“I have never seen further than
standing on the shoulders of giants” – Sir Isaac Newton.
When Sir Isaac Newton uttered these
words, he was referring to the years of research and discovery from such greats
as Galileo, Kepler and Brahe that gave him the base to do his own work.
Although we would like to think that genius is the force of scientist, any
scientist will tell you for every good thought they ever had was the product of
years of study, lab work, number crunching and observation.
In a lot of ways, cooking is in the
same vein. For every top chef that is anointed the next best thing by Michelin,
San Pellegrino Top 100 restaurants, or Food Network, there are years of
training and apprenticeship (stagiaire
in French). While a phenomenal dish may be born in chef’s head since they were
15, there are hours (and hours and hours) of peeling vegetables, stock making
and kitchen drudgery before that plate even hits a restaurant 10 or even 20
years later.
Thus when I first went to Noma [an
abbreviation of “Nordisk Mad” (Nordic Food)] in 2007, I realized that something
was brewing in René Redzepi’s head long before the wood sorrel even hit the
plate.
By now, the origins story of Noma
is fairly well established. BN (“Before Noma”), there was only a revolving door
of pork, potatoes, herring and grumpy Protestants. And AN (“After Noma”), every
restaurant in Denmark is busy foraging for herbs with funny letters and killing
moose with their bare hands.
But as with any origins myth, the
truth is far more complicated. Yes, Denmark for years was not what anyone would
call a “dining destination.” Beyond the famed smørrebrød, all you could in terms of
fine dining was from Italy and France. And outside Denmark? Interest in
Scandinavian food was a novelty – but mainly of the IKEA and butter cookie-kind
(Granted, Marcus Samuelsson did Scandinavia a huge favor by elevating
Scandinavian food to fine dining in the early aughts with Aquavit).
In
2003, Claus Meyer, the Danish restaurateur, approached a bunch of chefs about
opening a high-end restaurant that highlighted Nordic ingredients. Most chefs
passed. Except a young chef named René Redzepi. After having stints at Pierre
André in Copenhagen, Jardin des Sens in France, El Bulli, and French Laundry,
Redzepi, then working as a sous-chef at the Kong Hans, agreed and a partnership
was born.
But the beginning was not easy.
Sourcing was a bit of a problem: No one just had piles of wood sorrel at the
grocery store. But that was the least of Noma’s worries: How do you convince
diners, much less chefs, that there was any worth in Nordic food? Chefs were
the easy bunch. Ten months after Noma opened, Redzepi and Meyer did a Lars Von
Trier. Working with area chefs, they created the Manifesto
for the New Nordic Kitchen.
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| Chefs working inside the kitchen at Noma |
But as the 17th century
French playwright Moliere said, “I live on good soup, not on fine words.” The
proof was ultimately in the pudding. After reading several reviews of Noma, I
decided on a whim to go there for lunch in 2007. After eating at many of the world’s top fine dining
establishments, WD-50, Charlie Trotter’s, French Laundry, I was not expecting
to be surprised.
How
wrong I was. Starting with a couple of amuse-bouches of root crisps and egg
cream, beef tartar with wood sorrel and a juniper vinaigrette and an
aebleskiver (a donut like pastry made with batter) filled with pork and dusted
with vinegar powder, this was not your farmor’s food.
The
mains also did not disappoint. Instead of the ubiquitous pork, there was
seafood abounds. Squid was served with unripe strawberries, cream and dill.
Razor clams were served with an edible shell of parsley gelatin and a
dill-mustard sauce, garnished with a mound of horseradish powder. Tender reindeer
had ramson, woodruff and celery. This was food that broke ALL the rules yet
maintained a rigor in taste. I tried to convince my friends of the ingenuity of
the food I was eating, but I mainly faced a deer-in-headlights expression. They
didn’t get it and to a certain extent, neither did I. It wasn’t that the food
wasn’t delicious. It was fantastic. What I couldn’t get my head around was the
juxtaposition of radically local ingredients with classical technique. It was
if someone put a chef in Mars and asked him to go crazy.
But
it just wasn’t the food. Who decided that an old ship warehouse could be
repurposed to a fine dining destination? Who has the chef greet you like you
were his neighbor? And shouldn’t chefs be cooking the food and not serving it?
And since when did fine dining destinations look like a hunting lodge? And it
still gets a Michelin star?!
René Redzepi has now become the
poster boy for an uber-locavore and foraging movement that even has New York’s
Central Park worried for its plants. Almost as if he predicted a backlash to
the chemical warfare of molecular gastronomy, Redzepi’s style of cooking has
now become a dining meme to the point that a television show, Portlandia, has
made an entire parody of locavore and wildvore dining practices.
