Noma - Copenhagen's Crown Jewel

paz.ca, FlickrIn April, Noma, a widely praised restaurant in Copenhagen, claimed the number one ranking on The San Pellegrino best restaurant list, an event that signaled the arrival of both the seven-year-old restaurant and the nine-year old list. Of the previous eight awards, El Bulli -- the Catalonian restaurant run by the supremely innovative Ferran Adria -- won the award five times, including the last four in a row. It would have come as no surprise to anyone had El Bulli won again, as Ferran continues to go strong and is perhaps the most respected and most imitated chef of our time.

That Noma was number three last year went largely unnoticed; it was widely assumed that nothing could ever touch El Bulli. (Indeed, though the relative merits of the top five or ten restaurants on the list could be argued forever, El Bulli has a stature that goes beyond "bests.") And though I have long considered the list suspect -- it solicits the opinions of a not-very-exclusive group of 800 panelists (I was one in 2008; I declined last year) -- the selection of Noma means that next year's results will now be eagerly anticipated, even by cynics like me.

Like it or not, the list's impact is profound: The week after the awards were announced, Noma received either 100,000 or 200,000 requests for reservations, depending on which staff member kept a better count; either way, that's a lot for a restaurant that seats 42 people, 44 if some super-VIP calls right before lunch or dinner. (But not 46; I know of a super-VIP who was turned down because his assistant insisted that their party could not be fewer than four.)

The restaurant became the hottest topic in the food world and, in addition to my colleague Frank Bruni's piece in last week's New York Times, you will be seeing many more as food writers make the now-requisite pilgrimage to the lovely Scandinavian capital.

The Restaurant

Thanks to KitchenDaily I was among the early ones, visiting the restaurant and interviewing chef René Redzepi on midsummer's eve, June 22. René and I strolled along canals, toured his (rather small) kitchen, and foraged for some of the weeds that have made him famous. In the middle of all of this was a four-plus hour meal of something approaching 30 courses, detailed [here] and summarized like this: Noma is sensational, a place where local (and often unusual, and not only that wild) ingredients -- from cod roe to hay to house-made butter to pine needles -- combine with a fevered imagination to create a cuisine that could exist (for now) only here. This is a cuisine that cannot be duplicated outside of Scandinavia, a style of cooking which, when it is imitated (as it will be), will be done so successfully only by those chefs who understand that while Noma is all about Nordic cuisine, its philosophy is about the cuisine of wherever you are.

I have long complained that you could be plopped down in many of the so-called great restaurants I visit and have no sense of the chef's personality or the restaurant's place in the world; expense accounts and well-heeled travelers have created a market where a restaurant launched in (say) New York can be duplicated throughout the world. This has led to an uber-cuisine of tuna tartare, thirty dollar cheeseburgers, and heretofore unheard of dishes with ingredients flown in from everywhere, all without soul. If you cannot tell where you are from the restaurant you're in, you might as well be home.

At Noma, you know where you are as surely as if you were eating in a field. The food is famously and supremely justifiably regional, but the restaurant's greatness comes from René's unique approach to what he calls Nordic food (I believe it might be equally accurately called northern European, but whatever).

The Chef

This approach is largely colored by three facts about his life: One, he began cooking when he was fifteen (he's now 32). Two, by the time he opened Noma he had already worked at some of the world's best restaurants, including El Bulli. And three -- and I believe most important -- while his mother is Danish, and he grew up primarily in Copenhagen, his father is Macedonian, and René spent a great deal of his childhood not only in Macedonia but on transcontinental bus rides. All of these factors combined to make him an almost unbelievably wise, experienced, and open-minded 25-year old, which is what he was when he was tapped by a couple of local businessmen to become a partner in the new restaurant that became Noma.

Chefs become "great" with the regularity and predictability of ballplayers and scientists, which is to say not very often and usually by surprise; there is talent, experience, and luck. René has had all three, but he is long on talent and one of the most articulate chefs I've ever met. (The fact that English is not his first language or even his second makes this even more impressive.) As we're walking through Christianshavn, the lovely neighborhood across the harbor from downtown, where Noma is located, René stops and asks a couple of obviously lost Americans if he can help them, then steers them to a tavern for lunch. As we settle with coffee on the bank of a canal, I ask how he thinks "it" -- becoming one of the world's best restaurants -- happened.

He doesn't talk about talent (few talented people do), or even much about luck. With him, it's about work, or at least experience.

