Frank

A French Bistro Playing a Different Game

Grønnegade sits a short walk from the grand sweep of Kongens Nytorv, one of Copenhagen's oldest and largest squares, and a stone's throw from the corridors of Hotel d'Angleterre. The immediate neighbourhood carries more historical weight than neighbourhood edge — this is central Copenhagen, with all the foot traffic and tourist familiarity that implies. Against that backdrop, a small French wine bistro operating at a €€ price point with multiple consecutive Star Wine List number-one rankings is worth pausing over.

Copenhagen's dining conversation defaults quickly to the €€€€ tier: the three-Michelin-star rooms, the tasting menus running into the hundreds of euros per head, the experiential formats that treat dinner as theatre. Alouette, formel B, and texture represent parts of that more ambitious register. Frank sits at a different price tier entirely, and the awards record suggests that gap is a feature, not a compromise.

What the Awards Record Actually Says

A Michelin Plate in 2024 signals that the Guide's inspectors consider the food worth seeking out — below a star, but above the noise of the broader Copenhagen restaurant count. More telling is the Star Wine List record: number one in 2020, number one again in 2023 (alongside a number two in the same year), and number one once more in 2025. That kind of sustained recognition from a program that evaluates cellar depth, list construction, value, and by-the-glass range is not the product of a single good vintage or a clever marketing push. It points to a wine program being run with consistent seriousness over several years.

Star Wine List evaluations weight accessibility alongside quality , a list that makes serious wine available at prices that don't require separate financial planning scores better than one that is simply expensive and impressive. For a bistro operating at a €€ price point, this creates an unusual situation: the wine program is likely outperforming the price tier by a measurable margin. Comparable wine-forward bistro formats across Paris, Lyon, or Amsterdam rarely accumulate this kind of consecutive top-tier recognition while remaining in the mid-price bracket.

The 2025 inclusion in Opinionated About Dining's Casual in Europe list adds another dimension. OAD's casual category covers restaurants that deliver serious cooking without formal ceremony , the kind of places critics eat on their own time, without a notebook. Being listed there places Frank in a European peer set that includes some of the continent's most respected neighbourhood bistros and wine bars, not just its Scandinavian competition.

The Bistro Format in a New Nordic Context

Copenhagen's dining identity since the mid-2000s has been shaped overwhelmingly by New Nordic's influence , fermentation, foraged ingredients, hyper-local sourcing, and a kitchen philosophy that self-consciously turned away from classical French traditions. That shift produced some of the world's most closely watched restaurants, including the three-Michelin-star rooms at Geranium and the now-closed Noma. It also created space for a counter-current: French-leaning bistros and wine-focused rooms that offer something the New Nordic format rarely does, which is a familiar, convivial register at a sustainable price point.

Frank's positioning as a French wine bistro in this context is less nostalgic than it might appear elsewhere. In a city where the tasting menu format and the €€€€ price bracket have become near-synonymous with serious dining, a small room built around French wine and bistro cooking occupies a genuine gap. Venues like Abigail & Co and Anarki represent Copenhagen's broader move toward casual, wine-led formats, but Frank's awards record puts it in a distinct position within that emerging cohort.

Chef Rasmus Lund Jonasson leads the kitchen. The bistro format means the kitchen's output is calibrated for repeat visits and informal dining rather than the one-off tasting-menu occasion , a different set of demands than those placed on the city's starred kitchens, and one that the Michelin Plate and OAD Casual listing suggest are being met at a level above the price bracket's average.

Value at This Price Point

Copenhagen is an expensive city. Food costs, alcohol tax, and service charges mean that even mid-market dining is rarely cheap by international comparison. The €€ designation at Frank places it in a tier where expectations are typically modest , a functional meal, a passable wine list, and efficient service. The combination of a Michelin Plate, five years of consecutive Star Wine List top-two rankings, and an OAD Casual Europe listing at that price tier constitutes a significant value anomaly by the standards of any European capital.

For visitors who have already allocated budget to one of Copenhagen's larger-ticket experiences , or those building an itinerary that includes Denmark's broader dining landscape, from Jordnær in Gentofte to Frederikshøj in Aarhus, Henne Kirkeby Kro in Henne, Alimentum in Aalborg, ARO in Odense, or Domæne in Herning , Frank fits naturally as the meal where the wine program and kitchen quality exceed the cost of the evening. The Google rating of 4.7 across 448 reviews reinforces a consistency that single-visit award recognition doesn't always capture.

Restaurants at this price point that hold sustained wine list recognition of Frank's calibre tend to attract a particular kind of regular: wine professionals, off-duty cooks, and the kind of traveller who evaluates a city's dining depth by what's available between the flagship rooms. In Copenhagen, where visitors often plan their trips around the €€€€ tier, Frank operates in the space those visitors leave behind when they book the tasting menu and need somewhere serious for the other nights. For a comparable register of wine-forward modern cooking from the Nordic region, Frantzén in Stockholm and FZN by Björn Frantzén in Dubai operate at a considerably higher price tier, which underlines how far Frank stretches its price bracket.

For a complete picture of what Copenhagen offers across price points and formats, see our full Copenhagen restaurants guide. If you're planning the wider trip, our Copenhagen hotels guide, bars guide, wineries guide, and experiences guide cover the rest of the city's offering.