Jatak

Jatak is a small restaurant on Rantzausgade in Copenhagen's Nørrebro neighbourhood, Denmark. Its Canadian chef and owner Jonathan Tam runs it with his partner Sarah Frilund, cooking Nordic ingredients with Cantonese and Taiwanese influences. The name is Danish for "yes, please".

Food & Wine places Jatak No. 10 in its Global Tastemakers 2025 list of the top 15 international restaurants. The magazine describes minimalist Danish cooking with "a decidedly Asian bend", a menu that keeps changing and a calm room of muted colours and natural materials that lets the food take centre stage.

Tam, born in Edmonton in 1986 to a Chinese-Vietnamese family, came to Copenhagen in 2007 as an intern at Noma and stayed three years, rising to chef de partie. He then spent a decade as head chef of Christian Puglisi's Relæ until it closed, and opened Jatak, his first restaurant, in 2022. Standout dishes include lobster tail with Sichuan pepper, a Cantonese classic remade with hyper-local produce, Norwegian scallop with roe, and aged wild sea bass with green citrus and fennel, cut using a traditional Korean technique. The Best Chef Awards named Tam a New Candidate in 2023.

Sources of this text: Food & Wine (Dotdash Meredith, New York) · kevinEats · All in the Industry (Apple Podcasts)