Unsure of what he meant, I persist: “Weren’t you making French food with a Nordic touch, using French techniques?”
I remember the berries and greens soaked in vinegar for one year that were the first thing I ate yesterday. It made me feel just like that.
“Yes, absolutely. Mostly it was recipes from France, from the restaurants where I have worked or recipes from El Bulli [where he also worked]; I just changed the ingredients. So I thought that could be a local cuisine somehow, that if you had a French celery velouté and I just used Danish celery and Danish crème fraîche.”
“And I was so fascinated about that from the beginning and then, you know...”
It’s a fine line, I thought. Sometimes it is unclear what we mean by local and to what extent are we are really being original. “But as you were cooking it and seeing the response of diners, you realized that this was not the case. I mean, you weren’t distilling the essence of the place, which was always one of the things that I thought was interesting. As in, you go somewhere, you travel somewhere, and you smell and you see the place, you learn about the culture of the city, you get inspired...” He pauses to tell the waiter that he is having a glass of wine. “Me too,” I say. Matt Orlando, the chef, arrives with a dish of potatoes cooked in beer, Norwegian scallops, burnt lemon and soured cream. “Beautiful!”, says René, as I take a photograph. “This is really good! It’s beer and scallops. It’s potato that is cooked in beer and dried,” says Redzepi. “Where were we?” “The second phase of Noma,” I remind him. “Exactly! I have always found it amazing to be a tourist somewhere, going to see the sites. You land at the airport and go outside. You smell the air, you feel the freshness, you feel your senses absorbing the place and then, you know, you go to the museum, you get to know the history of the place, you get a sense of the people, you talk to them. But I have always felt that I have only really arrived at a place when I start tasting the place. As soon as you start consuming the very place you are in.” “I know exactly what you mean.”
“You felt you had to do more?” I say. “I felt I had to reach that, reach a point where every day is a distillation of the place you’re in. You know, it’s a distillation of the culture, the people, the ingredients, everything.” “But isn’t that the same as saying that the Portuguese should cook Portuguese, the French should cook French, the Spanish should cook Spanish, you know, the terroir...?” “Yes,” he says. “Why was it different for Scandinavia? Didn’t you have it here?” “Not at all! In very few places. Maybe it exists on an old fashioned level. You know, from a grandmother’s perspective. How you serve rye bread and pork in many ways, stuff like that, which are eaten a lot. Not in an elevated way, not in a way that looks to the future and that has a purpose of exploring togetherness and life through a meal.” René was reminding me that restaurants are not just about sustenance; like so many things we value because they offer something beyond their functional dimension. “Before, here and in most places and cultures, food was cooked to feed you, to survive, to give you energy. I mean, in religious parts of our country, taking pleasure in eating is still very complicated, very problematic, you know. So it was a very new thing, it was so distant from us we didn’t even think there were enough ingredients, we thought like...” “What could we eat?” I suggest. “Yes, what could we eat? What’s there?” Matt brings a possible answer to the table: “Chips made with salted black trumpet mushrooms, smoked monkfish liver and black garlic.”
34 We, Chefs
Miolo We Chefs1.indd 34
30/10/17 12:45