The Taste

What makes a restaurant great? And what transforms a nice place to have a meal into one of the best restaurants in the world – a dining destination of such stature that serious food-lovers might travel halfway across the planet just for lunch?

The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, published annually by Restaurant Magazine (an otherwise little-known British publication), offers no criteria for its highly sought-after rankings other than leaving it to the judgement of the “almost 1000 international restaurant industry experts” who vote for their personal bests each year. 

But visiting Noma in Copenhagen – which won the top spot four times between 2010 and 2014 (and is currently number 3 in the world) – may shed some light on the matter.

Located on the waterfront in a centuries-old former whaling depot looking back onto Copenhagen city, Noma is a study in New Nordic Cool. Dressed with oak floors and cool grey tones, airy windows and fur pelts flung over chair backs, the interior reflects all the clean lines and designer rusticity associated with contemporary Scandi-chic. 

And how about the food itself? 

Imagine a menu that starts with “apples and lemon thyme”, then moves onto courses described as “cabbage leaves and white currants”, “new Danish potato and nettle”, “sea urchin and hazelnuts”, “pumpkin, beechnuts and barley” and eventually, “forest flavours, chocolate and egg liqueur”. This was a taste of this northern autumn (the menu evolves with the seasons). 

Unusual, even daunting as some dishes may sound to the uninitiated, it’s all carefully and cleverly conceived – making a meal you’re unlikely to forget.

When Noma’s co-owner and culinary superstar Rene Redzepi first opened the restaurant, in 2003, with restaurateur and former partner Claus Meyer, the idea was to be fiercely “local”. “The restaurant would attempt to define the cooking of our region through Nordic produce,” Redzepi relates. “And that’s how we began, with a very strict dogma to only use the ingredients from our vast territory, thinking that a new type of cuisine, or a new flavour, would evolve from that.”

The lofty challenge, Redzepi continues, would be to distil the Nordic landscape onto plates of food – searching the forests and seashore for little-known plants and fruits, working with farmers and hunters for the best and most interesting ingredients available and increasingly, working on preserving and fermentation techniques to ensure exciting new flavours year round.

And the main thing, as I can attest, is that it tastes good. And surprising, intriguing, some-times a little challenging (yes, such as Noma’s famous live ants that added a lemony zing to dishes such as cabbage leaves and crème fraiche). I’ve lunched twice at Noma and have also experienced Redzepi’s cooking elsewhere. It’s unfailingly tasty. Even the much You-Tube’d wriggling live shrimp on ice – a concept he revived for a recent pop-up at Tokyo’s Mandarin Oriental. (We happily eat live oysters so… where’s the difference?)

And so to a menu of around 20 small plates. Many ingredients are familiar: superb seafood from the icy northern waters, seasonal vegetables such as asparagus, broad beans, nettles, and pumpkin, lots of onions and wild greens, and perhaps a little meat or game – wild duck or lamb. Others, as described above, perhaps less so.

The atmosphere is engaging. There’s no fashionable open kitchen at Noma but hipster beards and tatts are definitely in evidence as you gradually meet many of the chefs who have prepared your meal. They glide out from behind the scenes in neat succession, bearing the plates, slates, stones and customised ceramic bowls that house a series of tasting-sized courses and deliver them, smiling but thoughtful, to your table.

Chef Beau Clugston is one of several Australians working at Noma. It’s something of a tradition. “There have always been Australians here,” he says, “right back to the early days.” (Notable alumni include Cory Campbell, recently of Melbourne’s Vue de Monde and British-born Ben Greeno, formerly of Sydney’s Momofuku Seiobo and currently opening a new Paddington restaurant with Sydney’s Merivale Group). 

As part of the research and development team, Clugston, who once called Coffs Harbour home, now lives through the rigours of the Danish seasons. One of a small team of chefs led by Redzepi that is directly responsible for developing new dishes, he says he loves the challenge that his job entails. And even those harsh Copenhagen winters.

“It forces limitations on us, forces you to be creative,” he says. “And Rene really taps into that. Every season is completely new, we are never sitting still.”                  

Clugston also loves the interaction with diners. “That’s a huge part of it. That makes for your job satisfaction in itself. You take more pride and care because you can put a face to the name of your guests… It’s better for everyone. And as much as it sometimes sounds weird and people might look wary at first, the food is always delicious. That always wins.”

“Never sitting still” is something of an understatement. Not only has Redzepi become the poster boy for what has become a world-wide chef movement – foraging, fiercely local and seasonal ingredients and a push for ‘culinary identity’ that has seen native ingredients flourish on fine-dining tables from Lima to London, Santiago to Sydney. 

Through a series of well-attended chef get-togethers – called ‘Mad’(which means ‘food’ in Danish), Redzepi has also helped publicise the growing group of chef ‘activists’ – leading figures from some of the world’s top restaurants who are working to reduce food waste, protect the environment and help small producers and indigenous tribes by reviving and promoting their food traditions.

And so to Noma Australia. Following the successful ‘residency’ in Tokyo this year, Redzepi and his whole team, partners and children, will now move to Sydney for a 10-week stint on Sydney Harbour, on the waterfront at the new Barangaroo precinct. 

The temporary restaurant is about to open and will offer cooking inspired by what Redzepi calls “Australia’s unique landscape – so different from what we have at home – and the flavours that derive from that uniqueness. We will be able to cook with things we’ve never cooked with before.”

The menu is still in development but will feature plenty of Australian seafood and native plants, as well as a Noma take on our great barbie tradition – lots of cooking with fire, in other words. But probably not burned snags and charred chops, we suspect.

Tickets for the 10 week ‘season’ sold out in a matter of minutes when they went on sale late last year – a situation more often associated with a rock concert rolling into town, such is the popularity of Redzepi’s work. Audi will be intimately involved with sharing the Noma experience with special guests of the brand as part of the coming launch of the all-new A4, but for the rest, a waiting list and the hope that someone will cancel is now your only chance.

Of course there is always the option of becoming one of those food tragics (like me) who has been known to get on a plane just for lunch. Or dinner. Once the team is back in Copenhagen, next European spring, Noma as we know it will continue to operate from April 2016. That is, until it re-locates to a brand-new Copenhagen home in December 2016, with a farm of its own. Never sitting still, yet again…