N by norwegian on henne kirkeby kro

THE MAN WHO SAID

TO NOMA Paul Cunningham turned down the chance to head up what would become the world’s best restaurant. Six years on, as he tells James Clasper, he has no regrets Photography⠄Chris

Tonnesen

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ometimes I want to stick two fingers up at the Nordic bandwagon because it’s like the emperor’s new clothes,” says Paul Cunningham, as he pours a bottle of beer into a bowl of flour. “No matter what restaurant you go to, you know you’re going to get the same food.”

“It’s really problematic if everyone does the same stuff, day in, day out,” the chef says, as he begins to whip up a batter. “I had one of the worst desserts in my entire life at Noma. It tasted of nothing. I had a little bite and sent it back.”

In Denmark – where the New Nordic movement is like a culinary religion and the restaurant Noma its high temple – these sentiments are something akin to heresy. But if anyone is qualified to nit-pick, it’s Cunningham.

One of the leading lights of the Copenhagen scene in the early noughties, he was Claus Meyer’s first choice to run Noma when it was planned in 2003. “Claus called and offered me the role of developing the New Nordic kitchen,” he explains.

“I thought the idea was amazing but it didn’t make sense for an English guy to do it. And,” he follows up with a smile, “there was no way I couldn’t use basil for the rest of my life, or Japanese rice wine vinegar, or soy sauce.” Instead he recommended a young Danish chef named René Redzepi – and the rest is history.

Fourteen years on, it’s hard to imagine every chef would feel good about saying no to Noma,

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but Cunningham’s slightly scathing take on New Nordic isn’t sour grapes. He and Redzepi are still good friends and he’s eaten more happily at Noma dozens of times. “I could never have imagined creating the success that he has done for New Nordic cuisine,” he says.

Besides, Cunningham has been ploughing his own furrow very successfully, as head chef at farmto-table restaurant Henne Kirkeby Kro, a 200-yearold inn on the rugged west coast of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. Since he took over in 2012, “Our Henne”, as the 48-year-old likes to call it, has gone from humble pub to destination restaurant. Last year won its first Michelin star – and this spring has equalled Noma’s two.

We pay him a visit one Friday morning in the spring, shortly after news of the second star. He’s in the kitchen when we arrive, prepping for a Friday lunch service. An imposing man with a bald head, scruffy beard and stylish spectacles, today he’s wearing a sleeveless jacket, baggy trousers and slippers. It’s an unorthodox look for a Michelinstarred chef – “I look like an old tramp”, he admits, in typically candid fashion.

Around him a dozen young chefs are diligently deboning gurnard and slicing Maris Piper potatoes, preparing a surprisingly simple dish: fish and chips.

He finesses the batter, adding another glug of beer – a malty ale from Funen – and mixes it in. “If you’re »

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going to an inn on the west coast of Denmark,” he explains, “you aren’t going for cutting-edge food.”

What his diners are coming for – in numbers as close to droves as his 12-table establishment will allow – are simple, honest dishes. The menu today features baked cod with brown shrimp and cabbage – which comes with a silky butter sauce that’s rich and comforting in a way cutting-edge dishes rarely are.

“Butter’s illegal in Copenhagen, isn’t it?” he jokes.

There’s a chicken dish being plated up too, which must be up there with the most chicken-y chicken ever: a plump breast that Cunningham says has been “roasted, rested, roasted, rested”, taken off the bone, and finished in a pan with butter, herbs and garlic. “It’s all about the flavour, not how beautiful it looks,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be served under a dome of citric acid or any of that hocus-pocus.”

This kind of cooking is a far cry from his time in Copenhagen in the noughties, when hocus-pocus cuisine – “smoke and broken gels” – was exactly what he did. As head chef and part-owner of The Paul, his eponymous restaurant in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, he won a Michelin star in 2003 and retained it for eight years on the trot.

In 2011, however, Cunningham woke up one morning unable to move his right arm. Doctors diagnosed a blood clot in his shoulder – brought on by stress – and kept him in hospital for five weeks.

Alarmed by his brush with death – “10cm up my neck and it was game over” – he closed The Paul later that year.

One gets the sense that this was a turning point, and the decision to come out to Henne, a 19thcentury thatched timber coaching inn “in the »

“It doesn’t have to be served under a dome of citric acid or any of that hocus-pocus”

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Previous page⁄ Spring chicken, served with rocket and mustard Below & above⁄ Paul Cunningham’s Henne Kirkeby Kro, and the restaurant’s own pigs

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“When you come here, you’re getting a chance to taste the area – in the area” middle of nowhere” the following year was out of a need for something more relaxed.

It was also a kind of return to the past, for Cunningham, who first cut his teeth in the kitchens of an Essex pub, in the south of England. In fact, the Fleur de Lys in Widdington, where he started out peeling potatoes, is just a 10-minute drive from The Cricketers, Jamie Oliver’s parents pub. Despite being fully assimilated into Danish life (he’s been here since the 1990s, when he met his Danish wife), there are still touches of unreconstructed British bloke, as evidenced by today’s kitchen soundtrack: cockney musicians Chas & Dave.

