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Thursday, March 24, 2016

René Redzepi Plans to Close Noma and Reopen It as an Urban Farm

René Redzepi at the site of the new Noma just outside the border of Copenhagen's Christiania neighborhood. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
COPENHAGEN — “Welcome to the new Noma,” the chef René Redzepi said on a bright summer day. “This is it.”
Mr. Redzepi, 37, the godfather of the New Nordic movement and the chef at Noma, arguably the world’s most influential restaurant at the moment, was standing outside what looked like an auditorium-size crack den. Used spray-paint cans lay in heaps amid the weeds of an abandoned lot. Street art covered the walls of an empty warehouse; inside, teenagers rumbled around on skateboards.
World-class culinary destination? The site, right outside the ragged border of this city’s freewheeling Christiania neighborhood, seemed more like the Four Seasons after an apocalypse.
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Mr. Redzepi plans to close his current restaurant after a final service on New Year’s Eve in 2016. He hopes to reopen for business in 2017. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
But Mr. Redzepi envisioned something else as he climbed a staircase to a tar-papered roof and gazed out at a lake on the edge of the property. In what qualifies as a wildly risky roll of the dice, he plans to close Noma after a final service on New Year’s Eve in 2016. He hopes to reopen for business in 2017 with a new menu and a new mission.
As a crucial part of that, he wants to transform this decrepit patch of land into a state-of-the-art urban farm, with Noma at its center.
“It makes sense to do it here,” he said, despite visual evidence to the contrary. “It makes sense to have your own farm, as a restaurant of this caliber.” His plans are nothing if not ambitious. He will put a greenhouse on the roof. He will dig out the dank old asphalt lot and truck in fresh soil. He wants part of the farm to float.
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The site, currently covered in graffiti and skate ramps, will become a state-of-the-art urban farm. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
“We’ll build a raft, and we’ll put a huge field on the raft,” he said. “We need a full-time farmer with a team.”

If the concept carries a slight echo of that dream of building an opera house in Werner Herzog’s film “Fitzcarraldo,” Mr. Redzepi is fully aware of the gamble. “It really, really, really, really makes me nervous,” he said. “I’m not afraid. But it does make me nervous.”
Dan Barber, a New York chef who has dug deep into farming, said one big challenge for Mr. Redzepi could come from the unpredictability of agriculture. “Does that carry risks with it? Sure,” Mr. Barber said.
Mr. Redzepi believes Noma is ready for a dramatic evolution. His plans for the new site include a rooftop greenhouse and a farm that partially floats on the lake abutting the property. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
When a restaurant has its own farm, as Mr. Barber does at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the Lower Hudson Valley, it can signify a chef’s desire for “the ultimate control” of ingredients, he said, but “obviously the best kind of farming is the lack of control,” and cooks have to learn to work with whatever the earth produces.
“I continue to be in awe of the guy,” he said of Mr. Redzepi. “It takes a leader in the field to change the culture.”
The changes at Noma are not driven by necessity. There has not been a rent increase at the original location; business remains brisk. Mr. Redzepi simply believes that the restaurant, where he has led the kitchen for 12 years, is ready for a drastic evolution.
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Chefs gather in the Noma kitchen for Saturday Night Projects. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
In his mind, Noma hasn’t even crawled out of its infancy. “We’re just finding our way,” he said. “Even though it has been successful, even though it has had media attention and all that.” Lately, he has been asking himself broad existential questions about what it means to be a local restaurant in the Nordic region. “What are we?” he said. “And how do we progress?”
To illustrate all this as he showed off the property, he grabbed a pebble and scratched out the number 12 in the dirt. Then he added a zero, conveying the notion that Noma could last for a century or more. “We should make decisions that make this evolution last for 912 years,” he said.
As for the next two years, he’s already committed to giving the menu a radical shake-up. Over time, he has become less and less sure that it makes sense for customers to pass through the traditional stages of a tasting menu, from small nibbles to a slab of meat, culminating in sweets and coffee. “We’ve allowed the format of a tasting menu to dictate what we cook,” he said.
The young cooks are asked to put together their own dishes for Mr. Redzepi’s inspection and analysis. Credit Laerke Posselt for The New York Times
He intends to replace that predictable progression with a more fervent adherence to seasonality. In the fall, then, Noma’s menu will focus only on wild game (from goose to moose) and foraged autumnal ingredients like mushrooms and forest berries. In the winter, when “the waters are ice-cold and some of the fish have bellies full of roe,” as he put it, Noma will mutate into a seafood restaurant.
Spring and summer? “The world turns green,” he said. “And so will the menu.” In an expectation-thwarting move, during those months Noma will become a fully vegetarian restaurant, with much of the bounty ostensibly coming from the farm he wants to conjure up.
“It’s huge,” he said. “How are you going to give a bowl of spinach the same pleasure that a steak gives? A richness of flavor: That is something that we will deal with.” (Even the tableware will shift with each season.)
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Mr. Redzepi, who seems to crave change the way most people crave that steak, said the transplanting is only one of the shifts he has in store for the months ahead.
From late December to the middle of next April, the restaurant staff will be relocating to Sydney, Australia, to see what happens when the Noma approach is applied to Australian ingredients. (It undertook a similar experiment in Japan this year, and the Japanese reverence for the seasons clearly had a deep influence on Mr. Redzepi’s thinking. “It’s as if everything they eat is at the right moment,” he said.)
For the first time in his career, Mr. Redzepi is forming a partnership to open a second restaurant, a more casual enterprise in Copenhagen with the chef Kristian Baumann heading the kitchen, and he has lured the Irish chef Trevor Moran to leave the Catbird Seat in Nashville and come back to Noma (where he worked for four years) to help lead the next wave.

