Savor Flavor

April 2023

Explore: Scandinavia

Eating the North: An Analysis of the Cookbook

“NOMA: Time & Place in Nordic Cuisine”

Noma Spawned a World of Imitators, but the Restaurant Remains an Original

Must-Try Foods From a Norwegian Supermarket

Viking Soul Food Expands to a Restaurant in Woodstock

The Nordic Diet: How to Eat Like a Scandinavian

The ‘New Nordic Food’ Manifesto

Nordic Food Transitions

Sweden Gate — Why We Don’t Feed Guests in Scandinavia

The Mainstreaming of Sports Nutrition in the Norwegian Food Culture

The First Professor in Food Culture From Tourist Product to Ordinary Food

Noma Spawned a World of Imitators, but the Restaurant Remains an Original

As the renowned Copenhagen destination prepares to end its regular service, Pete Wells examines its complicated legacy.

by Pete Wells

Before I went to Noma, Noma came to me. René Redzepi’s pioneering restaurant in Copenhagen announced Monday that 2024 would be the final year it will be open for regular business, as it transforms itself into a different kind of enterprise, Noma 3.0. Tables for farewell meals at Noma 2.0 will no doubt be next to impossible to book, but that’s been the story for years. I piggybacked on an old colleague’s reservation when I wrote

rocks, seashells, logs and rustic pieces of hand-thrown pottery that had started to replace delicate French porcelain as the preferred objects for transporting food from the kitchen to the table.

about Noma in 2018, two months after the restaurant assumed its current shape and location. By that time, though, Noma had already been in New York City for years.

It was here in the one-bite appetizers of reindeer lichen and puffed fish skin, although they weren’t called appetizers, or amuses, either — suddenly they were “snacks.” Noma was here in the signal-orange berries of wild sea buckthorn that had begun turning

up in cocktails, jams, sauces and cheese courses. It was here in the sour, heartshaped leaves of wood sorrel and other plants that Mr. Redzepi and his cooks picked, snipped and dug up in their search for the building blocks of a strictly regional cuisine following the principles of the New Nordic manifesto.

It was here in the burning hay that perfumed individual ingredients and at times entire dining rooms. It was here in the keening acidity of pickled and fermented ingredients served in the early part of the meal, and in the gentle sweetness of parsnips and other vegetables that took the place of fruit in desserts.

It was here in the slates, rocks, seashells, logs and rustic pieces of hand-thrown pottery that had started to replace delicate French porcelain as the preferred objects for transporting food from the kitchen to the table.

It was here in the bony, opaque, angular, off-center, unpredictable, odd-smelling wines made in the Jura and the Loire and elsewhere by natural and biodynamic methods — bottles that had been cult

Perhaps no other restaurant has come up with as many ideas that were shoplifted by as many other chefs.

Photo: Ditte Isager

items in France for years but had rocketed to global prominence when Pontus Elofsson, Noma’s first wine director, made them the near-exclusive focus of his list.

These and other Noma-isms began washing up on New York City’s shores not long after 2010, when the restaurant was voted best in the world by a British magazine using a methodology that was itself fairly opaque, off-center and odd-smelling.

Noma’s Final Course

The renowned Copenhagen restaurant, repeatedly rated among the world’s best, will close for regular service at the end of 2024.

• An ‘Unsustainable’ Model: The chef René Redzepi, Noma’s creator, says fine dining at the highest level, with its grueling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point.

• A World of Imitators: “I don’t think any restaurant came up with so many ideas that were shoplifted by so many other places in so many other cities quite so quickly,” our food critic writes of Noma.

• Inside Noma: In 2018, our critic went to Copenhagen to eat at the pioneering restaurant. Here’s what he learned.

• The Ethics of Fine Dining: Recent reports have spurred a backlash against star restaurants like Noma for their use of unpaid labor that is crucial to the creation of the mind-boggling dishes for which they are known.

Other restaurants — El Bulli, for example, and Chez Panisse — have been widely imitated. But I don’t think any restaurant came up with so many ideas that were shoplifted by so many other places in so many other cities quite so quickly. Noma invented a lot of bits, and they got around. At times these bits could look like mannerisms in search of a manner.