Like Oliver – another “Essex boy made good” – he still peppers his speech with argot from the motherland. Dishes are “lovely”; colleagues “my love”. In gruff pub landlord style, he demands I “sit down and eat” when pudding arrives – a rich chocolate mousse with sea salt and Tuscan olive oil.

It’s a dish that typifies his new approach to cooking. Given the freedom to start again, he took a step away from both the jiggery pokery of molecular dining and the aestheticism of New Nordic. His philosophy isn’t about techniques or rules, but simply that food tastes better when it’s made with good ingredients, innovative cooking – and most of all with feeling – “happy people make good food.”

Left & above⁄ Henne’s take on traditional Danish tartelette, with tartar; the view to the coast at Henne Strand, with the North Sea beyond

Henne today acts as a showcase for top-notch ingredients from the fields and waters of western Jutland – like turbot caught up the coast in Hvide Sande, leeks grown in Henne’s 4,000m2 kitchen garden, and salt marsh lamb raised on an organic farm up the road. “When you come here, you’re getting a chance to taste the area – in the area,” Cunningham says.

Yet despite the rich local pickings, he’s not dogmatic about indigenous ingredients. The gurnard used in the fish and chips comes from England, for example, and the menu has exotic notes of ginger, caviar, pineapple and tonka beans.

“This is a local kitchen with local ingredients, but I spice my kitchen with my travels,” he says. As a keen traveller who shuts Henne to tour the world for three months of the year. “It would be wrong of me not to be inspired by other cuisines,” he explains.

Despite all the acclaim, he retains the air of an underdog, expressing delight that Michelin stars have come to west Jutland: “We got them here, not at a posh restaurant in Copenhagen”.

It’s somewhat ironic that Henne was his escape, and now he’s achieved more than at either of his »

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Hvide Sande

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Stauning Distillery

Henne Mølle Å Badehotel Billund Airport

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Ribe

Fanø

Henne’s two beehives are decorated with Britain’s Union Jack and the Danish flag, representing Cunningham’s two homes

two previous one-starred restaurants (his first gained at Copenhagen’s Søllerød Kro).

For the moment, Henne remains the culinary highlight of western Jutland, but it can’t be long until it experiences the kind of renaissance that diners have enjoyed in other parts of Denmark.

One can’t help but feel that ambitious young chefs might do well to move on from the dogma of New Nordic and follow Cunningham’s lead. After all, he appears to have found a formula that works – good, old-fashioned honest cooking, using the best seasonal ingredients, served in an unstuffy, unapologetic way.

As if on cue, a waiter emerges from the kitchen bearing a plate brimming with beer-battered fish, chunky chips and tartare sauce. Well-heeled guests sitting in a revamped 19th-century dining room catch the bouncing chorus of a Chas & Dave song.

It’s not your usual Michelin-starred approach, but then Paul Cunningham isn’t your usual Michelinstarred chef. And yet he’s got two stars. Wouldn’t it be funny if he got three before Noma did? He just smiles: “We didn’t change to get one star, we didn’t change to get two, and you’ll never hear from my lips that we’ll change to get three.” hennekirkebykro.dk Henne Kirkeby is one hour from Billund; Norwegian flies to Billund from Oslo, Alicante and Barcelona.

Book flights, a hotel and a rental car at norwegian.com

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EAT YOUR WAY AROUND JUTLAND 1. Fanø This tiny island is a foodie’s windswept dream. As well as Sonderho Kro, another 18th-century inn turned worldclass restaurant with rooms, it’s home to microbrewery Fanø Bryghus, which supplies Noma’s beer; Fanø Laks, famous for its cold-smoked salmon; and Rudbecks deli, which makes and sells organic breads and sea-water ice-cream. fanoebryghus.dk, fanoe-laks.com, rudbecks.dk 2. Stauning Distillery Scottish single malts now have some unlikely competition from Denmark; distilleries like Fary Lochan and Thy Whisky have been winning critical plaudits.

Last December, the world’s largest liquor company, Diageo, invested over DKK 100 million in Stauning Whisky – guided visits and tastings are available on request. stauningwhisky.com 3. Ribe A failed attempt to create an oyster-export business in the 1960s has left a serious surfeit of the bivalves in the Wadden Sea, along the south Jutland coast. A thriving industry has sprung up, with “safaris” out to harvest visitors’ own, and all-you-can-eat buffets. Fans should aim for Oyster Trophy Week in October. vadehavscentret.dk 4. Hvide Sande This quiet holiday spot doubles as a major fishing port. Restaurants like Spisestedet (smokehouse) and Sandgaarden give visitors the opportunity to sample the freshest North Sea fish, while in April the annual herring festival attracts eaters and anglers alike. hvidesande.com 5. Henne Mølle Å Badehotel A stunning spot situated amid the sand dunes west of Henne Kirkeby Kro, the hotel was designed by architect Poul Henningsen – a luminary of the Danish Modern movement – while the restaurant recently received organic certification. hennemoelleaa.dk