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Evidence suggests that Mr. Redzepi’s employees are accustomed to hearing their captain ordering them to steer for the high seas. Every week at Noma, after the final high-pressure dinner service, they gather in the kitchen for Saturday Night Projects, a public and semi-gladiatorial face-off at which young cooks are asked to put together their own dishes for Mr. Redzepi’s inspection and analysis. He even broadcasts it via Periscope.
“It’s like the Google of restaurants,” said Malcolm Livingston II, who moved from New York last year to become Noma’s pastry chef. “That’s what keeps it exciting: It stays fresh.”
Over the years, Noma has pioneered approaches to fermentation, foraging, aging and even cooking with insects. “You’re taking risks every time you move forward,” said the head chef, Daniel Giusti, who grew up in New Jersey. But a big leap into agriculture could be the riskiest move of all.
“That’s where the challenge will come in,” Mr. Giusti said. “Are we growing the right stuff? Is it good? I know René. It’s going to have to be great.”
Technically, Noma’s new home lies in the center of the city, even though it feels like some faraway vegetation-tangled edge. Mr. Redzepi may be seeking wilder pastures at the right time. A new walkable bridge will soon connect Nyhavn, one of the most tourist-packed parts of Copenhagen, to the docklike zone that currently houses Noma and its fermentation lab. As often happens in New York City, gentrification is surging in. Change is in the air.
“Of course we could just keep continuing, just stay put and do what we do there,” Mr. Redzepi said. “But I genuinely think that we won’t progress.” He seemed rapt as he stood among the weeds and broken glass, as if admiring the new Noma in its finished state. “I have yet to meet anyone who thinks this is a stupid thing,” he said.
He pondered this observation for a second or two. Then he got antsy, as he often does. “I can’t stand still like this,” he said.

René Redzepi Danish chef and restaurateur

René Redzepi, (born December 16, 1977, Copenhagen, Denmark), Danish chef recognized internationally for his unique reinterpretation of Scandinavian cuisine; his recipes are characterized by distinctly Nordic, locally sourced ingredients.

Redzepi’s father was a Muslim immigrant from the Macedonian region of Yugoslavia who moved to Copenhagen and married a Danish woman. Redzepi later claimed that family visits to his father’s relatives in Yugoslavia triggered his interest in foraging for indigenous edibles. At age 15 he enrolled in culinary school, and then he became an apprentice at a Michelin Guide-starred French restaurant in Copenhagen. He later pursued his training in the kitchens of such Michelin-starred restaurants as Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier, France, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, and Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Roses, Spain.

In 2003 Redzepi established a business partnership with Claus Meyer (a Danish entrepreneur and television cooking-show host), and the pair opened the restaurant Noma in a reclaimed 18th-century warehouse overlooking the harbour in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn district. (The restaurant’s name is an amalgamation of the Danish words for “Nordic” and “food.”) The small (12 tables) fixed-price restaurant was starred by Michelin and was ranked among the world’s top eateries by the London-based magazine Restaurant.

Redzepi’s cooking was the best example of his broader culinary philosophy based on “time and place.” His Danish book, Noma: nordisk mad (2006), was followed by the English-language Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (2010), which helped to spread his influential culinary philosophy. The documentary Noma My Perfect Storm (2015) chronicles Redzepi’s experiences at his famed eatery.

Danish chef Rene Redzepi is bringing his world-famous restaurant, Noma, to Sydney

Rene Redzepi has been exploring Australian produce, including seaweed in Tasmania. Photo: Jason Loucas
 
Danish chef Rene Redzepi, whose Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, was named the world’s best restaurant four times in the last five years, is bringing the entire restaurant to Barangaroo in Sydney for 10 weeks at the start of 2016 in a spectacular coup for Sydney as a global dining destination.
The decision, which will involve closing Noma back in Copenhagen, is a collaboration with Tourism Australia and Lendlease. Bookings will open later this year and the restaurant will be open five days a week.