Early on, especially from 2012 to 2015, chefs were copying things Mr. Redzepi did without understanding why he did them in the first place. For a while, when you walked into a brand-new dining room in New York with a modern Scandinavian look, you could predict with confidence that you were not going to be eating any tomatoes that night. The reason? They don’t grow well in Denmark, so Noma doesn’t serve them.

Forming an idea of the real Noma from all these distant echoes, I was like somebody who had never seen Michael Jackson, trying to imagine what his concerts were like based on seeing a subway performer moonwalk.

And then I went to Copenhagen and, by the end of a two- or three-hour lunch, all the Noma-isms fit together like puzzle pieces to form one whole picture. The restaurant that had inspired so many imitators was fluid, it was graceful, it was coherent.

Two things surprised me most. One was how original Noma still seemed, even though I’d essentially been watching its sizzle reel for a decade. The other was how enjoyable it was.

Few of the restaurants influenced by Noma captured this. Each time every available worker ran to the front door to greet an arriving group, I thought, “How corny” — then watched as the newcomers broke out in smiles, the way I had.

Like anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes on Instagram, I knew that the food would be strikingly, painstakingly arranged without looking artificial — a homage to natural forms was the reigning visual motif. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the shimmering

beauty of what came to the table, like the iridescent silhouette of a starfish brushed on a plate with edible paint and covered with the sparkling roe of wild Danish trout.

And I discovered the flavors of Noma. Some unprepossessing liquid that looked as if it had simply seeped out of a clam or mussel would turn out to be a sauce full of pleasure and complexity that would come at you in rolling waves. The next course would do it again, but in a different key at another volume. Feats like that, repeated in variations that never become dull, are what make Mr. Redzepi a great chef and not just a sculptor working with materials that go bad after a few days.

I ate that day with Jeff Gordinier, a former Times reporter who was finishing a book about his adventures with Mr. Redzepi

Some unprepossessing liquid that looked as if it had simply seeped out of a clam or mussel would turn out to be a sauce full of pleasure and complexity that would come at you in rolling waves.

(“Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping and Risking It All With the Greatest Chef in the World”). At the end of lunch we were given a tour of the compound. The fermentation suite was full of jars of grains and yeasts and fruits whose molecules were breaking down and rearranging. The research and development laboratory was ready for new discoveries. The greenhouse was under construction. Mr. Redzepi explained that the architecture was modular. Any building, any room, could be repurposed in the future. Even the

Natural materials like stones and branches were arranged on plates when they did not replace plates entirely.

Photo: Erik Refner

Desserts have been made with unorthodox ingredients, like plankton.

Photo: Ditte Isager

kitchen. “We’re in here for life,” he told Mr. Gordinier. “But we’re not in here for one thing. It can change.”

I did not guess that Mr. Redzepi would one day decide to reinvent Noma as something other than a restaurant. But I can’t quite say I’ll be sorry when it’s gone, either. In many ways, its excellence had become inseparable from the culture of overkill that now defines the windswept high peaks of fine dining.

The competition to be “the world’s best restaurant” — a meaningless title, but one that has an irresistible pull for chefs and headline writers — has distorted cooking, warped service, inflated check totals, padded menus and stolen hours from customers’ lives and many, many more

hours from the lives of chefs and their workers, whether paid or unpaid. Most of the overkill restaurants could not last a week without free labor.

Once he gets rid of those pesky diners, Mr. Redzepi apparently means to focus Noma on research and development of new products that he could sell. Maybe he could ask a small team of scientists to look into ways to shrink great dining experiences, like the one Noma gives its lucky diners, down to a size that is both more human and more humane.

In many ways, its excellence had become inseparable from the culture of overkill that now defines the windswept high peaks of fine dining.

René Redzepi has been widely copied, sometimes by chefs who do not fully understand his thinking.

Photo: Erik Refner

Must-Try Foods From a Norwegian Supermarket

by Matthew Paul Gundersen

Discover the weird and wonderful food items you can buy from a supermarket in Norway. View the circles on the map to see where in Norway these products come from.

Kaviar (and other food in tubes)

In Norwegian supermarkets you will find many different types of foods in tubes, from cheese to kaviar. A very popular choice for Norwegians, kaviar is a smoked cod roe which is creamed then pumped into tubes.

