Copenhagen’s superchef
René Redzepi takes cooking back to basics in his award-winning restaurant Noma
By Feargus O’Sullivan
Ladies and gentleman: I am delighted to announce that the world’s best chef for 2009 is in Copenhagen. Yes, you read that right: not Paris, not New York – Copenhagen. Though the Danish capital may not have a reputation for delicacies more toothsome than the odd bit of herring, this year’s World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards turned the gastronomic globe upside down by awarding the peer-selected Chef’s Choice Award to rising Danish star René Redzepi. Noma, his mould-breaking Copenhagen headquarters, was also singled out as the third best restaurant in the world for 2009 (behind Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli and Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck). This stellar rise by a relatively obscure outsider raises a question – has the restaurant world gone mad?
Perhaps it has – Redzepi is a singularly unlikely haute cuisine star at first glance. At just 32, his cooking at Noma ditches the traditional ingredients of high gastronomy, while he claims no interest whatsoever in the empire building favoured by the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Alain Ducasse. His superlative (and hardly cheap) food attracts pilgrims from across the world, but he’s so unworldly he admits he still can’t afford to buy a flat. With his long dangly hair, the youthful-looking Redzepi might also look more at home strumming a guitar in an indie band than encased in crisp chef’s whites. Oh – and he also favours the sort of language that could make a sailor blush.
“They called us the seal f***ers!” he bellowed on the podium at the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards in front of live TV crews. “They asked if we had whale penis on the menu. Look who’s laughing now!”
Given this raucous rock and roll image, Redzepi seems surprisingly demure and polite when we meet at the Identita Golose chefs’ congress in London. Sweating in the blazing summer heat, he explains how sceptical the public was when he opened Noma six years ago.
“People didn’t believe in the idea – they thought we were a joke. Danes can go over to Italy and rave about how amazing the food is there – and it is amazing – but they’ve got used to seeing our traditions as something dusty and old. Now at last there seems to be a kind of new discovery. It’s with this award that we’re really being taken seriously in Denmark. Even now, I’d say 60% of Noma’s customers are foreign visitors.”
It’s easy to see why Noma’s concept perplexed people. In a restaurant scene dominated by internationalised French luxury, Redzepi’s food is a breath of fresh forest air – and it’s as uncompromisingly Scandinavian as a brace of reindeer pulling an Ikea sledge. Redzepi’s team focus on fresh Nordic produce: 95% of the restaurant’s materials come from Zealand, the island where Copenhagen is located, and many of them are foraged wild from the region’s pristine forests.
Bull rush hearts, pickled rose petals, beach-gathered sea weeds and beer made from birch sap are some of the unusual ingredients that find their way onto Noma’s plates. The addition of regional specialities such as Icelandic lamb, Faroese horse mussels and Greenland musk ox, meanwhile, add a more broadly Scandinavian tenor to Redzepi’s cooking. He pickles and preserves many ingredients for winter use, even using winter vegetables in desserts when fresh fruit can’t be had locally. This resourcefulness and regional pride go together to form dishes that are novel, deliciously light and unmistakeably Nordic.
This may sound wildly avant garde, but it isn’t. Redzepi insists he is simply reviving age-old Scandinavian food traditions that have been lost or gone underground in recent times. With a long history of gathering wild food and of preserving, there can be something curiously Japanese about much traditional Scandinavian cookery, with its fondness for raw or lightly cured fish and pickles. As Redzepi puts it:
“The advantage of our region is that we still live very close to nature – there really aren’t that many people in Scandinavia. We have this past of doing things like using ashes as a kind of spice, but somehow this got lost in the last century or so. When I was growing up in the 1980s, Danes were just eating stuff like fish sticks and that kind of crap.”
Certainly, while the Danish food scene is currently blossoming, the country’s former over-reliance on pork and dearth of fresh vegetables made its more conventional food too stodgily northern for many. So when did Redzepi realise there was something better out there?
“Well, my father is a Macedonian Albanian, and we lived almost half the year in Macedonia, which is very rural, very wild. When I wanted milk, my grandmother had to milk a cow, we used to gather wild food to eat – and we never had Coke! We drank rose petal sugar waters, and stuff like that instead.”
Couple this rustic childhood with Redzepi’s apprenticeship under such culinary greats as Ferran Adrià and Thomas Keller of California’s French Laundry, and Noma’s Nordic-with-a-twist boldness starts to make more sense. But despite his early contact with restaurant royalty, Redzepi still has a bee in his bonnet about the high-class dining scene.
“How often do you go to a restaurant where the waiters treat you like rubbish?” I think for a moment – maybe monthly? “Exactly! When I created Noma I wanted to make a restaurant that I would actually like to go to myself. I’m really not into the whole pretentious, palace restaurant phenomenon.” I push him for names, but he’s tight lipped. “If you eat in those places and close your eyes, you could be anywhere – same food, same ambience. It’s so generic.”
While its two Michelin stars put it in the same category as the places Redzepi so disdains, Noma is anything but flashy. Indeed, its dining room in a 250-year-old waterfront warehouse in Copenhagen’s edgy Christianshavn district is almost monastic in its exquisitely bare simplicity. Is this plainness a form of rebellion in itself?
“Absolutely. Denmark is a fairly classless society – a professional society, mind you – and we are trying to make something that is just clear and approachable. Gold cutlery can make sense in Monaco, but that’s not what we want to do with Noma.”
Given the huge boost to his profile this year, I wonder if Redzepi has any plans beyond Noma itself? He shakes his head.
“I refuse to let Noma ever become an autopilot restaurant. I spend so much of my life there that if the passion goes, there’s just no point doing it. I’ve told my girlfriend it’s going to be a 10-year project for me – then we’ll see. For the moment, though, I think it’s enough!”
So will we have to wait a bit before Redzepi starts appearing on reality TV shows or opens a Noma in Las Vegas, then? He laughs – “No way. It’s just not what I’m interested in.”
Noma, 93 Strandgade, Copenhagen, +45 2396 3297; www.noma.dk
