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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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