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Magazine

In Copenhagen, Noma restaurant offers food for thought

By Jason Wilson,September 12, 2012

View Photo Gallery - : Inside Copenhagen’s Noma: The world’s best and most provocative…

Few consider the faith of the food writer. And this is probably a good thing. I won’t say that to worship food and drink is to pray to a false god. But even with all the high-minded talk of farm-to-table or Slow Food movements, of molecular gastronomy or urban gardening, of locavorism or fruitarianism or whatever-the-latest-ism, in my experience it rarely leads one down the shining path of enlightenment.

Or at least that’s what I believed until this past spring, when I spent one of the most glorious weeks of my life eating my way through Copenhagen, capped off by a 25-course, five-hour lunch at Noma, considered by many to be the best — and most thought-provoking — restaurant in the world.

“Some people see going to Noma as a religious experience,” said Michael Bom Frøst, a food scientist and director of the nonprofit Nordic Food Lab, which was established by Noma’s owners. This was several days before my own meal at Noma, and we stood in the lab’s shiny test kitchen, inside a houseboat moored across the canal from Noma. The brilliant Nordic sun shone in the bluest Nordic sky as we ate a pink ice cream made from seaweed and looked across the cold water toward Copenhagen’s center.

Copenhagen has become the epicenter of the “new Nordic” cuisine, which has supplanted Spain’s formerly avant-garde molecular gastronomy as the latest, buzzy Big Idea in international cuisine.

“High-level chefs change the world in ways that are unprecedented,” Frøst said. “They change the way we view food.”

In this case, he was talking about René Redzepi, Noma’s chef and the high priest of the new Nordic cuisine. The 34-year-old Redzepi had done stints early in his career at the late El Bulli near Barcelona (then still considered the best restaurant in world) and the French Laundry in Napa Valley before returning to Copenhagen to work at the fancy Kong Hans Kælder. In 2003, restaurateur Claus Meyer tapped Redzepi to open Noma in an 18th-century warehouse. Fast forward less than a decade. In April, Time magazine listed Redzepi as one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.”

Around the time of Noma’s opening, Redzepi and Meyer, along with other young chefs, drafted a new Nordic cuisine manifesto (because you simply can’t have a movement without a manifesto). They called for, among other things, “purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics.” The new Nordic chefs promoted the sole use of seasonal, Scandinavian ingredients — which meant, for instance, no olive oil, no lemons and no pasta — and a return to traditional Scandinavian techniques such as pickling, smoking, curing and fermenting. The idea was to force creativity by setting limitations.

Here’s how new Nordic cuisine came to be identified: ingredients such as sea-buckthorn or Douglas fir or gooseberries or deep-fried moss; cellared or slow-cooked vegetables and under-ripe fruit; dishes served on pieces of wood, rocks, seashells and tree branches; a focus on fish and veggies, rather than meat. Dishes, plated with wild grasses and leaves and such, mimic nature, with a fashionably mussed-up aesthetic, compared with the geometric, architectural plates of molecular gastronomy.

Then, of course, there’s the whole foraging thing. The popular practice of U.S. chefs’ searching for wild herbs and greens is a direct influence of the new Nordic cuisine. And the topic has proved irresistible to food writers, so many of whom wrote stories about foraging with Noma’s chef that Eater.com called out the journalistic trend as the “I Foraged With René Redzepi Piece.”

Of course, with any buzz there is skepticism and backlash. For example, Time magazine columnist Josh Ozersky called Redzepi the “personification of nature worship,” which Ozersky snarkily described as “an ardent belief system among top-tier chefs that seems to skirt the distinction between gastronomy and religion.”

I thought about the distinction between gastronomy and religion as I ate my pink seaweed ice cream on the Nordic Food Lab’s houseboat and talked to Lars Williams, the research and development chef. (Williams has the opening lines of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” tattooed on his arm.)

“We’re designing the building blocks of food here. We’re trying to produce more letters to the culinary alphabet,” Williams said. “For instance, we’re trying to inspire people to use seaweed as a food resource. But we don’t want to force a concept that’s foreign to them.” Thus, the ice cream.

“Seaweed is beautiful,” he added. “But most people only see it rotten and smelly on the beach. Well, if you were walking in an apple orchard and you only saw rotten apples on the ground, you wouldn’t have a good opinion of apples, either.”