We've seen it happen in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, and Smithfield in London. Now those groovy butchers have done it again. Copenhagen's meat-processing quarter, Kodbyen (literally, "Meat City") is the hottest nightlife destination in town. It seems that wherever there are butchers, the young, the trendy, their avant-garde hairdressers and cutting-edge mixologists are keen to follow.
In Kodbyen, the influx of bars, galleries, clubs and restaurants is the result of a decision by the city council, which owns the 1930s warehouse complex, west of the central station.
Thanks to Denmark's pork industry, Kodbyen is said to have once boasted the highest density of butchers in Europe, but when most moved out of the city at the turn of this century, there were fears the area would become a ghost town. Then, in 2005, the council lighted on Manhattan's Meatpacking District as a model for the future.
"The idea is for Kodbyen to be open 24 hours a day. You'll come out of a cocktail bar in the middle of the night and bump into butchers as they're on their way to work," the director of the project told one newspaper at the time.
Siblings Jeppe and Larke Hein's Karriere restaurant, with its light installations by Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic-Danish artist famous for his Weather Project installation at London's Tate Modern, was the first to arrive a few years ago. Karriere is still packed at weekends, but the party has spread throughout Kodbyen.
Just across the way, Jolene is a bar so cool it has no sign. Filled with an artful selection of ramshackle furniture, it's run by two Icelandic women, both named Dora. Its first incarnation, in a residential neighbourhood, was so successful that the neighbours complained. Now it's free to make as much noise as the patrons like, with a mix of live music, DJs and dancing. With the three-storey, post-industrial, Berlin-style Kodboderne 18 nightclub, these three venues form the core of Kodbyen's nightlife scene.
And yes, the revellers do pass the butchers on their way out at the end of an evening's partying. "We're pretty much used to it all by now," a butcher on a morning break says. "It's nice to have some life here."
"It's really cool that the butchers come in," says Cecilie Bepler of the photo art gallery Dask. "We had an exhibition of food close-ups recently, and they loved that."
Gallery manager Gitte Madsen of V1 often gets the "meat scene" popping by to look at her modern art, shown in the walk-in freezers. "I had a butcher in this morning," she says. "She was, like, `Wow! I could never have imagined you could use this space like this'."
Dask and V1 are two of several recent arrivals keeping the momentum going in Kodbyen by day and night. Another is Mette Ohlendorff, of the art collective Art Rebels, a group of artists, designers, musicians and new media types with clients including Diesel and Hummel, who moved there last year from the city's previous coolest quarter, Islandsbrygge.
The spare, white rooms and massive plate windows of the old butchers' shops look perfect for galleries and bars, but all of Kodbyen is subject to a preservation order, which has raised some problems.
"We love the fact that we can make as much noise as we want, and we love this industrial space, but the problem is we can't change anything," says Ohlendorff.
"If one of the tiles falls off we have to replace it. And it's not as if they are special tiles."
And that's not the only stumbling block. With rents recently raised as much as 200 per cent, the butchers are slowly being driven out; there are now just eight left, where once there were 50, and there are fears that, without its indigenous population, there'll soon be metaphorical tumbleweed blowing through Kodbyen during the day.
For now, at least, if you visit Kodbyen by day there's still plenty of life. By lunchtime the labourers are sitting on upturned packing crates after a long morning shift, beneath the noble bas-relief of the cow that is Kodbyen's symbol. You can still see the butchers at work and, come lunchtime, the students from the city's largest cooking school, also based in Kodbyen, roam in gangs in their chefs' whites.
Kodbyen has also become the city's new restaurant hot spot, with several recent openings. The largest is BioMio, a 200-seater, self-service organic restaurant with an open kitchen run by Australian Peter George. All the ingredients used are organic or biodynamic, and low priced - at least for Copenhagen.
Kodbyen's Fiskebar, is a contemporary Scandinavian fish restaurant with raw concrete walls and hypnotic, jellyfish-filled cylindrical fish tanks. The man behind it is Anders Selmer, part of the team that started Copenhagen's Noma - voted third-best restaurant in the world this year.
The newest arrival, Pate Pate, takes its name from the fact that the wine bar used to be a liver pate factory. The owners, brothers Dan and Kenn Husted, opened the much-loved Bibendum a few years ago. Their latest, inspired in part by London's Momo, is next door to BioMio and spills out on to pavement tables, oblivious to the savoury - and sometimes unsavoury - aromas from their neighbours.
Guardian News & Media
Getting there: KLM (klm.com) flies from Hong Kong to Copenhagen via Amsterdam
