Ollebrod is a monk’s dish, born centuries ago of scarcity and unending winter darkness. It comes from Denmark in the time of Hamlet, and started out (or so legend has it) as stale scraps of rye bread revived with a dunk in hot beer — a way to make the loaves last longer.
But the version served at the Great Northern Food Hall is hardly austere. Rye bread is saturated with beer overnight, then cooked down to a malty mush, labeled porridge but closer to pudding. This is served cold with a snowcap of milk foam, interrupted by pale green patches of tarragon sugar, like the first breakthrough of spring grass. Shards of caramelized rye bread lend a note of sweet grit; sea buckthorn berries, nourished by fog along the Danish coast, burst sour on the tongue.
How could a humble bowl of porridge contain multitudes? How could it be such a thrill?
The food hall opened in June in Grand Central Terminal’s former waiting room, Vanderbilt Hall, a half-hidden demi-cathedral of Tennessee pink marble and gold chandeliers that turn everything the color of honey.
Although just around the corner from the ticket booths, the space — configured as a constellation of stands and counters, each with a specialty: porridge, baked goods, sandwiches, salads and smoothies — seems eerily removed from the city’s crush.
At most food halls, inconstancy is part of the charm. It’s hard to know which among the motley vendors is worthy, and this can give a meal the flair of a treasure hunt. Great Northern is more unified, coming from the mind of one man, the Danish restaurateur and magnate Claus Meyer, a founder of Noma in Copenhagen, and a prime mover in defining and championing New Nordic cuisine.
In core principles, the New Nordic creed is not so different from the prevailing American farm-to-table ethos: Cook according to climate and landscape; use local, seasonal ingredients; try not to deplete the earth.
Still, it’s astonishing to see it applied here at such a reasonable price point. There’s something utopian about the notion that even a hasty, inconsequential meal, gobbled on a train or at a desk, can be — should be — fresh and good.
So here is a sandwich layered with lamb belly ready to melt, its gaminess offset by sweet pea purée and pickled wild nettles. And squares of flatbread under a potent heap of red and white onions laced with Arctic thyme from Iceland, which the ancients believed cleansed the blood.
Open-faced sandwiches called smorrebrod are built on dark, tender rye. They only look dainty. Toppings come and go: lush beef tartare under fat teardrops of chive mayonnaise; pork belly sliced until nearly translucent, as thin as prosciutto but still creamy, with a whorled up-do of beet strands and crumbled cracklings.
One of the most comforting dishes I’ve eaten all year is a near-risotto, a textural collage of pearl and black barley, freekeh, sprouted wheat and rye, that tastes profoundly of roast chicken drippings — chicken soup revamped as porridge. It gains further richness from havgus cheese, its saline tinge drawn from the milk of cows that graze in the marshlands of southwest Denmark, breathing in the salt air.
Everything can be packed to go, in cunning cardboard boxes that unfold like origami. But it’s nice to linger under the chandeliers, at expanses of white oak surrounded by sculptural Arne Jacobsen chairs. (Mr. Meyer’s wife, Christina Meyer Bengtsson, who designed the space, wanted to honor the oak-leaf motifs scattered throughout Grand Central.) Somehow the tables are immaculate: I never saw a crumb, although I certainly left some.
In the back is a section with waiter service, where you may order from any of the hall’s stations or choose from a brief menu of small, more esoteric plates, like a pat of sunflower cream hidden beneath petals of yellow and red beets, or a wedge of cabbage with a dusting of roasted yeast. But a sandwich of spinach leaves glossed with smoked marrow is presented without preciousness, modest and wanton at once.
So as not to waste excess meat, Mr. Meyer and his executive chef, Edwyn Ferrari, also run a hot-dog stand. It’s rather inconveniently located in another corridor. (Theoretically, you could get there by taking a shortcut through Agern, Mr. Meyer’s high-end restaurant — but they’d rather you didn’t.)
The four hot dogs on offer are substantial, spanning seven to eight inches, and all excellent, if slightly unrecognizable from an American perspective. They come littered with the likes of pickled turnips and shattered pork skins, beet rémoulade and lingonberry preserves, and are clasped inside potato buns that don’t just squish; they bring their own flavor.
Not everything in the hall transports. On one visit, a smorrebrod crowned with a six-minute egg, slowly leaking its gold, was gorgeous and creamy, but needed salt. A wan salad with rock shrimp in a dressing of cream cheese smoked over hay had bafflingly little flavor.
No matter, for all meals end happily at the Meyers Bageri stand. You will want a frosnapper, a poppy-seed-flecked braid of dough and air, with inner reserves of almond paste. And a teboller, an unassuming sourdough bun strategically pocked with chocolate chips. And a beet-cassis muffin, underbaked so it’s gooey at the center. And a tart of sea buckthorn, shockingly astringent, the passion fruit of the north.
In recent years Mr. Meyer, a grandee of the culinary world, has devoted himself to social programs, running cooking schools in Danish prisons,Bolivian slums and, starting this fall, Brownsville, Brooklyn. He moved to New York with his wife and three daughters last fall, committing himself to the life of the city.
If there’s an occasional whiff of proselytizing here, that’s because Mr. Meyer is selling not just food, but a state of mind. A poster in the middle of the hall quietly promotes the Danish concept of hygge — literally, coziness, and more broadly a sense of connection to others and a delight in everyday pleasures.
In this Mr. Meyer seems to be a true believer. One morning I spotted him stirring porridge behind the counter, calmly, unhurriedly, as if he had nowhere else in the world to be.
