When the Rolling Stones announce a tour, tickets for every single concert are snapped up within hours. That’s what happened with Chef René Redzepi and Noma. When the Copenhagen restaurant announced it would move to Kyoto, Japan for a two-month residency, every table reservation for every meal served for two months sold out in minutes.
Like the Rolling Stones? Well, yes and no. Most people who buy tickets to a Stones concert feel some personal connection to the music: the heartbreak captured in Wild Horses; A party that beats to the beat of Miss You. When they go to a Stones concert, they want to relive those moments; They want to see their favorite songs performed live and see how Mick Jagger can breathe new life into the song.
Not so with Noma and RedJP.
Many people who travel to Kyoto (and visitors from around the world) have never eaten at Noma before. Redzepi is not a high-profile public figure or TV star, like Gordon Ramsay: most diners don’t even know what he looks like. So the Mick Jagger / Rolling Stones parallel doesn’t work.
And here’s the big difference: Redzepi never plays his greatest hits. There is no Noma equivalent for a final encore of satisfaction and no edible version of Sympathy for the Devil.
Redzepi has no signature dish. God knows, he has invented countless dishes that have been imitated by others. But every menu is new. The classics are all retired. So no one buys a plane ticket to Japan to relive favorite food moments at Noma Residency. Even Redzepi didn’t know what the menu would be like when the pop-up was announced or what dishes would be served to guests lucky enough to score a table.
So why is Noma’s Copenhagen always booked months in advance? Why do Redzepi’s out-of-town accommodations sell out in minutes, even if guests don’t know what to expect?
I asked him this question last fortnight in Kyoto when we spent an afternoon chatting over food. Red JP said he did not know the answer. He was not particularly attached to dishes and did not want to repeat himself.
Why did people come from far (and pay so much) to eat his food?
He said he was confused.
He probably knows the answer, even if he’s too humble to put it into words. Since Redzepi opened Noma two decades ago, he has become one of the most influential chefs in the world; Leader of the generation taken from Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal.
As Pete Wells wrote in The New York Times, “I don’t think any restaurant has come up with so many ideas that have been taken over so quickly by so many other places in so many other cities.”
People called Noma’s style New Nordic because some foods relied on foraging and fermentation. And certainly those elements were widely imitated. But Redzepi has never seen himself as the leader of a Nordic or any other movement. When his food is cerebral, its origins seem more intuitive. As Wells writes, chefs “copy what Mr. Redzepi did without understanding why he did it in the first place.”
To pin down Redzepi’s vision, people seized on elements of Noma. ants that he sometimes used in dishes to add flavor; small plates to start a meal; A refusal to use ever-delicate china and porcelain and an enthusiasm for shells, slates, logs, rocks and other utensils for serving food; The popularity of natural wines in the great Chateaux of Bordeaux; Acidic tastes that sometimes come at the beginning of a meal; Complex broths made by RedJP, using unfamiliar ingredients (reindeer heart, sea buckthorn, rare seaweed) and so on.
While all these elements are depicted in Noma, the reality is both simpler and more complex: Redzepi was both an outsider to Denmark and a food conservative. So he did what outside adventurers do. He ignored the old rules and invented his own: in life and in the restaurant.
Although much is made of Redzepi’s Nordic origins, he is the son of an ethnic Albanian Muslim who moved to Denmark from Macedonia. The family returned to the former Yugoslavia to stay longer, and Redzepi says he was happier there than when he was in Denmark, where, as a Muslim, the son of Eastern European immigrants, he wasn’t allowed to feel fully at home.
He found his voice in the kitchen, but like most chefs who set out to create dishes, he saw food as a journey to discover new flavors and explore the world of flavors.
Take Garum, which he revived. Garum was created by the ancient Romans to make a sauce from fermented fish or meat in which they cooked their food. No one alive today has tasted the original Roman garum, as it disappeared from Italian cuisine centuries ago. Redzepi imagined it to be like a sauce and used it to flavor food.
He did a similar thing by fermenting fish guts and created umami flavors that traditional haute cuisine never used. But the recipes that made his early reputation and were widely copied were never finished in themselves. They were just steps on a journey to discover and understand taste.
His background and what he says was a troubled childhood, led to problems with his success and pressures. There were anger issues and his cooking style could be in your face. He now says he has worked through those issues (he has therapy) and is much more at peace with himself.
I went to lunch at his Kyoto residency and was amazed to see his kitchen (up to 48 chefs for 60 guests) in the midst of high-stress service. Redzepi was in the dining room where he went to each table and chatted with the guests. When there was a gap in the service, he picked up the plates and carried the food to the table himself. There aren’t many great chefs who would do that.
Then he went to the kitchen. Later he told me there was a small crisis in the kitchen and he rushed to fix it. Presumably he was able to fix it quickly because he quickly returned to the front of house and when I went into the kitchen later, the chefs looked happy and relaxed.
I asked him why he said he would close Noma in Copenhagen next year. His answer was in line with his overall philosophy. Travel was about exploring ingredients and finding flavor in the world around us. The restaurant was only part of that journey. Now that it was no longer affordable to run that type of restaurant, his journey would continue in different ways. (The starting salary for Noma’s chefs is around 3000 euros and fifty or more people cook in the kitchen. That’s one reason it’s so expensive to run.)
Redzepi hopes to inspire all of his chefs to continue researching flavors and creating new products (such as the excellent vinegars and sauces he has launched for sale) that are aimed not at the mass market but at the discerning cook. From time to time, when he feels the journey has yielded interesting results, he will take up a residency (like in Kyoto) and serve clients again.
I knew that for Redzepi, the dishes weren’t the point, it was the journey. But talking to him, I knew that the dining room was not even the point. Food and taste are his real interests. And they don’t need a dining room where you serve lunch and dinner every day.
It’s a bold decision but easy to understand. Many influential chefs (for example Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal) have gone beyond restaurants and ended up in food and taste themselves.
So yes, Noma will die. But it will also live forever. And sometimes we’ll be lucky enough to get a taste of what Redzepi has become.
From HT Brunch, April 8, 2023
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