An All-Day Nordic Restaurant and Bakery Opens in Brooklyn

In 2019, when Sebastian Perez and Sebastian Bangsgaard opened Smør, a Scandinavian all-day cafe, in the East Village, they were onto something. A Noma fetish had long swept the city, and Great Northern Food Hall had found a footing in Grand Central, but they were eager to do something that felt more true to their experience growing up in Denmark. They wanted to open a casual, Downtown New York take on the Copenhagen lunch spots that turn into wine bars without the tweezer fine-dining pretension. Five years later, now with a cafe and bakery in the East Village, the team is building on that vision by opening a larger, full-service restaurant version of Smør at 26 Putnam Avenue, at Downing Street, in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, on Wednesday, October 16.

The Sebastians, as the two Danes are often called, met while working at a now-closed Manhattan restaurant called the Copenhagen almost a decade ago. They kept in touch over the years before teaming up on their own. Smør — which takes its name from smørrebrød, Danish open-faced sandwiches — began in earnest as a catering gig.

“It was very makeshift, we didn’t have much sales but we had a few recurring customers,” says Perez. Eventually, they signed on a tiny East Village storefront just under 500 square feet. “We had no money,” they say in unison. A $40,000 loan from an uncle kicked them off (pennies in the world of restaurant build-outs), transforming a whitebox office into an order-at-the-counter restaurant, outfitted with some Ikea furniture.

Paul Quitoriano/Smør

Paul Quitoriano/Smør

Right in the first year, when they were about to get the business off its feet, COVID hit. It turned out to not be all bad — people in the East Village were looking for a casual spot for stay-at-home lunches. A regular connected them to another storefront on the block, a former architecture studio that had just shut down, and the duo decided to take a leap and expand their small floor plan again with a neighboring bakery. They realized that instead of sourcing bread from a bakery like She Wolf, they could actually lower their costs if they baked in-house. “It was a bunch of trial and error,” says Bangsgaard. “We went through like five to ten cardamom versions,” Perez chimes in.

Their new Brooklyn space is much larger, with a full, all-electric kitchen (a hack, they said, to quell their fears of the usual gas hook-up waiting game), and feels like a more mature 2.0 version of the business. It’s airy, with a skylight and courtyard out back, and, of course, thematically sleek and minimalist, but it does a good job of evoking spots like Villette, a canteen and bar in Copenhagen where people can linger and have reason to come back throughout the week. Increasingly, New York has caught onto the all-day cafe trend in the past five years. “A lot of the bakeries in Denmark do dinner as well and operate as these hybrid places,” says Perez. “It’s very European to be out all day bouncing from place to place,” adds Bangsgaard.

Paul Quitoriano/Smør

By day in Clinton Hill, there will be a to-go bakery counter, with cardamom buns, bread loaves, and other pastries from their head baker Rowan Gill, a Bien Cuit alum. It will also offer a full-service daytime menu with egg sandwiches, pickled herring smørrebrød, Danish pancakes with lemon zest, and a snowpea carrot salad with rye crunch. By night, it’s a full-on restaurant (reservations can be made) and wine bar, serving fluke crudo, a Norwegian shrimp salad with roe and lemon on sourdough, sesame-crusted schnitzel, and sausage with apple chutney. Rice pudding is for dessert.

On both breakfast and dinner menus, there are Danish-style hot dogs — a nod to the hot dog stands in Copenhagen — with curry ketchup or remoulade. Overall, it’s a few things from their Manhattan operations, but much of it is exclusive to Clinton Hill — and a lot more is possible with their fully built-out kitchen.

In addition to wine and beer, there will be non-alcoholic options, including Danish sodas with flavors like elderflower or lingonberry.

The menu reflects their upbringing. “Besides the fact that were both born in Copenhagen and named Sebastian, I’m half Portuguese, and he’s also Spanish and Brazilian,” says Bangsgaard of his partner. “We talk about this all the time, what does being Danish mean in terms of how we were brought up with food — we want Smør to reflect all parts of that, maybe a bit atypical, but also nowadays you’d call it modern, the mix of what today’s Danish culture even is.”

Paul Quitoriano/Smør