Solvang: California’s Taste of Denmark

One of the things that I love about living in California is that there are so many cool areas to go on road trips to, both within the state and in neighboring ones. I’ve been itching to go on a weekend getaway, and so at the end of last week, my husband and I journeyed to the Santa Barbara area for a few days of wine tasting, hiking, and exploring the Danish capital of America – a town called Solvang. 

I like traveling to unique little places, and Solvang is definitely just that. It’s a quaint, Danish-styled town in the Santa Ynez Valley that was founded a little over 100 years ago, and is home to a population of just 5,000+ people.

Solvang is about a 4-hour drive from where I live in northern San Diego County. Pretty much the whole drive, you’re traveling right up the Pacific Coast with a pretty view of the ocean, or you’re looking at mountains, or sometimes both. Besides the Los Angeles-area traffic that you’re bound to hit in some shape or form, I find it to be a pretty relaxing drive with nice scenery to gaze at.

When you walk around the town of Solvang, you feel like you’re in a bit of another world – or at the very least, you don’t feel like you’re in California. All of the buildings feature traditional Danish-style architecture, complete with windmills and replicas of statues found in Copenhagen. I’ve never been to Denmark, but the style of the town reminds me a lot of Austria. On the outskirts of town there are picturesque rolling green hills, that were also reminiscent of my stay in Austria.  

I had been to Solvang one other time for a night nearly four years ago during a road trip up the California coast. For this getaway, I booked our hotel stay at a place called Wine Valley Inn. A few days before the trip, I was looking up info about the town, and a bell went off in my head and the hotel name started to sound very familiar. Photo albums from my 2011 vacation up the coast confirmed that we had actually stayed at the same hotel the first time!

Wine Valley Inn & Cottages has some pros and cons. The pros are the decent cost – which is one of the reasons why the hotel caught my eye both times I’ve been to Solvang – and the location, which is conveniently located in the heart of town. I love being able to just walk places and not move my car, and we were easily able to head to restaurants and explore the town by foot.

The hotel offers a free breakfast, which is always nice when you want to just grab something quick and easy in the morning. The breakfast was just okay, definitely nothing great, and the room itself was also mediocre. There were a lot of little things I noticed about the hotel room being kind of old and constructed kind of sloppily, but it was fine for a short stay when we weren’t hanging out in the room a whole lot. 

We stayed in a standard room, but the hotel offers larger cottages that look pretty neat from the outside (pictured above). I loved the hotel’s garden area and thought that it was pretty and nicely manicured.

Solvang features lots of little restaurants, wineries and bakeries. We didn’t have time to do any wine tastings within the town itself, but if I had stayed there longer, I definitely think it’d be fun to hop from one winery to another. There are a ton of wine shops in Solvang, and they’re all close to one another, so I image it’d be a fun day to go wine bar hopping and not to have to worry about someone driving.

What we did have time for was trying out some bakery goodies. When I read about Solvang’s bakeries featuring a lot of traditional Danish pastries, I knew it’d be a few days full of sweets. When in the Danish capital of America, you eat Danish pastries, am I right? 🙂

Olsen’s Danish Village Bakery was one of the spots we stopped by. In doing some research online beforehand, what I thought was cute about this bakery was the the fact that the owner, Bent Olsen, comes from a bunch of generations of Danish bakers. His bakery features traditional Danish family recipes, and when we stopped in the shop, everything looked and smelled pretty damn yummy. A and I split what they called a cinnamon crisp, which was flaky, buttery…to sum it up in one word, delicious. 

One morning we made a stop at Mortsensen’s Danish Bakery, where it took me no less than 10 minutes to decide what I wanted because every sweet at the counter was catching my eye.  

A and I decided on an apple pastry, which we quickly inhaled together… and this was only about 20 minutes after breakfast!  

For dinner on Saturday night, we dined at Hadsten House – which is also an inn and spa in Solvang. The bistro restaurant is probably one of the nicer eateries within the town, and features a menu full of salads, pasta, gourmet burgers and seafood entrees.

For an appetizer, we tried the brie en croute: a hunk of brie cheese wrapped in flaky pastry with apricots, figs, candied pecans and a port reduction. It was kind of amazing, but also kind of heavy, and I could of just had some of this appetizer and called it a meal…. 

….but, we had already ordered entrees beforehand, so out came this huge portobello burger with bell pepper, spinach, avocado, oven-dried tomatoes, caramelized onion, and yes, more cheese, along with house truffle chips. The burger tasted great, but I only managed to eat a few bites before calling it quits and taking the rest to-go. A had an even bigger regular burger, which was topped with a fried egg, avocado, red bell pepper, bacon, spinach and mushrooms.

Hadsten House had a nice wine list selection as well, with both local California and international wine offerings. We both really liked the atmosphere and menu at the restaurant, and would recommend it to any visitors of Solvang looking for a bit of a higher end meal out.

For breakfast on Sunday morning, A and I ventured over to Paula’s Pancake House, a popular breakfast spot in Solvang that’s been around since 1986. Being the pancake lover that I am, I knew that I wanted to see what Danish pancakes were like.

I ordered the house special: Danish pancakes topped with fresh strawberries and homemade whipped cream. The pancakes were thinner, almost like a crepe. I’m a sucker for homemade whipped cream, and strawberries with whipped cream is always a winning combination in my book, so I enjoyed that a lot. In all honesty, the pancakes were good, but not great. Now that I make my own pancakes batters all the time, I’m sort of picky about pancakes at breakfast joints, and typically pancakes out don’t taste as flavorful as the ones I make at home. It might be because I use oats, whole wheat flour, and banana to give the batter a lot of hearty flavor!

A customized an omelette, and said it wasn’t his favorite because it was made kind of greasy and heavy. I tried a bite of both his hash browns and biscuit, and both were just sort of take-it-or-leave-it. Paula’s was definitely better than our hotel’s continental breakfast, but wasn’t all that memorable to us. I definitely indulged a lot in Solvang, but it was worth the splurge. I pretty much never eat pastries unless I’m traveling somewhere that specializes in them, and it was definitely a treat! I’ll soon be sharing details of Santa Ynez Valley wine tasting and hiking at nearby Gaviota State Park, so stay tuned for more recaps of this road trip’s adventures!

Tell me… What was the last really unique place you visited? Have you ever eaten Danish-style pastries?