Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine

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Lars Williams, who was drafted to Noma from Heston Blumenthal’s test kitchen in 2009, moved to the houseboat in 2010 to run the Nordic Food Lab for two years. “We’d be as scientific as chefs could be,” Williams said. “We’d try the same idea 30 different times, with 30 different incremental variations, and record it all to assure we’d been rigorous.” Much like the restaurant, the lab operated with solely Nordic produce, but did its best to stretch that definition: “Things from the Faroe Islands were fair game, things from Northern Norway were fair game – we didn’t just operate around a kilometre’s radius around Copenhagen.” These gatherings, which straddled the line between networking events, university lectures and evangelical tent rallies, helped build the movement that is spreading across the globe today. Figures of all stripes and skills would swap business cards, applaud each other’s speeches, plan events and collaborations together, united in the belief that everyone had the destiny of the food world in their hands. Noma began attracting talents from outside the food world: anthropologists, molecular chemists and agricultural scientists who would work in its Nordic Food Lab. This lab space – which was, for many years, a rigged-up houseboat moored outside of the restaurant – developed new local products, such as miso made with Danish yellow peas, or salt from shoreline seaweeds for the restaurant to use, while doing original research into the culinary biodiversity of Scandinavia.

Spanning music, fashion, design and food, a new book, Make Break Remix explores the global rise and rise of Korean culture We are incredibly happy to be allowed to reopen the doors of noma, now that restrictions have eased in Denmark.There are also plans for a Mad Academy, with funding from the Danish government, which aims to become “a Bauhaus of food”, as its executive director, Melina Shannon-DiPietro puts it – a place where all the different steps in food production are taught, and where efforts are geared towards answering the most urgent questions of the day: “How do we make food sustainable? How do we make food available to all? How do we protect food cultures against globalisation?” Following surprisingly little in the way of preamble, the middle (and largest) part of the book partners a photo of a dish with a detailed description of what’s on the plate and some information about how it’s put together as well as a list of its constituent parts. Even simple looking and sounding dishes are made up of a multitude of different preparations. For example, Noma’s sheep’s yoghurt mousse with salted berries has no less than seven different elements that all need to be prepared prior to plating the dish, including semi-dried Danish kiwis, lacto Mirabelle plums, white currant sauce and compressed noble fir cone scales. Horror Caviar, the first cookbook from A24, features recipes inspired by horror movies,from creatives including Laila Gohar andChloe Wise, alongside essays byCarmen Maria Machado,Stephanie LaCava, and more Melina Shannon-DiPietro, the executive director of MAD (Danish for food), a foundation founded in 2011 by Redzepi with the aim of transforming the restaurant business and hospitality and forcing fundamental change in food systems, said the awards had sparked “incredible pride” in Denmark.

