The Noma Way
By: California Sunday
Tags: Features, Cover Story, Photography, Australia, Food

Redzepi was born in Copenhagen in 1977. His father was a cabbie, his mother a cafeteria clerk. Every summer, his parents would take him and his twin brother, Kenneth, to his father’s native Macedonia, where they would drink milk straight from a cow, gorge on berries of all sorts, and roast chestnuts they foraged in the mountains. At home in Denmark, people called Redzepi “a Balkan dog.” To help support the family, he and Kenneth delivered booze and cigarettes in between running five paper routes. All these early memories, he said, shaped his naturalistic food aesthetic — dishes of wild things, fermentation, and leftover bits, food born of necessity, unlike the foams and spheres of molecular haute cuisine. His style of earnest hospitality is that of someone who knows how it feels to be an outsider.

At 15, he followed a friend to cooking school, where he earned top marks with a variation on his father’s recipe for spicy chicken with cashew sauce. He landed in a French restaurant in Copenhagen before taking a trip around the world to intern in other notable kitchens — Le Jardin des Sens in France, elBulli in Spain, and the French Laundry in the United States. Redzepi was 25 when Claus Meyer, a Dane who had made his name with a TV cooking show, called to ask him to helm the restaurant that would be Noma; its name is the amalgamation of the Danish words for Nordic and food.

Redzepi was expected to fall in line with his mentors and cook French classics, and for a while he did. Soon, though, Redzepi had the epiphany that his food should not only be made with but entirely shaped by what he found in the forest, on the beach, and in the hands of local farmers. In practice, this meant that berries ripe for a mere two weeks a year and plucked by a Swedish farmer uninterested in selling them were more luxurious than imported caviar; he served them in a bowl with minimal adornment. He made terroir — the soil, the climate, and the land that shape the flavor of the plant and the animal that eats it — more than jargon. He made it the entire point of his cuisine.

The shoreline south of Adelaide, where Noma Australia sourced ingredients

Noma’s influence today is undeniable. If your local fine-dining establishment offers swirls of vibrant-green sauces, carrots as a main course, or anything lacto-fermented, someone in the kitchen is probably thinking of the Noma way. The Noma aesthetic also helped spawn Nordic-chic décor — sheepskin, rough-hewn wood, and neutral and black earthenware (on sale now at Crate & Barrel). In Denmark, where local cuisine had been essentially pickled herring on smørrebrød (flatbread), markets now stock and sell out of seasonal items like ramson (wild garlic) and sorrel. Through Noma, Redzepi created a modern cuisine where no distinguished cuisine existed before and put the Nordic region on the cultural map.

Noma is now more institution than restaurant, and it has many satellites in its orbit. There is the main restaurant, with dining rooms, a service kitchen, and a test kitchen for research and development. There is a science bunker with three staff researchers who devise efficient cooking processes and new flavors (including Nomite, a play on Vegemite for the Australian menu). There is MAD, a semiannual culinary symposium that draws food illuminati to Copenhagen. Soon there will be a foraging school as well as a partnership with Yale to explore the management side of restaurants, from wage inequities to effectual leadership. In the spring, a casual offshoot restaurant called 108 will open in Noma’s space, and Noma will move to an abandoned plot and erstwhile skaters’ hangout in Christiania, less than a mile away, where the chefs will become part-time farmers, serving a menu that reflects the best of the seasons — only vegetables at the height of summer, only seafood in winter. The drastic revamp will free Noma to keep evolving, Redzepi has said, and will allow it to stay open year-round — even through the bitter Danish winters.

Chef René Redzepi

If it’s not clear from everything Redzepi has going on, he rarely stops moving. In the beginning, 90 percent of everything served at Noma was farmed, fished, or foraged within 60 miles of the restaurant. Redzepi avoided coriander, which originated in southern Europe, instead foraging for strand-trehage, a beach plant that tastes much like it. But sometime around 2014, he no longer saw a need to be so strict. “It’s just a matter of going far back enough in time until you realize that most of the foodstuffs you built your menu around were actually introduced from somewhere else,” he said. “Why shouldn’t we use coriander if the farmers grow it exceptionally well here, where it tastes incredibly different from how it tastes in Thailand?” Redzepi is still a regionalist (flavor dissipates with time in transit, after all), but he is focused most on bringing out new flavors from ingredients we’ve forgotten, discount as weird, or consider so ordinary they seem unworthy of a tasting menu, wherever he finds them.

The Noma tradition for researching on the road began a few months before the restaurant opened in 2003, when Redzepi and his partners traveled around Scandinavia. They tasted sour mysa in Iceland, reindeer in Greenland, and a turnip that had grown sweet from the struggle of surviving in the frozen tundra of the Faroe Islands. They weren’t ingredients that could be sourced in significant volume for the restaurant, but they were flavors to build on. “It’s about filling up with images, sensations, and tastes,” Redzepi said. They store them away and look back often later.