“I have always been attracted to the incredible diversity you find in Australia’s landscapes and ingredients, because they are like no other place I’ve seen before,” Redzepi said. “Australia combines strong influences from its Indigenous people with new communities from around the world. When you mix it all together, the result is something truly inspiring. It really is the perfect place to come and learn.”

Redzepi, has already been on several scouting trips to Australia, including currently for three weeks, exploring the country and meeting with producers, supported by Tourism Australia.

Earlier this year Redzepi moved the entire restaurant to Tokyo’s Mandarin Oriental for several weeks.
Speaking at today’s announcement, Redzepi said Australia was always top of his list of places to take Noma, saying it may be five-to-10 years before it can happen again.

“We’re all getting on and having kids,” he said.

The shift will see around 100 people moving to Sydney, including four Australians among the 70 staff, fleeing the dark Danish winter for three months of Sydney summer, but Redzepi admitted many of the details of the move still need to be sorted out.

“We have the space and the flights. But we haven’t found schools for our kids yet, or a place to stay,” he said.

Redzepi posted this announcement on his website, where there’s further detail available.
Last year I had the greatest learning experience of my life. By moving our restaurant to Tokyo we opened ourselves to a new library of taste, an awe-inspiring culinary tradition both ancient and diverse. The immersion into Japanese culture challenged us to understand a new set of ingredients, develop new mindsets, and explore new possibilities. We came back to Copenhagen more lifted than ever: with bags of energy and inspiration, and many new friends.

We want to travel like this one final time… and lately I’ve been dreaming of Australia.

Australia has always drawn me in; its great cities, its generous people, and of course its ever-present sun. But what really boggles my mind is the differences you find in its landscapes and ingredients, because honestly I have never seen anything like it.

Since my first trip to Australia several years ago I’ve been wanting to spend more time there— exploring, tasting, and understanding its ingredients. From the tropical fruit in the north, to the native pepper leaf of Tasmania; the pristine fish and shellfish of the very south, and all the new exotic wonders in between. Our research forays will take us into the bush, around every shoreline, weeding our way through Flinders and Kangaroo Island. Somewhere along that course I may even get my first surfing lesson.

When we settle down we’re bringing the entire team, from dishwasher to general manager –our work family as well as our spouses and kids— but we’re leaving behind our ingredients in Copenhagen. All we’ll take from our kitchen is an open frame of mind and a passion for learning.

Now… how will we replace the winter beet with a coconut?

Noma Chef Rene Redzepi on Creativity, Diversity in the Kitchen, and that Time Magazine Story

Before he talks at the Smithsonian about his new book, the famed chef identifies who he sees as the goddesses of food
 
 
Rene Redzepi, chef/owner of Noma in Copenhagen, is one of the world’s most influential chefs.

Rene Redzepi was 25 years old when he opened his first restaurant, Noma, in Copenhagen, and 32 years old when it was crowned the best restaurant in the world. Noma, which stands for nordisk mad, or Nordic food, held that title from 2010 to 2012, serving a scrupulously seasonal menu of local and foraged ingredients including sea buckthorn, ramson flowers, puffin eggs and ants—a far cry from the meatball platter at Ikea. Redzepi is singlehandedly responsible for putting Nordic cuisine on the map, but after ten years at Noma, his influence extends much further than that. He has used his worldwide celebrity as a platform to promote innovation in food, from new culinary techniques developed at the Nordic Food Lab to shifts in food policy discussed at the MAD Symposium, an annual gathering of chefs, farmers and food professionals. In 2012, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world—and just last week anointed him a “god of food,” alongside his friends and fellow chefs Alex Atala and David Chang.
Tonight, Redzepi speaks at a Smithsonian Associates event about his new book, A Work in Progress, which documents one year behind-the-scenes at Noma. We asked the chef about creativity, the role of food in society, and the state of female chefs in the restaurant industry.

The new book includes a copy of the journal you kept in 2011, your daily recap of how things were going at Noma. What was your process in writing that journal?

It was quite a painful thing. In an everyday life that’s filled with so much discipline—waking up and cooking breakfast and lunch for the kids, and then going to work and being organized and being disciplined, and then coming home—you really just want to have a drink and go to sleep. But then you had to be disciplined again. I never intended it to be a book, actually. I did it for myself, to see if I could find some sense of who are we, why are there good days, why are there bad days and what type of restaurant are we, basically. Then my book editor read parts of it, she liked it and then it became a book.
At the same time, it was also a weird experience because I’m used to working in teams, and doing this thing, you’re all alone. It was a very lonely thing to do. It’s tough, standing there at the end of the night, looking at a screen, just waiting for the words to come out. But it really did give me a lot of new insight. This idea of coming home and being able to distill the day, understanding what made it a good or bad day, really has given me a better understanding of why I do the things I do.

