Hotel Nimb

Tivoli is a peculiarly Danish fun fair and is a delightful mix of the usual adrenaline junkie rides combined with sedate gardens, beautiful ponds, classical concert venues and some award winning restaurants (two of the restaurants in the Gardens have Michelin stars). Along one long wall of the park sits Nimb – a white Moorish palace complete with minarets and decorated with hundreds of fairy lights at night. Inside Nimb a painstaking renovation took place in 2007 to convert the tired old “Bazaar” into a luxury hotel containing two restaurants, a wine cellar and bar, dairy and 11 beautiful (and very expensive) rooms.

The rooms are decorated with a selection of colonial antiques and some bespoke furniture. Our room was large enough to skate around and had a real wood burning fire in one wall and a comfortable sofa and coffee table covered with books. We had a minimalist version of a four poster bed that was possibly the biggest I have ever had the privilege to sleep in. The bathroom was immense and featured an enormous shower with black limestone walls, and a free standing monumental bath tub as well as two separate sinks. The shower felt like Niagara but unfortunately flooded the floor each time we used it.

Our room also had windows overlooking Tivoli and we spent enjoyable hours watching the park goings on (and also watching all the tourists taking pictures of our building!) One evening there was a moving dance and puppet show that we watched from the window. On another occasion we enjoyed lying in bed and listening to the brass band rehearse. It has to be said that we did not appreciate the early morning rehearsal of a rock band on our last morning and one of our few criticisms of the hotel is that it is of course not exactly quiet being next door to Copenhagen’s most famous amusement park.

The entire scale of Nimb is massive. The upstairs bar is an enormous room and the renovation has only made the scale seem even more immense by painting the walls white and adding wooden floorboards and large scale but minimal art works. A truly enormous fireplace sits at one end of the room and a grand piano by the window seems dwarfed by its surroundings. This is a room for gavottes and dancing bands and hundreds of people and we found it rather soulless as a bar. We had a cup of tea and a whisky here one evening but didn’t stay long. Sitting here for breakfast felt a little like eating in a museum (and the low coffee tables made eating tricky as well).

The cellar downstairs had more character, with several long wooden tables and walls absolutely covered in bottles of wine that my companion positively drooled over. You can sit here and have a platter of tapas type food as you work your way through the wine list and we found the staff here to be friendly and chatty and generally the atmosphere a little more conducive to having fun.

There is another restaurant on the ground floor that we didn’t visit – and then, of course, the one Michelin star restaurant Herman which we very much enjoyed eating at on our second evening in Copenhagen.

If it is fun that you are after then Nimb does sit right on the edge of Tivoli gardens, and one of the real perks of being a guest here is that you get free entry to the park whenever you want. We took advantage of this on our first afternoon and spent hours enjoying the rides in uncharacteristic hot sunshine before visiting the hot dog stand outside the Railway station for a light dinner.

Excuse the digression but Danish hot dogs are a real national speciality and if you visit Denmark you really must go to your nearest “Pølse Vøgn” (Sausage Wagon) and order a “ristet hotdog”. Your hot dog “med det hele” (with the lot), will be given to you covered in pickled cucumber, with lashings of ketchup, mustard and remoulade (a sort of gherkin inspired sauce) and covered with crispy roast onions. You need to try one – trust me. And with a large beer sitting in the sun by the harbour of Nyhavn this meal is almost impossible to beat!

To return to the review at hand!

Nimb was a real experience. In my opinion the building is still adjusting to the massive face lift it has had and hopefully, with more use and as it becomes more popular with locals and tourists, the bars will fill and the old building will come alive once more. When we stayed it did feel a little like we were guests of a very absent Sultan left to our own devices in a massive and somewhat soulless palace. But the room was wonderful, the staff always friendly and the glimpses of Tivoli life mostly charming.