It is not unreasonable to approach Alchemist with dread. The very doors of Copenhagen’s new restaurant are meant to be imposing—more than two tons of hand-sculpted bronze pointedly reminiscent of Rodin’s Gates of Hell that open as portentously as if Satan himself were waiting on the other side. Nor is its chef’s reputation any less daunting: Rasmus Munk is the guy who, in the restaurant’s previous incarnation, served a blood and cherry sauce in an IV bag, and another dish fashioned to look like a used ashtray. But it’s the premise of this incarnation that arouses so many misgivings: a breathtakingly expensive, three-story space that, with its several rooms, 50 courses, and at least one dancer clad in LED lights and bearing rainbow-colored seahorse popsicles, promises an experience rather than mere dinner. And just when you thought molecular gastronomy was dead.

This is a restaurant that gives new meaning to the phrase “over the top.” Located in the former set-building workshop of the Royal Danish Theatre, it sprawls across 22,000 square feet and culminates beneath the kind of dome most of us first encounter on a school field trip to the planetarium. It employs 30 cooks for the 40 guests who will dine each night, along with a handful of costumed actors and a staff dramaturge, hired to imbue the four-plus-hour meal with classical theater’s narrative arc (albeit in five acts rather than a standard three). The price comes to about $600 for diners who opt for the cheapest wine pairing. The cost of the buildout, handily underwritten by Saxo Bank co-founder Lars Seier Christensen, came to $15 million, a full-ish 10 times over its original budget, according to Munk.

Alchemist flies smack in the face of the naturalistic, terroir-based cooking most closely associated with this part of the world (and now being practiced with renewed, mold-addled vigor at the new Noma just down the road). It is the kind of place to build both menu and decor around an annually changing theme—diversity for its debut—and that, without a shred of irony, can describe itself as inspired by both Aristotle and Brecht, and as “a parallel journey through...unique physical spaces as well as through your own senses.” It is at once painfully earnest—Munk is determined to use the restaurant to raise awareness about social issues that matter to him—and, thanks to a price tag only an oligarch could love, nosebleed-inducingly elitist. By any reasonable standard, it should collapse beneath the weight of its 10,000-bottle wine cellar and its own pretensions.

And yet, Alchemist is magical.

Partly that’s because the place really is unlike any other. “I want our guests to feel like they’ve left reality behind,” Munk told me a few days before the opening, and in that, he has been overwhelmingly successful. Other restaurants, like Albert Adrià’s wonderful Enigma, in Barcelona, shuffle diners from place to place over the course of the meal, and others, like Ultraviolet in Shanghai, incorporate sound and light installations into their dining rooms. But at Alchemist the trajectory feels more dreamlike, and the rooms themselves are intended to be more integral to the experience. Once through the yawning portal, for example, guests find themselves in the New York City room, where the walls are splashed with graffiti commissioned from Japanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist Lady Aiko, the granite comes from the same source as Central Park’s, and Fifth Avenue’s traffic bleats from the speakers—all this in the name of setting the scene for that diversity theme. Doors appear and open as if by magic, and lead to a swank lounge that overlooks the towering, 13-meter wine cellar on one side and a futuristic test kitchen on the other. There, chefs conjure dishes like the technically marvelous “omelet”—Alchemist is also one of those places that requires a heavy deployment of air quotes—in which the actual membrane of an egg yolk, dehydrated and blanched a few times, enshrouds a buttery, creamy filling of Comté cheese and egg. Or “Greed,” which looks like frozen cotton candy and tastes of pine and green apple, though I’m not entirely sure how I know that since, through some culinary sleight of hand, it disappears as you try to eat it.

And all that is just a prelude to the main event. The planetarium dome, underneath which the better part of dinner takes place, is an astonishing space, ethereal and elegant in equal measure. Overhead, jellyfish morph into the northern lights, and sparks from a bonfire cast their luminescence on silvery tables that face center and wind around the circular room. Along one edge runs a shadow wall behind which the kitchen works in silhouette. This is dinner with a show, and then some.

And the food? Much of it inspires wonder: A clear tomato water, tasting purely of summer, is transformed, disorientingly, into a snowball, thanks to cryogenic freezers. Thin slices of Ibérico ham are served on an impossibly fragile “bread” made of potato starch that has the layers (all 50 of them) of a croissant. Lamb brain, brushed red with a cherry glaze, is poached and sliced surgically in front of the diner. Pigeon breast gets an extra punch of funkiness from a beeswax cure, and is served, very literally in the well-hung Spanish style, dangling from its feathered head.

Subtle these messages are not, and that’s before Alchemist reaches the apotheosis of on-the-nose in the LGBTQ room (that theme again) that leads from the dome. There, a confusion of multicolored neon and atonal sounds is meant to impart to diners the sense of exclusion that gender nonconformists might feel, until that LED-clad, seahorse-popsicle-wielding dancer leads them through the relief of “coming out”—although in this case what they come out into is the service kitchen they have watched in silhouette all evening. Beyond lies another plush lounge with coffee and cocktails (and should diners be so inclined, a tea ceremony overseen by a master from Yunnan, China).