You’ve said that you felt “restricted” after Noma was crowned the world’s best restaurant and that this journal was a quest to understand creativity and where it comes from. What were some of the conclusions you drew from writing the journal?

One of the conclusions is that success is a fantastic, smashing thing, especially accolades—but the accolade is not the mountaintop. It’s not the highest thing to achieve. That was what I needed to shed off in the process of writing the journal—that it’s a great stepping-stone, something you can use on the way. But if your only goal is to achieve accolades, you will quickly find yourself out. I thought maybe we had reached that mountaintop. That’s what people were telling me: “What now?” And there I was, 32 years old, thinking, “What do you mean, what now? I’m 32 years old!” To me, it wasn’t the mountaintop that everyone was telling me . But it confused me for a while. So writing the journal, the conclusion was let’s just play around again, be fearless. There’s nothing to lose; don’t get attached to the thing. That’s the most important thing I got out of it—just being open to breaking the mold that made your success.

Pickled and smoked quail egg, served at Noma. Photo by Flickr user cyclonebill
How do you stay creative on a day-to-day basis?

Today it’s very much team-minded. Before the journal, it wasn’t so much; it was mostly decisions that I made all the time. But in trying to understand the process, I could see that the team was a good way of exhilarating everything. You’re also making it easier, if you have people to rely on and sort of comfort you at bad moments. It’s very much built on team effort now—conversations, brainstorm sessions. And, of course, ever-changing seasonality and weather—that’s also a big guiding force.

How would you describe your management style in the kitchen?

I used to be a control freak. I grew up thinking that as a cook, you are the big control freak who doesn’t care about anything besides the prosperity of your kitchen—and anybody who doesn’t follow along, just fall behind and leave. But once you go back and read everything during a year, you can see that what really makes the good days good is when you actually feel good. When there’s fun involved. And the bad days are always the ones where you don’t handle situations well. There will always be bad moments. There will always be big failures. But you just need to deal with it well, as opposed to being a little angry idiot. So the journal made me change my management style quite a bit. It was a big step to me, from being trained in a very old way of cooking and stepping into a new thing. But it changed the restaurant, and I could never see myself going back to the traditional kitchen style.

You have a lot of career changers on your staff—an ex-banker, a Hollywood dropout, a lawyer and others who didn’t come in with culinary experience. What do they bring to the table?

There are so many fantastic aspects to gain from people who are somewhat involved within food culture. Right now, in the Nordic Food Lab, we have a graduate of the Yale Sustainable Food Project. It’s certainly not cooking, but his understanding of issues that surround the meal adds different layers to the research and to our base understanding of what food can be. It makes our restaurant better. The way I understand innovation today is that the more we are open to new, valuable information, the more we study history, memories or these new experiences, and bring them into the now—that’s when something new really happens. I try to be as open to all these factors as possible.

Food seems to be everywhere these days—in TV, politics, symposia like your own. Is it possible to take food too seriously?

No. I don’t think we take it too seriously at all. On the contrary, sometimes the discussion is a little bit stupid and not serious enough. But the thing is that food is not just food. If you want to say that, you’re kidding yourself. It’s a bit of an old-fashioned statement, even—a classic, Westernized, Protestant statement food as sustenance and please don’t try to make it anything more than that. If that’s the level we choose to look at it, then what do you really need? To me, food is one of the things that makes life most livable—just like having a comfortable place to live in. Do we really need it in order to stay alive, in the same way that we just need to food to sustain us?
At the same time, there are so many critical issues, such as sustainability and agriculture, that surround food all the time. I think we are also realizing, more and more, how important the meal is. I know that now that I have a family. It’s easy to come across as some sort of romantic, when you talk about the importance of the meal and the family aspect, but I really believe that it’s important and I can see that it is.
So I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you take food seriously. When it’s treated as a fashion or as a way of generating huge revenue through bad TV programs, then it’s probably a bit too much. But putting food in a cultural light and valuing it as an important part of our cultural upbringing, I think that can’t be taken too seriously. I think it’s a good thing.

What are some of the ideas and innovations in the food world that you’re most excited about right now?

In the past five years, the exploration within fermentation is definitely the most exciting thing. That’s going to continue for a long time and maybe just become a natural, integrated part of any cuisine in the future. We forget bread and brewing coffee are fermentation. There are new explorations happening that might give us some new flavors on par with those.

