I
’m going to assume you are
a music fan. I’m going to guess
that your connection to music
was forged when you were
young. A moment in solitude
or a moment in a crowd, a
Chopin prelude or a Cat Power ballad
collapsing in on itself, high-gloss ear
candy pumped out of speakers at a
Saturday pool party. Or the swelling
voices of a neighbourhood choir
at church on Sunday morning, the
propulsive opening war chords of
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or the modal
blossoms of “So What” – whatever
it was, something lured you in.
If you are a certain kind of music
fan, an obsessive, that initial swig led to
a period of glutting, a slurping from the
vat, fireworks flashing across your brain
each time you made contact with the
latest iteration of the greatest song
ever. I’m willing to bet that these songs
contributed to the formation of your
identity. They became tiles in the mosaic
of you. But after a while the rush begins
to fade. The years pass and you go
back to old songs seeking the comfort
of recognition instead of the thrill of the
unheard. You try and fail to connect with
much of the new stuff. This band from
2014 reminds you of that band from
1994, or 1964. This new song strikes
you as little more than an abstracted
algorithmic reference to that old song.
Music starts to become, in your mind, a
museum of half-remembered associations.
There are still many years ahead, you
hope, but it feels as though you will have
to rely on music as a vehicle for carrying
you backward, not forward.If you ask me what it was like to
eat at Noma for the first time, the best
analogy I can offer is that it sent me
wheeling back to that febrile receptivity
I had once felt with music. Sure, I felt
excited because here I was, I was in. I had
managed to score a table at the restaurant
everyone in the world apparently wanted
to eat at – there’s no way to deny the
anticipatory theatre of that. But in the
same way that some people get all swoony
when they talk about seeing Hamilton on
Broadway, it turned out that the show
lived up to the hype. These dishes were
like songs you couldn’t get out of your
head. I got lost in each bite as if I were
wearing noise-cancelling headphones.
Fresh berries and lemon thyme.
Hip berries and walnuts. Flatbread
and rose petals. Turbot roe and parsley.
Burnt onion and walnut oil. Shrimp
and radish. Pumpkin and caviar.
The effect of encountering these
flavours could be compared to that “secret
chord” that Leonard Cohen wrote about
in “Hallelujah”. We grow up eating what
we eat – corn, potatoes, cheese, bread, hot
dogs, peaches, strawberries, cupcakes – and
develop an interior lexicon of familiar
flavours. Even if you’re an “adventurous”
eater, wired to seek out the cuisines of
regions other than the one in which you
grew up – Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia,
Japan, Peru – you’re often making contact
with traditional staples whose component
parts have been canonised over the
centuries. What chef René Redzepi was
serving at Noma, well, I had never eaten
these combinations and preparations
before. I had never imagined them.
I couldn’t help but think of Le Mystère
des Voix Bulgares, an album of folk songs
sung by a female vocal choir from Bulgaria,
a country whose neighbours to the west
are Redzepi’s ancestral turf of Macedonia
and Albania. The women in this brightly
garbed chorus are famous for singing in
microtones, which might be described
as the notes in between the notes you
already know. Instead of sounding flat
or sharp, the voices of these women,
rising in mesmerising unity, can locate
unfamiliar modes of harmony. It’s not
the conventional Western euphony you
hear when, say, a C note and a G note
are played at the same time in a popular Clockwise from left:
Noma’s René Redzepi;
Nordic seafood; Noma
2.0 during winter.PHOTOGRAPHY DITTE ISAGER RENÉ REDZEPI & JASON LOUCAS NOMA, SEAFOOD.
GOURMET TRAVELLER 61