It’s hard to know what to make of it all, especially because Munk is neither the raging narcissist nor the clueless naïf one might expect to be behind such a venture. A cherubic 28-year-old from Denmark’s westernmost region of Jutland, he seems utterly unfamiliar with the concept of cynicism. He knows that he does not cook in a way that is particularly in vogue at the moment. He understands that others might find his new restaurant ostentatious or heavy-handed or simply bizarre. And he is aware of the, um, paradox in a privileged white European who serves expensive food to even more privileged Europeans (mostly) trying to make a point about diversity and inclusion. He just chooses to do what he thinks is best anyway.

As research for that water-filter dish, for example, Munk traveled to rural Kenya, visiting two schools where, prior to the filter’s arrival, the children spent hours each day collecting and hauling water that frequently made them sick anyway. Photos of the pale, blond Viking posing among hundreds of Kakamega children in their matching school uniforms are frankly cringe-inducing. And to none so much as Munk himself. “Yeah, I know how it looks,” he said at the time. “But does that mean I shouldn’t do anything if I can?” Although he had arrived in Kenya thinking that he would simply donate proceeds from the LifeStraw-inspired dish (as he had done with the ashtray dish for organizations fighting lung cancer), he left the country awed by the magnitude of the problem and convinced he needed to do more. And sure enough, he has since enlisted the help of bottled-water company Aqua d’Or to subsidize the purchase and installation of more filters and start a foundation that will investigate more effective water-purification means in the area.

Yet for all of the provocations, Munk takes an old-school approach to service: More than anything, he wants his guests to feel well cared for, and none of the more political aspects of a meal at Alchemist are intended as pressure. Rather, he sees what he does as raising questions. He chose Alchemist’s first theme because he—along with the board of chefs and artists that advises him on creative matters—believes that questions of inclusion and diversity demand attention right now. “You have elections in Denmark, anti-immigrant parties, Trump, the rise of the far right, the border with Mexico…” he trails off. “As chefs, we have so much power these days. If you have that much attention on you, I think you have a responsibility to talk about more than just what’s on the plate.” With three days to go until the opening, Alchemist was hosting a group of asylum seekers being held at a nearby detention center. Since the women housed there are forbidden from preparing their own food, Munk was inviting them over just to cook.

All this comes at a cost, and not just the $15 million investment. Restaurant openings are always stressful, but few are as wearing as this one has been. Nearly every element of Alchemist—from the spidery papercuttings that serve as menus to the set-in countertop screen that looks like something Captain Kirk might have used to steer the Enterprise but is in fact used to expedite orders—has about a zillion things that could go wrong, and many of them did. The ventilation that keeps the former warehouse from turning into a tinder box didn’t work; the online server necessary for everything from firing orders to projecting images broke down. The 220 hammered leaves that comprise the upstairs chandeliers and look like inverted waterlilies weren’t enough to fill the space; another 150 had to be ordered at the almost last minute from the Italian artist who makes them. At a trial run five days before the opening, the mechanism that parts the bronze entry doors failed to function. “You can do it manually,” said Munk. “But pushing open 2.5 tons kind of ruins the effect.”

The very worst was the dome itself. “It was nearly done,” Munk recalled of a date back in February, before sheepishly correcting himself. “Actually, it was totally done.” But when they went to give it a trial run, Munk could see the plates hadn’t been installed correctly, so there were gaps and shadows where the images should have been seamless. “Ninety-five percent of people wouldn’t have noticed,” he said. “The staff was all saying about how beautiful it was. The carpenter said, ‘I think it’s good enough.’ But it wasn’t.” The next day the chef called the blacksmith and had the dome taken down, even though it would take two weeks to remove, and another three to reinstall. “We were so close to finishing, and already so far over budget,” he said. “But now I think it’s the best decision I made.”

And that, in the end, is the thing that gives Alchemist its most potent magic: its personality. There are parts of it that don’t work—the theme rooms in particular aren’t especially sophisticated or well integrated, and some of the dishes are uneven. But in its inconsistency, Alchemist seems somehow more authentic to the person behind it. Like Munk himself, the restaurant veers precipitously between the sublime and the tacky. It is at once hedonistic and high-minded; derivative and inventive; outrageously elitist and charmingly naïve; provocatively boundary-pushing and prodigiously kooky. It is, in other words, that rarest of things in this age of globally homogenous dining and Airbnb aesthetics: idiosyncratic.

Some of the early press on Alchemist has heralded it as “the future of fine dining.” And indeed, the restaurant thus far has found no shortage of diners eager to experience its experience; three months’ worth of bookings sold out in three minutes, with a 7,000-person waitlist to spare. But it’s hard to see how something as intensely individualistic; as faithful to its progenitor’s vision; as, yes, uniquecould ever be replicated. “I hope the guests walk away with something more than just a good meal,” Munk said. “I hope they get that same feeling that comes with art or theater—catharsis, however they define it.”

— Our cover story: How Idris Elba became the coolest—and busiest—man in Hollywood

— Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and the making of a very Page Six Hamptons summer

— Why are pop stars struggling to top the pop charts?

— Get all the details on Harry and Meghan’s pricey renovations

— Can Democrats win back the internet in the age of Trump?

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.