Star chef René Redzepi as guest chef in the Ikarus

October 2009 at Restaurant Ikarus: René Redzepi

East, West, home is best

"Noma", Copenhagen, Denmark

“Why spread yourself thinly in every possible direction, from classic French and Italian cuisine to fusion cooking, if your own country offers such a wealth of aromas, flavours and ingredients that are unique in the world?” was the question that Danish chef René Redzepi asked himself – and he came up with the answer in the form of Noma, his restaurant, where the cooking is all about the region that the head chef feels so strongly attached to: he has dedicated his career to new Nordic cooking. Together with Torsten Vildgaard, Danish chef of the year 2005, René Redzepi pulls the culinary strings at Noma.

Redzepi did his apprenticeship at the Restaurant Pierre André in Copenhagen and Le Jardin Des Sens in France, under the watchful eye of his mentor Jacques Pourcel. In fact, all the stops on the Danish chef’s career path read like a Who-is-Who of top-level gastronomy: Ferran Adriá’s El Bulli, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, and Thomas Rode Anders’s Kong Hans Kælder in Copenhagen. In his work, Redzepi is careful to avoid any sort of hyperbole: understatement is his game, and this is also reflected in his culinary creations. The head chef serves his very own version of Nordic avant-garde, for instance a “snow” of iced goat’s cheese with a beetroot consommé and cubes of smoked beef marrow. This example already shows that Redzepi focuses on Scandinavian products – he serves his guests a little bit of home, of tradition, and has been known to venture as far as Greenland for inspiration and ideas. On a typical list of Noma ingredients are scallops from Norway, truffles from Sweden, seaweed from Iceland, shrimps from the Faroe Islands, and musk ox meat from Greenland. Mediterranean classics such as sun-dried tomatoes, olive oil, mozzarella or Parma ham, on the other hand, are banned from his kitchen.

The inspiration behind his dishes comes not just from the present, but also from the past. At the Forum Gastronomico in Santiago, for instance, he amazed the attending chefs with a recipe from a 200-year-old cookbook, which used hay ash as an ingredient – not unusual for the time, but completely forgotten about nowadays. No wonder that the sight of Redzepi sprinkling black powder with a sieve on a dazzling white plate to make a bed for vegetables cooked in shellfish stock caused some surprise!

As a pioneer of new Nordic cooking, Noma has not only been copied quite a few times, but has also attracted numerous fans, among them several gourmet critics. Only two years after it opened its doors in 2003, it was awarded its first Michelin star; the second star followed in 2007. One award followed the next – Madrid Fusion selected Redzepi for its Honorary Chef Award, and Restaurant Magazine listed Noma in the top ten of its World’s 50 Best Restaurants ranking.

Redzepi has raised Nordic cuisine to a new level. What he has done is rediscovering his country’s traditions anew and creating a vision of a new style of eating. It is thus not surprising that the Nordic Council of Ministers has appointed him “New Nordic Food Ambassador”.