10 new york | july 8–21, 2019intelligencer45 minutes with ...René Redzepi
Entering the mold-eating cult of the
world’s leading culinary demigod.
by adam plattPhotograph by Ditte IsagerG
rowing up in bicycle-mad
Copenhagen, the most famous
chef in the world never, ever
learned to drive a car. “I’ve never
even tried,” René Redzepi is say-
ing in his merry, emphatic, charmingly
offhand way, as if cars weren’t something
one needed to bother with in order to lead
a productive, civilized life and, besides, who
has the time for that kind of thing anyway?
He’s wearing kitchen clogs and a camo-
green zip-up on this bright summer’s after-
noon, and we’re on a walk through his own
little Faulknerian corner of Copenhagen.
Our tour begins at the original location of
his four-time “world’s greatest restaurant,”
Noma; continues aboard the refurbished
langoustine boat he co-owns with a gregari-
ous gentleman named Nils; and concludes
as he and Noma’s genial fermentation spe-
cialist, David Zilber, walk their bikes to the
newly rebooted Noma 2.0, which Redzepi
opened outside the city’s prominent hippie
community, Christiania Freetown, in 2018.
As we bob along the canals, he and Zilber
discourse on the perils of burnout (“Are we
exhausted? Yes! Are we burnt out? No!”);
the difficulty of planning the restaurant’s
new high-wire vegetarian menu, which
includes ingredients like crisped unborn bee
larvae and several dishes laced like wheels of
cheese with delicate scrims of freshly grown
mold (“Can you imagine growing enough
mold for 80 covers a night!”); and the vaga-
ries of “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants”
list, on which the new Noma will debut in
a couple of days at No. 2. “If people say ‘I
don’t give a shit’ about the ‘50 Best’ list,”
Redzepi says, “they’re lying—of course I
care. We all care.”
Never mind that I’m a confirmed nonveg-
etarian and all-around skeptic when it
comes to chef worship in general and the
hysteria surrounding “World’s 50 Best” des-
tination restaurants in particular. Thanks to
the hype—and endlessly streamed shows
like Chef ’s Table—haven’t we all heard
enough about genius philosopher- king-
cooks in our increasingly list-obsessed culi-
nary landscape? But to the most fervently
devout Nomaheads, Redzepi has never beenyour run-of-the-mill Michelin-star-
grubbing cook. He’s a prophet and a vision-
ary, a once-in-a- generation talent who, like
Ferran Adrià before him, fundamentally
altered the perceptions of how the rest of the
world looked at, tasted, and walked through
the worlds of food, nature, and nourish-
ment. Adrià was an inspired mad scientist
who created his own gastronomic move-
ment. Redzepi, who once apprenticed at
Adrià’s elBulli restaurant, is more like a
charismatic John Muir, a boyish Johnny
Appleseed figure who led his disciples out
from lablike kitchens and into the wild.
Like any self-respecting prophet and
visionary, however, the Moses of the great
Scandi foraging-and-fermentation move-
ment has recently had to endure an
extended period of wandering in the wilder-
ness. First came the closing of his storied
restaurant, followed by a series of frenetic,
PR-generating pop-up events in Tokyo and
then in Sydney, where he and his cooks
experimented with the culinary joys of
crocodile fat, and finally in Tulum, which
remains the most beloved pop-up experi-
ence among his devotees but ended up caus-
ing a mini-backlash in the food press. (“The
restaurant is making a statement that
belongs to Mexicans to make,” the late Jona-
than Gold wrote in his review. “Arguments
about localism and sustainability may seem
trite when most of the customers travel
thousands of miles to eat a meal.”) The
building-out of the new Noma in an aban-
doned military warehouse has been a titanic
(and, given the chef ’s genius for self-
promotion, well-documented) struggle, and
two months before the opening last winter,
and four days after his 40th birthday, Redz-
epi’s father, who according to his son had a
40-cigarette-a-day smoking habit, died of
cancer at the age of 68.
“It turned out to be the worst day of my
life, and so these last two years have been the
most challenging of my entire career, I’m not
going to lie,” Redzepi says, crinkling his brow
in contemplation, then lapsing into silence.
He’s always thrived on an endless cycle of
reinvention, however, and the new Noma
seems to have been designed with this par-ticular addiction in mind. The restaurant
features three distinctly different seasonal
menus each year: vegetal “Plant Kingdom”
delicacies in summer, wild game in the fall
(get ready for broiled raven, puffin meat,
and moose blood), and a bounty of Nordic
seafood treats in the winter.
“René likes to have us all jump off cliffs
and land on our feet every time, and he likes
to say for the first 12 years in the old restau-
rant we were just practicing for this one,”
says Zilber, whose biblical tome The Noma
Guide to Fermentation serves as a kind of
touchstone for the next phase of the Noma
adventure. Redzepi considers mold and fer-
mentation great engines of taste, especially
in an era of increasing scarcity, but as we
walk down by the brightly colored shanty
houses of the hippie colony, he says there’s
still plenty of work to do: “We’ve been open
a year, but it feels like two months. It will
take us ten years to get this right.”
The next day, before I enjoy my dinner of
mold pies and an edible butterfly made
entirely of flowers, the chef gives a quick tour
of the new Noma, which looks less like a res-
taurant than like the campus of an elite
middle-school science camp. We tour the
flower gardens on the roof and visit Zilber in
his lab, where acolytes are spooning bits of
mold culture from bubbling plastic vats.
There’s a canteen on campus, saltwater fish
tanks to keep the seafood catch fresh in win-
ter, and even a barrel-shaped sauna set up
on the edge of the garden by the water for
the 90 staff members (and counting) to
relax in during their endless days of tweez-
ing flowers and growing mold.
Before serving this first-ever Plant King-
dom dinner, which like most Noma perfor-
mances sold out long ago, Redzepi looks
semi-relaxed, even refreshed, as if he’d been
out for a light jog in the woods and had
stopped for a rest. I’m sitting with a group
that includes an eminent vegan named Rich
Roll, who’s flown 11 hours from L.A. for the
meal, and the ultimate Redzepi scholar, Jeff
Gordinier, who spent a good part of four
years following the chef around the globe to
write a new book, Hungry, about Redzepi
and his obsessions. As the 19-course dinner
unfolds, Redzepi stops by our table for a
breezy chat. He can’t actually take credit for
any of the strange creations, he says, nor can
he remember where most of them origi-
nated. This menu took five months of
research and testing to prepare, and he and
his development team are now deep in the
weeds on the raven and moose-blood delica-
cies planned for fall. If he’s happy or unhappy
with the progress, he doesn’t say. “Like most
chefs today, I’m here to make people do the
work,” he says in his modest way. “I just
facilitate things and nudge them along.” ■ PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF NOMA