I want to ask you about the Time magazine story in which you were named a “god of food.”

Yeah, I haven’t even seen it yet!

But you’ve heard the criticism?

No, I haven’t! Ever since I arrived in America, people have been talking about it. But it’s a typical American thing that everybody in America thinks that everybody understands what’s happening in America. But no, I haven’t. I actually saw on the airplane coming here. I arrived here yesterday and then this morning somebody said that there’s been criticism of it. But in Denmark they didn’t even talk about it, nobody wrote about it. What’s going on? I’d love to understand what’s going on.

Basically, the article profiles important leaders and innovators in the food world—people who are changing the way we eat and think about food worldwide. The controversy is that only four of the people profiled are women, none of them chefs, so people are asking, where are the female chefs? I know you weren’t involved in writing the article but—

I didn’t even know they were going to put us on the cover! They don’t tell you these things. They say, “Ah, we can see you in town at the same time, can we take a picture of you? We’re writing about friendship.” And then, two months later, you’re on an airplane and somebody tells you you’re on the cover of Time magazine.

Which female chefs do you think should have made Time’s list?

I can tell you that I met yesterday, for the first time, Alice Waters. I was totally starstruck. I was almost—I didn’t know what to do. To me she is a definite food “hero,” food…god, if you will.
But there are so many extraordinarily powerful women who deserve credit and attention. Last year at the MAD symposium, we had Vandata Shiva , but of course she’s not a cook. Then there’s Margot Henderson, who runs very quietly a restaurant called Rochelle Canteen in London, but she gave a very powerful talk. And I read the memoir by Gabrielle Hamilton but I’ve actually never visited the restaurant. Every time I come to America, it’s always an in-and-out trip. . . . If there’s one girl who will be in the future, it’s my pastry chef, Rosio Sanchez , who’s from Chicago but of Mexican descent. She’s extremely good.
When I started 21 years ago, women in kitchens were a total novelty. Now, 8 out of 24 chefs in our kitchen are women. I’ve stopped thinking about it so much. Although if there are periods where we get too male-dominated in the kitchen, I always try to create a balance and get more women in the kitchen.

Because they add something different?

Yeah, there’s no question about it. It’s very important, that balance. In many ways the style of cooking that we do fits more with the sort of delicate touch of a woman as opposed to this big, rumbling male with his big, clumsy hands. I’m exaggerating here, but you know what I mean. And the sensibility in flavor—women are a bit sharper in finding these small, delicate tones here and there, when tasting stuff. Kitchens are also notoriously macho. It’s a good thing to have more females in the kitchen to add balance and to take that a bit away, not to soften things up but to bring the discussion to a more serious tone.

Do you think there are more women now because the culture in the kitchen has changed, or because there are more opportunities for women? Why do you think it’s changed so much in your lifetime?

I don’t know. I think there are more opportunities. It’s not so much of a blue-collar trade that it used to be, ten years ago. When we started operating Noma, it wasn’t unusual that at least once a year, somebody would come to me and say, “Hey, I’m not coming to work for the next six months, I’m going to jail.” It sounds crazy, but that’s the way it was. It was like seeing one of those old-fashioned movies of steel plants, where men were working with fire and shouting dirty jokes at each other, fighting and drinking. Not that long ago, kitchens were very much like that. I think things are slowly changing—from guys leaving to go to jail, to having a Harvard dropout in our cuisine. So I think the whole environment has become more friendly—for anybody, really. It used to be you’d become a cook because you can’t be anything else.

Redzepi delivers a TED talk in London in 2011. Photo via Flickr, © Sam Friedrich/acumenimages.com
Now that you’ve met Alice Waters, do you have any other food heroes that you still want to meet?

One that made me very sad that I never met was Charlie Trotter . I never got to meet him; I only texted with him. That’s another thing about the trade that we’re horrible at—celebration of icons and people who really did something. If they don’t have the latest, freshest new thing, then they just get forgotten. I remember in the 1990s there were two things you read. One of them was White Heat, by Marco Pierre White. The other was books by Charlie Trotter.

Where will you be dining while you’re in the U.S.?

I’m going to Alinea for the first time. and I are actually old-time pals, but we never visit each other’s restaurants, so I’m an Alinea virgin and I’m really looking forward to it.
Redzepi will speak at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on Thursday, November 14, at 6:45PM, with book signing to follow. The event is sold out, but tickets may become available. Visit smithsonianassociates.org for more information.

