The island

A table that could only exist on Bornholm.

Bornholm

a small island held alone in the Baltic, far enough out to keep its own weather

We cook from one small island and refuse to look past its shoreline. The tide writes the first half of the menu and the meadow writes the rest. We preserve in summer so the winter table still tastes of the sea, we waste nothing the island worked to grow, and we let the long Baltic light do most of the seasoning.

Kadeau sits low against the rocks on the southern shore of Bornholm, a small island held alone in the Baltic. The cooking begins outside, in the salt wind and the dune grass, with whatever the island is willing to give that week. We gather along the strand at first light, reading the driftwood line for what the sea has left and the meadow for what has just come up. The dunes give sea kale and beach herbs, the woods give berries and bark, the fishing boats give what swam past in the night. By evening the room holds a single long meal, plated on pale stone the colour of bleached bone, built only from the island and the day around it.

First light over the dune and the southern shore

We begin on the strand, while the boats are still out.

The island only

We cook from Bornholm and stop at the shoreline. If it does not grow, swim, or wash up here, it does not reach the plate.

Keep the summer

We preserve at the height of each season so the winter room still tastes of warm strand and bright meadow.

Read the tide

The morning walk and the tide line set the menu before we do, and we follow what the island offers that week.

Mads Holmgaard grew up on Bornholm, between a smokehouse and a stretch of windbent pine, and learned the strand long before he learned a kitchen.

After years cooking on the mainland he came back to the island to build a table that could only exist here. His cooking follows the foraging year without arguing with it. Each plate is meant to read like a short note from a single week on the island, the salt of the strand, the green of the dunes, the dark sweetness of the late summer woods, set down with as little between the guest and the place as possible.

Mads Holmgaard

Head Chef and Partner

A slow path back to the shore.

2012

A small kitchen opens behind the dunes on the southern shore of Bornholm.

2016

The first summer pantry is built to carry the island into winter.

2020

Daily foraging along the strand becomes the start of every menu.

Now

One long island meal, served to a room of twenty four seats.

The few who walk the strand each morning.