It’s as if Fergus Henderson took his “ nose-to-tail” philosophy into Whitehall, got funding from the National Lottery and ended up getting people across the British isles to butcher their own meat, instead of just feeding offal to well-heeled Londoners. What the New Nordic movement is trying to export is not a single cuisine, but an all-encompassing philosophy of food. The publication of the cookbook roughly coincided with the news that the restaurant will close in 2024,​​ with chef-patron René Redzepi planning to relaunch the relaunch for a third time the following year as a ‘giant test kitchen and food laboratory’. That project will be called Noma 3.0, which does rather limit the shelf life of the team's most recent book. The decision to call time on Noma the restaurant is down in part to it no longer being a viable business due to the intensity of its food development process. Noma 2.0 gives an insight into the extraordinary lengths the team goes to create some of the the world's most creative cuisine, and is well worth a look even if most will never cook from it. In 2012, Redzepi launched the Mad non-profit, to “unite a global cooking community with a social conscience”. Aside from its larger symposiums, Mad has run pop-up salons in London, New York and Sydney, inviting local chefs and journalists to talk about topics as expansive as abandoning ego, indigenous food culture and questioning the very value of life itself. They have partnered with Yale to teach students about leadership, have published essay collections on how food cultures overlap all over the world, and launched a foraging app, VILD MAD (“wild food”), to help users find what’s edible in their local park. We are looking into many more [partnerships] across Europe, maybe America,” he said. “The short-term plan is trying to work out what people want, what people resonate with.The multidisciplinary cohort for this year's Design Researchers in Residence includes April Barrett, Eliza Collin, Jamie Irving and Freya Spencer-Wood, who will explore the theme of ‘Solar’ The Noma team says that while its new book is ostensibly a cookbook, it’s not necessarily to be cooked from. This is very much the case. Though Noma 2.0​ - so called because it is concerned with the work of Noma’s test kitchen since the world-famous Copenhagen moved to its new location in 2018 - does give chefs a good insight into the makeup of its dishes it only gives limited instructions as to how to actually replicate them. Further afield, in Bolivia, Meyer has opened restaurants and cooking schools to revive the nation’s hospitality industry. In the US, Dan Giusti, a former head chef at Noma, now feeds more than 4,000 school children a day with nourishing meals, while in Albania, Fejsal Demiraj, one of Noma’s current sous chefs, runs a foundation that researches and catalogues the nation’s village recipes to give the country a documented culinary history for the first time. Must try dish:​ Mouldy asparagus (asparagus spears that are cooked and dried slightly before being dusted with rice flour and inoculated with aspergillus oryzae spores and left for two days until bright white mould covers the vegetable) For the past twenty years, noma has been a restaurant ever curious to learn and grow—to be the best that we can be! Our origin is rooted in an exploration of the natural world, which began with a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients by foraging and to follow the seasons.

If your desired date is unavailable, we encourage you to enter your name on the online waiting list as we often reference this list if a cancellation arises. We accept reservations for one season at a time. We have currently opened reservations until Game & Forest Season 2023. Please sign up for our newsletter to book a table for upcoming seasons.Followers of the New Nordic approach are also working to change food policy and production practices around the world. Building on the success of Noma and the New Nordic manifesto, Nordic governments have set up an institute to promote their region’s food policies to other nations. In addition, Redzepi has set up a non-profit organisation called Mad – it means “food” in Danish – that led a campaign in partnership with the UN in the summer of 2019 against the environmental damage of food production. This is 100 per cent the right time. I was looking to do the transformation maybe when we were 25 years in, but that got pushed forward because of the pandemic. It showed the fragility of Noma and everything around it. The foundation is the team and this name that we built up.’ Beyond that, the movement has established a Nordic way of doing things that can be adapted anywhere in the world, to breathe new life into cuisines that are distinctly Bolivian, or Mexican or Albanian. And these are just the first initiatives that Noma and the New Nordic principles have sparked. “We’ve already seen people who have come from Noma step out into the industry and work towards change,” says Dan Giusti. “But there’s people in that kitchen right now, and more people who will come through there in future, who we haven’t heard yet. In 20 or 30 years, there’s no telling how big the change could be.” Scandinavia now leads the world in food policy, too. In 2018, Dr Afton Halloran, one of the world’s foremost experts on sustainable food systems, published a collection of innovative food policies from around the Nordic region, the Solutions Menu. It outlined the benefits of 24 innovative food policies, aggregated from successful initiatives around the Nordic region – including universal free school meals, organic food in hospitals and schemes to help farms move towards zero food waste. Halloran and her co-authors cited Noma and the New Nordic movement as their chief inspiration. Chefs were once courtiers; then, in the 19th century, they became artisans. For a time following the deprivations of the second world war, they were relics – vestiges of lost luxury in a time of hardship and scarcity. As the age of reality television and fast money dawned in the 80s, so too did the bonafide celebrity chef: a hard-living, tortured genius who justified their wealth and fame with a relentless dedication to perfection. Then, around the turn of the millennium, came an era of techno-utopianism and the transformation of the chef into a wizard of molecular gastronomy, with its frozen foams and fluid gels and trompe l’oeil flourishes.