Kaviar goes great on bread or crispbread (knekkebrød). It is convenient to squirt onto bread because of its smooth consistency and because it’s in a tube.

Brown Cheese

When people talk about food in Norway, brown cheese (brunost) comes up more often than not before anything else. Technically it isn’t cheese, rather ‘whey’, a by-product of cheese. It is tan in colour with caramel-like smell. In terms of texture, it can feel quite dry and gummy on the tongue, with taste of caramel to match its smell. It seems to go through various stages of taste as its consumed. Some types of brown cheese are sweeter, so you can find one that’s right for you.

Mackerel and other tinned fish

Norway is a country famed for its fishing industry. The most popular fish in supermarkets is tinned mackerel (but it can also be bought in a tube if you prefer).

Mackerel in supermarkets can come in various flavours, including olive oil and the most popular, in tomato sauce. Because the fish contains high levels of omega 3 fatty acids as well as vitamin B, there are many health benefits to eating mackerel.

Viking Soul Food Expands to a Restaurant in Woodstock

by Isabel Lemus Kristensen

After 12 years of serving lefse—handmade Norwegian potato flatbread baked on a griddle—with sweet and savory fillings, chef-owners Megan Walhood and Jeremy Daniels of the Viking Soul Food cart, are bringing their beloved, Scandinavian-inspired dishes to a brick-andmortar location in Woodstock.

The restaurant continues to offer the Viking Soul Food cart’s fare of Norwegian meatballs, smoked steelhead, pølse sausage, or mushroom hazelnut patties enfolded in lefse. But with the restaurant’s bigger kitchen space, Walhood and Daniels also plan to bring back smørrebrød (Scandinavian open-face sandwiches) and a variety of soups, including seafood chowder in a saffron-shellfish cream and Troll Hunter Stew, which consists of Swedish pork sausage and braised beef finished with gjetost.

The restaurant’s Norwegian meatball lefse is probably Viking Soul Food’s most iconic wrap. The meatballs are smothered in a Norwegian caramelized goat cheese, or gjetost gravy—a recipe from Walhood’s childhood—which is served inside of a lefse wrap paired with surkal, a style of sweet and sour purple cabbage pickled with apple cider vinegar and caraway.

“Jeremy was the one who had the idea to take the lefse and put the meatballs inside, which was kind of taboo, because you normally just have lefse with butter,” Walhood says. “And then we just thought, ’Wait, this totally works. Like, this is street food.”

In early 2010, Walhood and Daniels began creating a menu and purchased a Streamline Duchess trailer, which they named Gudrun, meaning “she who knows the secrets of battle.” By August of that year, Viking Soul Food opened at the Bite on Belmont (4255 SE Belmont St), where it remains to this day. Now, Viking Soul Food is setting up shop at 4422 SE Woodstock Blvd.

With a kitchen facility at the new location, Walhood and Daniels plan to introduce more Scandinavian desserts, such as a banana pudding-filled krumkake, rhubarb trifle, as well as mini pecan pies topped with whipped lingonberry goat cheese.

Walhood says the Woodstock neighborhood could not be more inviting and enthusiastic to have them. “It’s been a pleasure to be around so long and to know people for so long, because folks have been so supportive,” Daniels says. “It’s just been an incredible experience.”

The Scandinavian food cart in Portland found a second home.

THE NORDIC DIET: HOW TO EAT LIKE A SCANDINAVIAN

Discover how eating like some Scandinavians could be better for the environment and even lead to weight loss.

by Andrew McKay

Plant-based, seasonal foods with a healthy dose of fish and seafood and a limit on processed foods are the key components of a Nordic diet.

While it’s not a diet universally enjoyed across the Nordic region, the Nordic diet does form the basis of many people’s approach to eating.

It’s similar to the Mediterranean diet in many respects. So, while there’s no single ‘diet plan’ to follow, inspiration from the Nordics could be used to help you live a more healthy lifestyle.

What is the Nordic Diet?

The Nordic diet is a way of eating that emphasises fresh, whole foods. The main idea is to eat local produce that’s high in nutrients and, as far as possible, unprocessed.

Think about lean proteins, low GI complex carbohydrates and healthy fats. It probably goes without saying that the diet is high in both vegetables and fruits, as they’re the backbone of almost all successful healthy eating systems!