‘We need 140 live shrimp now!’: the inside story of Noma Japan

René Redzepi uprooted his award-winning restaurant from Copenhagen to Tokyo for a month. ‘There’s a huge chance of failure,’ said the chef as OFM joined him behind the scenes before the big opening

The kitchen was two courses into its trial run when something began to go terribly wrong. Made from several varieties of local fruit set in a pool of kelp oil and dotted with tiny rounds of sancho pepper, the citrus dish’s bright juiciness and deep savouriness were delicious enough to encourage bowl-licking. But you can’t lick a bowl you don’t receive. Meant to contain 11 perfectly rounded segments of fruit, freed from their bitter membranes and carefully trimmed so as to remain upright, each portion had to be made à la minute, which is to say in the tragically short interval between when the live shrimp for the first course were relieved of their shells and the shavings of frozen monkfish liver for the third were placed onto their rectangles of sourdough toast. In the rush, some citrus pieces emerged with edges less seductively curved than others – a flaw perceptible only to the increasingly agitated chef, who sent dish after imperfect dish back to be remade. Out in the dining room, the restaurant’s front of house staff – the beneficiaries of that night’s practice dinner – waited with polite restlessness as the dish failed to appear. Sommelier Mads Kleppe gazed balefully at the empty place setting in front of him. “If this were any place but Noma,” he sighed, “I’d be worried.”

With two days to go before they opened at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo on 9 January, the staff of Noma had no shortage of things to worry about. There was the entirely new menu made from ingredients most of the staff had never seen before, let alone cooked with. There were products that appeared one day, only to become unavailable two days later. There was the formal dining room, complete with ornate moldings and a mirror-trimmed pass, that had to be transformed into something more suitably Nordic. There was the jetlagged staff putting in 20-hour days, and the reservation requests that came by the tens of thousands, and the kind of extreme pressure that only legions of clamouring journalists, bloggers and photographers can engender. But mostly there was the simple fact of it: the restaurant considered by many to be the best in the world had temporarily uprooted its staff from home in Copenhagen to a place literally and figuratively a world away. And no one – not even René Redzepi, the chef whose wildly ambitious dream this was – knew if they could pull it off.

In terms of its bookings, the “residency” was a success before it opened: every single one of the 3,456 reservations was snatched up within a day of being offered, while 58,000 people were shunted to the waiting list. But in every other aspect – food, service, finances, and reputation – Noma Japan is the riskiest thing the 37-year-old Redzepi has ever done.

  Head chef Daniel Giusti and René Redzepi discuss the menu and guest list at Noma.

Like many risky ventures, it was born of a bad experience. “You know what really made me decide to do it?” the chef asks. “Norovirus.” Redzepi first visited Japan in 2009, and fell in love with the country, its culture and its food. He had toyed with the idea of doing some kind of project there, but it took a 2013 outbreak, which sickened 63 of Noma’s customers and unleashed a tide of negative media coverage, to make him pull the trigger. “Everyone was shattered by that,” he says. Noma dropped to No 2 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, and that made it even worse. “We were really down, and needed to do something new, something that would bring us together.” Redzepi told his business partner, investor Marc Blazer, what he wanted to do. Blazer approached the general manager of the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo, Anthony Costa.
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“Here we had the greatest chef in the world, and he wanted to come to Japan,” recalls Costa. “I thought, ‘I have the ability to make his dream come true.’” But it took the citrus – that same citrus that would prove so vexing all those months later – to make the hotelier realise that what Redzepi had in mind was not your average invited-chef gig. “We walked into the banqueting kitchen and René immediately went up to the fruit and stuck his nose in it. He was smelling it, rubbing it, licking it, eating the skin. At first I thought, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ but then I realised that I was witnessing his intensity.”

Although Noma is known for its artful use of only those products that grow in the Nordic region, Redzepi made it clear he wouldn’t be recreating their menu from home. Rather, he and his staff would take their dedication to expressing time and place and apply it to the ingredients they found in Japan. Over the next year, members of his staff travelled eight times to Japan to source plants and seafood. Then, on 1 December, the restaurant’s three senior research chefs – Rosio Sánchez, Lars Williams and Thomas Frebel – arrived to begin testing new dishes. They worked in the dark, hot and cramped kitchen three floors below ground that the hotel’s restaurants use for prep work. By the time that Redzepi and head chef Daniel Giusti showed up in the days following Christmas, the development team had the menu more or less in place.

Admittedly, there were disappointments. They hadn’t, for example, come up with a good enough recipe for the cod milt that Williams in particular was keen to cook with. (“Lars has drunk gallons of cod sperm,” Redzepi chortled to anyone who would listen. “He’s pregnant with cod sperm.”) But with few exceptions, the recipes – the 12 that would comprise the standard tasting menu plus a few options – were startlingly flavourful and visually spectacular. “I’m super happy,” said Sánchez as she folded a shiny, rubber-like sheet of dehydrated black garlic into what looked to be edible origami. “And René’s happy. Which makes all of this a lot easier.”