"The cuisine," he said, "starts early. The life we lived in Madedonia was quite rural: You sat on the floor, and you ate with your fingers for the most part." (Yes, I'd call that rural.) The community was Muslim, and Muslims were a minority in Macedonia (and certainly in Denmark), living among Greeks and Turks. "We hung out in the fields," he remembers, "picking wild berries while waiting for the grownups to finish their work, eating tomatoes off the vine." Though this was the 80s and even into the 90s, the food was unprocessed and almost entirely local; this was a part of Europe that was almost as off the grid as northern Scandinavia.

At 15, René enrolled in culinary school in Copenhagen, with a friend. The pattern in Denmark is school for a few months, and then a job. But for René , things happened fast. "I finished the class with no sense of what I wanted to do, really. As a 15-year old the most important questions were, 'When will I play soccer?' and 'Do I dare talk to that girl?'" After a cooking competition, however, he began to think, "If I'm going to look through all these cookbooks -- this was pre-internet -- what is it that I want to cook, and what do I actually like about food?" And he remembered a Madeconian dish of fresh chicken, cooked over rice with garlic and spices in a wood oven, the fat and juices from the bird dripping onto the rice, and saw a cashew sauce that he thought was quite modern to pair with it.

"And I thought," he remembers, "'OK, this is it.' And from that day on I started going to school early, reading all the time, looking at the Michelin guide, reading about chefs. And it was then," he says, "that I began to think like a grownup, I realized I could point myself in a direction and take it."

Remember, this is a 15-year-old.

The Food

After a few years in a respected but uninventive Copenhagen restaurant, learning the French classics as most chefs do, he began to travel. "At that point," he says " my whole world was French cuisine, and I thought that eventually I would open a restaurant doing French cuisine with Danish influences -- something like crème brûlée with cloudberry, maybe or poulet de Bresse with our asparagus." (This is exactly what scores if not hundreds of Scandinavian chefs are doing now.)

"But then I cooked at El Bulli. And after that, I didn't go home and say 'I'm going to do the Danish version of El Bulli.'" (It's worth noting that this is what scores if not hundreds of chefs have done after a stint of cooking at El Bulli -- their nation's version of El Bulli -- and most are, if not abject failures, then nothing approaching the original.) "But I did leave with a sense of freedom, a sense I could do something different. "

He cites one other series of "lucky" breaks, one that came just after he was asked to open Noma, which from that start was envisioned as a restaurant that would focus on local food. "I went on several trips in the North Atlantic before the restaurant opened and, on the first trip, which was 17 days, I kept a diary that stops on day 13 -- I don't remember what happened, and in all my trips after that, I didn't write at all. But this particular time I felt I had to. And when I went back to look at the diary, just last year, as we were putting together the Noma cookbook: (to be released this fall), I was surprised to find that a lot of the things we spent seven years on shaping, as the restaurant developed, I'd written about back then, when I was 25."

Just after that, when the restaurant had been open for a year, he went to shoot for muskox in Greenland. "It was very, very cold -- minus 55 degrees; extreme, you couldn't believe it. And the weather turned bad, really bad, and we got stuck. I couldn't go out, couldn't even use my computer - all the plugs were American (we were stuck on an old American military base) -- and, once I got over being bored, I started to think. Just think. I mean, how often do you have time to do nothing? So I started reflecting a bit.

The Place

"And I realized that time and place are the essence of everything we do at the restaurant. If we are lost or in doubt, we go back to this question: Are we showing people where in the world are we, and at what time of year we're cooking? And that's when everything really started to take shape."

"And now seven years have passed."

To me, this is the most telling story. Noma is not a "locavore" restaurant in the sense that there has been some political decision to use local ingredients. It's a local restaurant, in the sense that the cuisine is being made from all local food, for culinary reasons. As René said to me, "These are the ingredients we were given, and we're using them." Halfway through my meal there, I realized that I had had no olive oil, no Parmesan, no tomatoes, no basil, and -- incredibly -- no citrus. Nothing that doesn't grow outside in far northern Europe. (Yes, there are exceptions: coffee, for one. And much of the wine is from France.)

It's ironic but perhaps not surprising that this almost perfectly Nordic restaurant should be the brainchild of a not wholly "Nordic" individual. But, as René says, "I'm not really a native here, and I never thought 'this is the way you do things and you can't put them in another context.'"

In fact, he's putting things in a context that didn't exist just a few years ago. Whether Noma is "the best restaurant in the world" is irrelevant; what matters is that it's supremely inventive, really good, and could not have been invented without its chef.

Article photo by paz.ca, Flickr