As well as leafy greens that are low in calories and high in fibre, you’re additionally encouraged to eat the beets and the root vegetables that are sometimes avoided on diets. While these veggies can be higher in calories, they contain vital nutrients that are often missing from the more processed foods we eat too much of in the West.

Also, there’s an emphasis on eating legumes such as peas and beans as these are, again, an excellent source of good quality nutrients, including complex carbohydrates, proteins and, importantly, fibre.

The origins of the Nordic diet

The main sources of protein in the Nordic diet are oily fish, such as Norwegian salmon, mackerel, and herring. These contain both protein and essential fatty acids that are important for heart health. Lean protein such

THE NORDIC DIET IS A WAY OF EATING THAT EMPHASISES FRESH, WHOLE FOODS.

THE MAIN IDEA IS TO EAT LOCAL PRODUCE THAT’S HIGH IN NUTRIENTS AND, AS FAR AS POSSIBLE, UNPROCESSED.

Seafood soup. Photo: Erik Refner

as chicken can also take its place as long as decent quantities of oily fish are included.

If you want to eat red meat then game is the way to go, with venison and rabbit much preferred to beef and lamb. The leaner meat is a much healthier option while still giving that full meaty flavour.

Researching this article, I found two conflicting origins for the Nordic diet. The first suggests that the diet was developed by a group of nutritionists, scientists, and chefs in response to the fact that in Nordic countries, levels of obesity were increasing. There’s also some suggestion that the farming practices were becoming unsustainable.

The second theory is that it was developed by scientists and nutritionists outside of Scandinavia after observations that Scandifolk have lower levels of obesity and related diseases than those in other Western countries.

Looking at figures for these things, it seems possible that this is true. Nordic people are healthier than those in other Western countries. But there’s no way of knowing whether that’s down to diet, increased exercise, or the combination of both.

I can’t say for sure which theory is correct. Perhaps both are. It could be that the Nordic scientists developed an eating scheme to help their own people live healthier lives and then others around the world looked at this

and packaged it as the Nordic diet. Either way, it’s clearly centred around the kinds of foods that are easy to obtain in Scandinavia so it seems most likely that it was originally conceived there!

What is New Nordic cuisine?

There is also the term “new Nordic” to consider. Many fancy restaurants around the world have adopted “new Nordic” cuisine, which is essentially a premium version of the Nordic diet.

Such restaurants will feature authentic Nordic ingredients, simply cooked but often served with a twist. This was conceived by a group of Scandinavian chefs in the early 2000s.

Common foods found in a basic Nordic diet. It shares much in common with the Mediterranean diet.

Photo: Ditte Isager

A diet for the environment

As you may or may not expect from the Scandinavians, the health of the person isn’t the only consideration of the Nordic diet. The region is well known for its focus on and connection with environmentalism and ecology, and this extends to the Nordic diet too.

The emphasis on eating locally sourced produce makes sense in two different ways. Firstly, we know that food starts to lose its nutritional value from the time it is picked to the time it is eaten. For the most nutritious food, we need to gather the food and eat it in the shortest time possible.

This also works well for the planet. The best food a person can eat is grown in their own garden. Second best is from the nearest farm and finally, food grown within the same country.

Food grown abroad, which accounts for a huge percentage of the regular Western diet, is bad news for the planet and bad news for our health.

Isn’t this just the Mediterranean diet?

If you’re familiar with various eating schemes that have been promoted for healthy living, you’ll likely be aware of the Mediterranean diet. Said to promote heart health, this is yet another seafood-rich diet with whole grains and as much local produce as possible.

The main difference between this and the Nordic diet is that the Mediterranean version includes olive oil. Instead of this, the Nordic diet focuses on Canola or rapeseed oil, or rapsolje in Norwegian. It is a much easier source of oil to grow in a northern climate.

The two oils are fairly similar, being low in saturated fats. Canola oil is actually healthier in this respect, although olive oil contains higher levels of healthy antioxidants.

Canola oil is also a better cooking oil, as it can tolerate higher temperatures before starting to smoke and degrade. Overall, both ways of eating are much healthier than the carb-, sugar- and fat-heavy diets that many of us eat in the West.