But developing recipes they were happy with wasn’t the same as serving them to 108 covers a day, six days a week. Japanese chef Shinobu Namae was taking chunks of time away from his own Michelin–starred restaurant, L’Effervescence, to help Noma’s team source ingredients, but even he couldn’t promise their supply. “We need 140 live shrimp every day,” said Giusti. “Maybe they won’t come in because the seas were too rough for boats to go out. Maybe they’ll come in but half of them will be dead.” He rubbed his forehead wearily. “We never know if something is going to work out until we have it in our hands.”


  Crown roots preparation. Photograph: Shiho Fukada/Panos Pictures

Unpredictable ingredients weren’t the only thing setting nerves on edge. Still adorned in the formal style of the Mandarin Oriental’s Signature restaurant, the dining room was several chaotic light years away from Noma’s pared-down Nordic aesthetic. The new tables and chairs – designed by furniture maker Carl Hansen and shipped from Denmark – were still in their crates, the purple velvet banquettes that lined one corner were still in place, and glass walls still divided the room. Each time Redzepi walked by the massive, ornately carved mahogany table in front of the pass, he gave it an angry thump. “Are you sure we can’t do anything about this?”
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Money too was weighing heavily on his mind. The Mandarin Oriental had agreed to a generous deal that provided the entire Noma staff, plus some of their partners and children, with housing, meals and laundry for the whole residency. It also granted the restaurant a budget of $140,000 to re-do the kitchen and dining room to its specifications – changes which it would then reverse once Noma packed up. In exchange, the restaurant had to pay a percentage of its sales as rent to the hotel. They would split the reservations between them. Of course, the Mandarin Oriental was also reaping the benefits of having the best restaurant in the world in house. “We didn’t do it for the money,” says general manager Costa. “We’re doing it to inspire our own staff.”


Redzepi also emphasised that he was doing it to inspire and challenge his team. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned about costs. In the early planning stages, he had been cautiously hopeful that the arrangement might actually earn Noma – which in Copenhagen squeaks by on the thinnest of margins – a bit of cash. But a few days after he set the price of the meal at 40,200 yen (now about £230), the Japanese currency began to slide. It finally bottomed out 12% lower than his team had budgeted, and instead of hoping they might turn a profit they began praying to break even. Yet even that diminished goal was looking uncertain. For one thing, the restaurant had banked on 80% of its diners choosing the wine pairing – at an additional cost of 27,400 yen – to go along with the tasting menu. But in the pre-bookings, a mere 18% had opted to do so.

Expenses were just as painful. The live shrimp cost $8 a piece. The uni [sea urchin], which wasn’t even as good as the stuff they had delivered live at home, was $12 a portion. A single tuna collar – which Redzepi hoped to serve to VIP guests as an extra course if he and the team could get the recipe right – cost $150, and they tested one a day for a month. All the tableware had been specially made by local artisans for the residency, and was expensive enough ($200 for a plate; $120 for a spoon) that merely thinking about dishwashing gave the chefs palpitations. “The full set for 54 people cost more than it did to fly 70 people over here from Copenhagen,” said Redzepi. Giusti, who until that point had been mindlessly playing with a set of chopsticks ($80), gingerly set them down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Redzepi speaks to the team during a meeting before lunch. Photograph: Shiho Fukada/Panos Pictures

Yet of all the anxieties under which the Noma chefs worked, the pressure of getting it right was the worst. In Japan, Noma has been under intense scrutiny from the media. Food writers from around the globe rushed to get seats at the opening of the year. So too did prominent chefs: Massimo Bottura, Bo Bech, Ivan Orkin, and most dauntingly of all, the 89-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono. Even foodies without reservations turned up in Japan, hoping to get, if not a last-minute opening, then at least the chance to say they were in Tokyo at the same time. “Everybody’s coming, and if they’re not coming, they’re watching,” says Redzepi. “We have western chefs asking why we’re not making “our” food, and Japanese chefs saying we don’t know what we’re doing, look how those idiots cook tofu. There’s a huge chance of failure.”
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Waiting for the elevators one day, Frebel mentioned innocently that he hated not being able to open the windows in his room. Redzepi bristled. “You have this amazing opportunity and you’re complaining?” His voice rose. “You have the rest of your life to open windows.” But the outbursts were relatively few. Creatively, Redzepi is invigorated rather than paralysed by the fear of failure. When the bus containing the rest of his staff pulled up to the hotel, and those who had already arrived came out to welcome them, his excitement was infectious. “Guys,” he said as he scanned the bleary, now smiling faces in front of him, “we have the chance to do something extraordinary here.”

