Alchemist Copenhagen will close for five months from December 2026, pausing its regular restaurant service while chef and founder Rasmus Munk and more than 100 employees work on a new version of the two-Michelin-starred restaurant. The period, called “Intermission”, will be dedicated to research, experimentation and redesigning the dining experience before Alchemist reopens in 2027.
The Copenhagen restaurant announced the plan on Thursday, saying that the five-month break will become part of a new way of operating. Instead of maintaining continuous service throughout most of the year, the entire team will remain employed and use the closure for creative development.
Why Alchemist Copenhagen is pausing service
Munk described the decision as an attempt to create more time for experimentation away from the demands of daily restaurant operations.
“It feels like the beginning of a new chapter. We are turning our entire daily routine upside down because there is still so much we want to explore. I am taking this step to create the time and space for both me and my team to keep challenging the boundaries of what a restaurant can be. For us, it will be a period of metamorphosis, in which we rebuild ourselves from within.”
Alchemist calls the pause “Intermission” and says the model is inspired partly by other creative fields, where periods without performances or public presentation are used to develop new work.
During the five months, the team plans to work on the restaurant’s menu, artistic installations and projections under its large dome. When regular service resumes, Alchemist says guests should encounter a substantially redesigned experience rather than simply a continuation of the previous season.
The restaurant will also organise behind-the-scenes tours for the first time during Intermission. Visitors will be able to see its art installations and planetarium-style dome, learn about the development of the restaurant and sample selected food and drinks from the previous season. A programme of additional events is expected to be announced later in the autumn.
A restaurant that has been fully booked since opening
The current Alchemist venue on Copenhagen’s Refshaleøen opened on 4 July 2019, according to the restaurant’s own documentation. It occupies a former welding hall at the historic B&W shipyard and has 52 seats for one sitting each evening.
The Michelin Guide awarded Alchemist two stars in 2020, when the restaurant entered the guide directly at the two-star level. It continues to hold two Michelin stars.
According to Alchemist, the restaurant has been fully booked since the current venue opened and has accumulated more than one million people on its waiting list. Munk told Danish media that this level of demand gives the restaurant room to experiment with a model that would be difficult for most establishments to adopt.
The decision therefore does not amount to a temporary shutdown caused by a lack of customers. Instead, Alchemist is deliberately reducing the number of months in which it serves regular dinners to create a recurring development period for its staff and concept.
November will be the last month in its current form
November 2026 will be the final month to experience the current version of Alchemist before the first Intermission begins. Reservations for November are due to be released on 21 September.
The restaurant says that when it returns in 2027, the menu, installations and visual projections will all have been reworked. The five-month pause is intended to become part of Alchemist’s operating model, with future Intermission periods providing time for further research and reinvention.
For Copenhagen’s internationally recognised restaurant scene, the experiment will also test whether a high-end restaurant with exceptional demand can treat creative development as a formal part of its annual calendar rather than something carried out alongside daily service.
