Chef's exotic localism puts Denmark on map
(The New York Times)
Updated: 2010-08-09 10:30
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LAMMEFJORDEN, Denmark - On a recent afternoon on the seashore here about an hour's drive from Copenhagen, the Danish chef Ren Redzepi was up to his knees in weeds. Browsing.
"This is how the Vikings got their vitamin C," he said, plucking a thin blade. "It's called scurvy grass. It has a horseradish tone."
So it did. "So much of what you see here, it's edible," said Mr. Redzepi, who has his staff collect the scurvy grass and sorrel, as well as what he called sea coriander, beach mustard and bellflowers.
All of these make their way into his dishes, along with puffin eggs from Iceland and musk-ox meat from Greenland.
He is omnivorous in his exoticism, but restrictive in his geography. If the Nordic region doesn't yield it, Mr. Redzepi doesn't serve it, with rare exceptions (coffee, say, or chocolate). That approach might well seem a recipe for obscurity, which is what critics predicted for his restaurant, Noma, when it opened in Copenhagen in 2003.
Seven years later, Noma is an international sensation, as is Mr. Redzepi, 32.
On a trip to New York in June to promote his cookbook, "Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine," to be published in the fall, he was treated like a hero by some of the city's most celebrated chefs.
When he returned to Copenhagen, the visitors included the chefs of two restaurants in Spain with three Michelin stars apiece (Noma has two). An assistant to the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten called to ask if Mr. Vongerichten and three companions could come for lunch the next day. (They couldn't; Noma books up three months in advance, and only has 12 tables.)
A fair share of the demand and attention flows from Noma's anointment in April as the best restaurant in the world, at least according to a poll of industry professionals.
Denmark isn't Provence or Catalonia, so Mr. Redzepi's culinary accomplishments draw all the more regard for the degree of geographical difficulty built into them.
At Noma, he said, "We're not trying to change the world, and I'm not being judgmental."
He is, instead, acting on the premise that the most special, inimitable contribution a restaurant can make is to serve the food that is freshest and truest to its region, to scour its traditions for ingredients that cooks have stopped using.
A visitor to Noma is likely to be introduced to sea buckthorn, an orange berry with an outrageous tang. Mr. Redzepi pairs a pulp of air-dried sea buckthorn with pickled rose hips in one amuse-bouche. Danes long ago used the ashes of hay as a seasoning, so Mr. Redzepi does, too.
Since he interprets "local" in a more ethnically thematic than literal way, the fellow Nordic country of Iceland is where he gets fat, exquisite langoustine tails. A diner is denied utensils and instructed to use only fingers.
Mr. Redzepi likes to have people eat with their hands and wants them to feel nature - and that has the deliberate side benefit of being great fun. He presents root vegetables in a flowerpot whose "soil" is a layer of malt and hazelnut flour over an emulsion of sheep's-milk yogurt, tarragon and other herbs. A dish of shrimp and sea urchin powder is arranged as a beachscape with scattered stones and tufts of grass.
Mr. Redzepi was born in Copenhagen, where his father, an immigrant from Macedonia, drove a cab and his mother, who is Danish, worked as a cleaning lady. At 15, he went to a restaurant trade school because a friend was going.
He went from school to a world-class restaurant in France and from there to El Bulli. "I didn't come back to Denmark thinking, I'm going to put a gel of a gel of a gel on my monkfish liver while I whip my guests with burning rosemary," he said. "I just came back with a sense of freedom."
In a houseboat docked near the restaurant that Mr. Redzepi uses as his laboratory, he and his team are working on a new venison dish. "We imagine ourselves being the deer," he said. "What does it step on?"
His answer: snails and fiddlehead ferns. "The flavors will go together. Snails and deer: they live together. They have a symbiosis."