20th-century design heroes. The furniture designer Hans Wegner was born here and lighting innovator Poul Henningsen spent time here too – their iconic chairs and lamps enjoy an unlikely but utterly authentic seaside setting in restaurants and pubs, homes and hotels.

Tell Copenhagen hipsters that the most southwesterly corner of Denmark is a dining destination and they’ll raise an eyebrow; this nature wonderland may be the country’s second greatest attraction, but its bounty has remained relatively unsung. However, Denmark’s Michelin-starred chefs all bow in homage; Noma, Geranium and the rest have built their reputation on the fine ingredients native to Jutland.

‘This area has been our larder for decades, though we didn’t always know it,’ says chef Jakob Sullested of Sonderho Kro, an 18th-century inn whose previous owners imported from France items they had no idea were growing on their doorstep. ‘How those suppliers must have laughed at our ignorance!’ he adds wryly.

When Sullested took over nine years ago from the family who had owned the 14-bedroomed inn for generations, he proudly substituted a resolutely Nordic menu for the French cuisine that had been served in the past: ‘Ever since I arrived I’ve been passionate about our wonderful local products – the little crabs, the oysters, the sea-plants, wonderful lamb from our local breed of small black sheep. We don’t have pork on the island, so I don’t serve it.

‘As for the beach outside our door, I don’t just trawl it for seafood, I pick the plants to infuse in my home-made schnapps,’ he says, pointing to the enormous Kilner jars that are lined up atop a counter where fresh pancakes are temptingly piled high for breakfast alongside some home-made plum preserves.

Sonderho Kro, exquisitely authentic to its period with its wood panelling, rich, dark walls, and textiles in tiny floral prints, is the focal point of a gorgeously quaint and entirely thatched hamlet at the southern tip of Fano, a pretty spit of land with such a rich history it’s surprising that it remains such a well-kept secret. Just a ten-minute ferry ride from Esbjerg on the Danish mainland, this magical little isle was once the preserve of sea captains who sailed the world in search of treasure. They brought back exotic spices, plus clothes and jewellery for wives who often entertained lovers during their long absences. This is the explanation for the pairs of china Staffordshire dogs seen in virtually every window on the island. Back in the day, the dogs were placed facing inward to silently convey that it was safe to call; outward-facing dogs were a clear ‘stay away’ signal that the master was home from his travels.

The women of Fano still wear on special occasions the rich costumes assembled from a mixture of exotic and homegrown threads embellished with buttons of silver or locally washed-up amber. While the originals can be seen in the charming little island museum, jewellery and textile designer Gitta Foldberg, who has lived on Fano for 20 years, crafts contemporary takes on these textiles and buttons for her boutique opposite the museum: ‘There isn’t anyone from here who doesn’t own a bit of the past, something brought back by a sea captain or a new wife,’ she says of this distinctly bohemian island which is home to many artists. ‘The people are extremely open- minded, which makes them great to live with.’

Nordby, the pretty red-brick town with a feel of New England where the ferry arrives on the doorstep of the museum and Gitta’s emporium, is more urban but every bit as picturesque as sleepier Sonder, a hamlet of thatched cottages, and the beating hub of the island. The two are separated by a coastal road and a beach so broad and flat that many take to the wheel along the sands with legal blessing.

While Sonderho Kro is the place for leisurely, romantic dinners – this is where the aforementioned sand-crabs are cooked up into a sweet broth in a kettle ‘like I see people doing all the time on the beach,’ says Sullested – there are more casual daytime eats in Nordby. At Rudbecks Ost & Deli, Tilde, the talented daughter of organic farmers who switched to catering for the pleasure of showcasing local products, combines buttermilk with a touch of seawater to create a delectable ice cream with a true sense of place. She also bakes organic bread for foot-long smorrebrod (open sandwiches made with rye bread) topped with local bounty including bakskuld – traditional Danish sand dabs cured in the smokehouse across the strait – and churns her own butter.

Rudbecks is also where visitors can taste the fabulous biodynamic cheese made by Vadn Borg and his wife Hanne at the Kristiansande Dairy on the mainland. It’s named for the family farm Borg inherited from his grandparents; the couple were in the vanguard of Denmark’s artisanal cheese movement and among the first to go biodynamic.

Another fine showcase for local produce is Kellers Badehotel and Spisehus, where an equally big draw is the schnapps, infused with all manner of local berries, beach herbs and spices, to knock back with herring, locally-caught squid or island ham.