Admittedly, the extraordinary began with a specimen jar. At their initial briefing, the staff learned Japan has its own problems with norovirus, and the Noma team would be expected to follow the hotel’s preventative protocols, including a semi-monthly stool sample. But it wasn’t long before they got down to work. In the kitchen, chefs taught cooks each of the new dishes, showing them how to arrange the glazed cuttlefish so it looked like a neat row of soba noodles, and reminding them that they had to cut the citrus as precisely as sashimi. The freshwater shijimi clams solicited a special degree of disbelief. Set atop a kombu tart spread with wild kiwi (“like a bad pizza,” Redzepi joked), the clams were each the size of a hazelnut. It required a kilo to make three portions, it took 14 cooks three hours to open enough for a single service.

Initially, things were a little calmer for the dining room staff, for the simple reason that they didn’t yet have a dining room to work with. The design team was still unrolling rice paper over the glass divider walls that Redzepi hated, still putting together the tables, and still building – from scratch – a mud-walled private dining room. One designer spent a day pruning the five or six bamboo plants that had been brought in, then straightening their leaves, one by one, with a hair iron. The front of house used the time to train the Mandarin Oriental staff who would be joining them in Noma’s warm and informal style of service. When manager James Spreadbury explained that he might occasionally take his leave of a customer with a friendly high-five, a look of terror collectively crossed their faces. But the relaxed dress code went over far more easily. “Do you mean,” asked one in a breathless whisper, “that we don’t have to wear heels to work?”

Meanwhile in the dining room, general manager Lau Richter was struggling to come up with a solution for the dining room cabinets that would house the fleets of glasses needed during service. He had chosen the cabinets back in Copenhagen, but now that they were in the Mandarin, they looked out of place, and Redzepi was unhappy. “They’re unacceptable,” the chef said. “They look like they belong at a Thai beach resort.” Shoulders slumping, Richter set off to investigate his options.

Hours later, he was still pursuing solutions when the trial run started. Redzepi was furious: how could the manager communicate to the others what the dishes tasted like if he hadn’t tasted them himself? (Lau would have a chance the next day). But it was hardly the only problem. Waiters had to dodge the ladders of the still-unfinished designers. There were long waits between the courses and in some cases, including the citrus, the kitchen couldn’t manage to prepare enough plates. The ducks burnt and had to be remade. Bad jazz seeped into the dining room from the lounge next door. When it was all over, Giusti looked as though he was trying to shake off a bad dream. “That was painful.”


Patrons dine at Noma in Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo. Photograph: Shiho Fukada/Panos Pictures

The next morning – the day on which the kitchen would open for a soft run for friends and family – everyone looked worse for wear. No one had left before 1am the night before and some – like Richter, who was still trying to fix the cabinet problem – had stayed until 5am, long enough to welcome most of the cooks back to work. One sous chef had already lost his voice; another gulped paracetemol. Giusti in particular looked like hell; his eyes were so swollen from allergies or stress that a doctor had to make a kitchen house call to deliver a cortisone shot. Cans of Red Bull were passed around the kitchen. Redzepi strolled in and cheerfully opened the blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows. For what was already the thousandth time, everyone turned instinctively to gaze at Mt. Fuji in the distance.
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“It’s a symbol for us,” he said. “That’s the mountain we have to climb.”

“The mountain we have to climb barefoot,” added Richter.

“Barefoot and with someone gripping our balls,” replied Redzepi with a grin. All was forgiven.

To everyone’s delight, the meal for friends and family on 8 January went smoothly. The diners were audibly enraptured by it all: the silky richness of the fresh-made tofu and the earthy sugar of a sweet potato dessert; the warmth of the service staff; the unforgettable sight of the sun setting over Fuji. There would be more obstacles to come on when the restaurant opened to the public the next day: a $200 plate broke; the design team was still trying to cover up the mirrors on the pass an hour before the start of service; the dishwashers got sick, forcing two of the Mandarin Oriental managers, dressed in ties and formal slacks, to step behind the sink. Only 10 of the really good botan ebi came in that day so the kitchen had to round out the live shrimp course with langoustines. But when Redzepi asked his exhausted staff that night if it was worth getting rid of the preparation-intensive shimiju clams so that they could get two extra hours of sleep, he got a resounding “no”.

Their determination surely helps explain why Redzepi was already thinking about the future. After the last of his first paying customers in Tokyo had left, he stood with Williams and Giusti in the temporarily quiet kitchen. “Just wait,” he said. “By next week, we’re going to start getting bored.” He sucked at a bit of leftover grapefruit until a mischievous smile crossed his face. “We’re just going to have to come up with something new to do next.”
 
 
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