Analysis doesn’t show much difference in outcome between the two, but the Nordic diet is newer and so has been studied much less.

THE REGION IS WELL KNOWN FOR ITS FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTALISM AND ECOLOGY, AND THIS EXTENDS TO THE NORDIC DIET TOO.

Can I lose weight with a Nordic diet?

As with all eating plans, it’s not the system itself that helps you lose weight. Weight loss is all about taking in fewer calories than your body needs, so it has no choice but to burn stores. The main difficulty comes in keeping your metabolism high rather than heading into starvation mode.

The evidence suggests, however, that the Nordic diet is a good eating plan to follow for weight loss. In one study, participants were divided into two groups. One group

was told to follow the Nordic diet but with no further restrictions. The other was told to carry on as they were.

The group that switched to the Nordic diet all lost significant amounts of weight. This was in spite of the fact that they weren’t artificially limiting intake or ‘counting calories’. Instead, it’s likely that the types of food they were eating were leaving them feeling fuller for longer so they naturally ate less.

As with all such studies, sustainability is key. A two-year follow up to that study showed almost all participants had regained the weight they originally lost. It’s known that over time, the body adjusts to different food types, so it gets more efficient at processing them. It’s also well known that adherence to eating schemes decreases over time.

The best aspect, however, is that the Nordic diet is the right type of diet if you’re looking for a healthier way of eating. Rather than

IN OTHER WORDS, THE NORDIC DIET PROVIDES EVERYTHING YOUR BODY NEEDS, IN ROUGHLY THE CORRECT PROPORTIONS, SO THERE’S NO ELEMENT OF STARVATION.

Smørrebrød, a Scandinavian open sandwich featuring herring, mackerel, and salmon.

Photo: Ditte Isager

category-restrictive diets such as Keto or Paleo, or heavy calorie-restrictions such as the infamous cabbage soup diet, the Nordic diet is balanced.In other words, the Nordic diet provides everything your body needs, in roughly the correct proportions, so there’s no element of starvation. In combination with a regular exercise regime, and a healthy dose of will power, it’s likely to help people make progress towards their weight loss goals.

Other health benefits of the Nordic diet

Losing weight is far from the only reason to change eating habits. Even if your weight is fine, you still may be eating too much fat or too little fibre. The diet generally includes double the amount of seafood and fibre compared with the Western diet, while also including dramatically less processed sugar.

The increase in micronutrients in foods, such as vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids has been linked to a decrease in cholesterol, a decrease in heart disease and circulatory problems, a decrease in inflammation and a decrease in diabetes.

Several studies have been conducted into all of these areas and the results are mixed. There is a pronounced and reproducible lowering of blood pressure in every study done so far so that’s a definite win.

In other studies, sometimes cholesterol is lowered and other times there’s not much noticeable effect. Likewise, one study has noted a lowering in blood sugar while another has shown little result.

One thing that is clear, however, is that the Nordic diet is much better for you than eating highly processed sugar-laden foods. This is, in fact, true of almost any other diet!

Is the Nordic diet right for you?

The health benefits of the Nordic diet are worth considering, even for people who aren’t looking to lose weight. If you already

eat ‘kinda healthily’ then you won’t really notice much difference. But if you’re known by name at your local fast food outlets then the benefits could be huge.

One problem you’ll find outside of the region is the availability of certain foods. We can somewhat buy anything we want in most countries, but this completely negates the ecological benefits. Instead of eating ‘what the Nordic people eat’ you’d be better off trying to research what locally grown produce you can find where you live.

So, if you live near a blueberry field, you’ll be much better off eating blueberries than cloudberries that have been imported from Scandinavia. Likewise, if you live on the coast then oily fish will be readily available.

But if not, then it’s better to eat whatever lean protein you can source locally than having someone drive a fish a few hundred miles from the coast!

In other words, the best way of following ‘the Nordic diet’ might be summed up in the principles rather than the exact details.

Lean protein, fruits, veggies, legumes, nuts and seeds, whole foods rather than processed, that are sourced locally will provide a much better diet than you’re probably used to.

IN OTHER WORDS, THE BEST WAY OF FOLLOWING ‘THE NORDIC DIET’ MIGHT BE SUMMED UP IN THE PRINCIPLES RATHER THAN THE EXACT DETAILS.