Both restaurants serve the fine craft beer of the Fano Bryghus, the unlikely fruition of a dream born in Rottingdean. ‘I lived in Sussex for 15 years working for American Express, but most enjoyed standing in for the landlord at my local pub while he was on holiday,’ says Claus Winther, who opened this exceptional brewery championed by Noma of Copenhagen, as well as by bars and restaurants throughout Scandinavia, in 2009.

‘I got into the real ale thing in Britain, so much more interesting than the industrial beers which were then all we had over here,’ he explains. ‘When we returned to Denmark I started visiting all the small craft breweries that started opening up in 2000, and a few years later we moved to the island, bought these premises from a brewery going out of business – and I’ve never worked so hard ever since.’

The Bryghus, rated in the top 50 of 13,000 world breweries in an international competition, is one of a small Danish consortium which has developed a native Nordic yeast: ‘We really wanted to bring a sense of local ingredients into our brewing, and are working on an alternative to the English and American hops we use at present.’ Perfectly complementing Claus’s award-winning IPA – he makes six year-round and two seasonal beers – is a smoky bivalve sizzling outside under the eagle eye of Jesper Danneberg Voss, Fano’s self- styled Oyster King. Voss runs weekly safaris for visitors prepared to don waders and shuck their catch on the beach, but also makes occasional appearances in the brewery yard to fire locally-caught specimens on a barbecue, deliciously caramelising their shells.

While Fano is a destination in itself, it would be a crime to come so close and miss the national parks and other high points of the mainland, in particular the almost deserted little hamlet of Henne, which has two distinct, but equally unmissable, hospitality offerings.

Nature-lovers in the know head four kilometres down a remote gravel track to Henne Molle A Badehotel, a simple hotel in the midst of wild nature, which is the only such dwelling designed by lighting architect Poul Henningsen, better known as PH. Now owned by a trade union whose members visit often, outsiders also get to benefit from its very low prices. While the place’s raison d’être is its proximity to dunes and the thrillingly broad, shining beach a few minutes’ walk along a scenic estuary, the uber-fresh local produce is also a draw, not to mention the visual pleasure of PH’s iconic light fittings, which hang throughout the split-level dining room. Ironically, Henningsen designed the room to be lit with candles when he designed the place in the Thirties – his fittings were brought in decades later as a tribute to the building’s heritage.

Although examples of Denmark’s famous mid-century design abound in Jutland, the owners of Henne Kirkeby Kro, now one of Denmark’s finest dining and sleeping destinations, were determined to create a thoroughly contemporary experience on the site of another 18th-century roadside inn. However dramatically, if minimistically, gorgeous the rooms, the real pull is Paul Cunningham, the British- born chef who has cooked in Denmark for 21 years. Long before Noma was invented (Cunningham was invited to launch the restaurant, but declined, recommending instead his one-time sous- chef Rene Redzepi), he earned a Michelin star for his food at The Paul, the restaurant in Copenhagen that he gave up in 2011 before decamping to the west of the country.

It’s a move he has never regretted: ‘This is where everything comes from – the best fish, the vegetables, the meat – all this is on Henne’s doorstep. We breed our own lamb, make our own honey and take all our inspiration from the kitchen garden, like a dish of nasturtium leaves we’re serving tonight wrapped in ham we’ve made ourselves. We make not only all our own charcuterie, nine different bread doughs every day, churn our own butter and are expanding our cheese- making to a second variety,’ he says proudly.

Cunningham revels in the new categories of comestibles which are evolving all the time to serve an increasingly discriminating local population. ‘Ten years ago Denmark didn’t even have an artisan cheese tradition, yet now we have excellent dairies, and where once there was only industrial beer we have great craft breweries. We even have a whisky distillery on our doorstep.’

Flying in the face of those flying the flag for New Nordic Cuisine, Cunningham chooses to weave his favourite flavours from around the world into his creations. Veal fillet is smoked with coffee as well as bone marrow, and the roast duck with local cherries is scented with five-spice. While other Scandinavian chefs fall over themselves to stick to only what grows around them, Cunningham is resolutely unapologetic: ‘I’m not a fan of the exclusively Nordic kitchen, and while I support local fishermen and butchers, I spice my kitchen with my travels,’ he explains. In that sense, he is merely following long-held local tradition. This westernmost tip of Denmark has always faced outward to the wider world, and has imported spices from afar for centuries. It’s the local ingredients which have expanded and improved over the past decade, along with the gastronomy, in the hands of an open-minded population which is prepared to combine them with a taste of the exotic.