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| Amsue Bouche of Malt Flatbread with Juniper being prepared |
Did
two Michelin stars, a Time Magazine cover and three consecutive number ones in
San Pellegrino Top 100 Restaurant list change anything? Certainly the
restaurant itself has changed. From a kitchen staff of under 10, the staff is
now of close to 40, including 20-30 stages, plus a hoard of foragers, farmers
and fishermen supplying the restaurant. Add a completely renovated kitchen, a
food laboratory, an actual head chef beyond Redzepi, and it’s any wonder that
the restaurant is in the same physical location.
But
what about the food? Over the course of this year, I was lucky enough to dine
at Noma twice, once at lunch and once for dinner, and well, things have
changed. But to use the words “better” would be a misnomer: Noma didn’t become
“better” or “worse.” It just is.
This
was evident the minute I sat down to eat. Opening with an amuse-bouche of malt
flatbread shaped in the form of a tree branch with a dusting of dried pine
needle powder set inside a vase of local flora, the setting might have proved
to be too precious – until one took a bite. The slightly burnt caramel
undertones of the malt were offset by the herbal bitterness of the pine powder,
as if one could capture the Swedish woods in a cracker.
And
on and on it went, this series of amuse bouches, each reminiscent of the best
Scandinavian holiday you never had. A blue mussel with concentrated mussel
juice and celery was encased in an edible shell with the taste of Limfjord in a
mind’s eye. A pot of baby radishes and carrots planted in a “soil” of ground
malt bread and a puree of herbs and crème fraîche. A tin of cheese “cookies”
topped with chopped arugula and stems taken from an assortment of herbs used in
the kitchen that day. Toast topped with smoked cod roe was the summer picnic on
the bay.
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| Snack of Blue Mussels with an edible shell |
By
the time I finished all the amuse-bouches, I realized what the change was
there. Yes, some of the “standard” Noma dishes were still on the menu: the beef
tartar with sorrel, the marrow salad with pickled vegetables, but others got a
new twist, such as the æbleskiver.
While earlier, Noma nibbled on the
edges, it was evident in within that first hour that Noma had pushed itself to
virtually change the ontology of fine dining. The categories of what were
“ingredients,” “cooking,” and “food” were all challenged, just in 14 bites.
Salad? Forget it. René has ants. They tasted like lovage, simply dressed with
vinegar. Aebleskiver, looked the like its generic self-until you saw the muikku
(a small Finnish freshwater fish) speared through it. One bite later, revealed
a square chunk of piping hot pickled cucumber. And using shaved frozen cod
liver, normally destined to Omega-3 supplements, as a Nordic answer to foie
gras? Huh?
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| Tastes like lovage! Live ants dressed with vinegar |
But the push was also in seeing how
much work ingredients and technique could do. Redzepi asked more of his
ingredients, geography and culture. And in turn, Redzepi was asking his diners
to take that risk with him. A dish of fresh and fermented peas (or “peaso” as
our server joked) used the fermentation techniques of ancient Japan to place vegetable,
animal and mineral all in one dish.
A dried scallop, beechnut and biodynamic grains plate used locally grown
grain and herbs to create a “grød” or porridge with
dashi-esque freeze-dried scallop chips placed on top for an umami crunch.
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| Pear Tree dessert with pear and thyme sponge |
But lest one think that the desserts were to be neglected,
Noma’s chef de partie Milton Abel and pastry chef, Rosio Sanchez, did not
disappoint. A dessert of poached/grilled pear, seasoned with lemon thyme, sat
next to a frozen sponge of thyme and a sauce of thyme oil. The natural sugar in
the grilled pear only became more evident with the judicious use of thyme and a
sprinkling of salt. A dessert of walnut and berries had no hint of it’s origins
until you took a bite-it was walnut ice cream, but balanced with the tannic
notes from a slightly bitter walnut powder and an acid punch of powdered
berries.
“Is everything all right?” asked the
waiter. It was more than “all right” – it was incredible. But in some ways,
this is not really the right question to ask. No one ever asked Newton, if
things were “all right.” Nature is as nature does, but even Newton admitted
that while “Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain
who set the planets in motion. God governs all things and knows all that is or
can be done.” The question for
Noma is not whether there should be expectations upon what the “perfect” dining
experience should be. The genius of Noma, like in science, is in creation. It
still is becoming.
Cross-posted (with edits) on The Daily Meal
