Noms 2.0
My laptop auto-corrects Noma to “Noms”. There’s a lot to unpack there, if you look hard for it; enough to make the Nordic mad. I’ve settled for professing my distress in a supportive environment and leaving it be.
In case you’ve been living under a moss-freckled rock with a compound butter on top of it, the reason for this predictive anguish is that the latest iteration of Noma has opened in Copenhagen. Predictably, people are losing their minds. Critics have flown in as far as 4,000 miles to eat at the nigh-on unbookable, totally reinvented expression of a culinary philosophy that has defined certain parameters for how restaurants work for over a decade. Its frantic opening night was documented blow-by-blow; its design and architecture have been scrutinised, and most tellingly, it’s been endlessly compared to its forbear, the old waterfront warehouse from which René Redzepi and his team redefined how hundreds of restaurants and eaters around the world conceive of what goes on their plates. Being the sibling to the prodigal must be hard work.
British GQ go as far as to say that “Noma is back. It’s better than last time. It makes the old one look amateur in comparison. When you thought Noma couldn’t out-Noma itself, it’s gone and done just that.” Washington Post critic Tom Sietsema would “race back” on his own kroner. The more reflective critics — Sietsema among them—have, well, reflected on what this all means. Los Angeles critic Jonathan Gold writes that “nobody just happens to eat at Noma”, in a tacit concession to his review’s ultimate irrelevance. The very idea of comparing 2.0 to 1.0 is highly exclusionary: there’s not really a crowd to source for opinions, even less a critical consensus to draw on. This leads to a moment of lurid self-awareness in Sietsema’s review where he spots Gold across the room, guided by Redzepi. Both men recall Redzepi’s telling them that they might see a fox, for this is “wild nature”, robbing the anecdote of its alacrity, civilising its wildness. For all of Gold’s use of “you” in his review, we are not party to his culinary fever dream. For all of his and Sietsema’s eloquent tributes to plate after plate, we are not in a place where “once again demonstrates the versatility of kelp” is a legible phrase. GQ’s conclusion that “It makes the old one look amateur in comparison” is an utterly meaningless judgment for the overwhelming majority. (It’s also critically defunct, but whatever). Whether one Noma is better than the other is an inscrutable comparison, a philosophical tedium, a question met with a resigned shrug.
But Noma matters, right? It’s Noma — the philosophy for which the restaurant is a vehicle, the bellwether and albatross for restaurants across the world. It’s a source of wonderful inspiration and invention, a catalyst to rethink native ingredients, an encouragement to think of a fresh vegetable and its fermented partner as speaking twins rather than distant relatives, to think of induction hobs as a place of creativity rather than student nightmares (hello, P. Franco). It’s also the source of a crippling anxiety of influence: creative stupefaction, Airspace on a plate (or more likely a wrought pewter vessel), the minds of a generation of chefs destroyed by sea buckthorn, jaded by fermentation. Redzepi and co have had an impact so titanic that their uniqueness has become ubiquitous: undoubtedly a reason behind Redzepi’s endless appetite for reinvention, a restlessness that finds peace in being peripatetic.
The key reason that this appetite can be sated is that Noma’s philosophy is a slippery one. Its most famous expression is “new Nordic”: the time, early 2000s, the place, Copenhagen. A reaction against a high-end dining scene propping itself up on imported luxuries, it was a resolute commitment to what was immediately available: the finesse and fineness would come from technique, rather than DHL. The longer strapline, “time and place in Nordic cuisine” has stubborn heft, but what it represents is something more elastic. Noma is a mutable philosophy, not a movable feast: what is time and place in cuisine if not where you are, right now?
So the “Noma diaspora” has spread inexorably across the globe, propelled by alumni and social media, creating countless iterations of that philosophy. Good, better, Baest. Same, same, but different. There’s been Noma Tokyo, Noma Australia, Noma Mexico, Noma 1.0 and 2.0. They didn’t bring monkfish liver to Mexico; they focussed on local melon clams. Australian wild blackcurrants replaced Danish ones. The fundamentals: fermentation, things in broths, a gentle hand with heat and bewilderingly fiddly preparations remained; unripeness celebrated rather than shunned; the fugitive crunch of native ants resounded with a different pitch. I know this not because I have eaten at Noma; I know this mainly thanks to Redzepi’s wonderful leveraging of Instagram Stories as a living ingredient bible. What links Noma’s various iterations is resonance, and indeed, Jonathan Gold closes his review with an appeal to those lucky few who can talk about what’s better:
If you have dined at Noma before, you will recognize resonances; less a repetition of signature tropes than what are nearly literary allusions to Redzepi’s work.
The thing is, whether or not you recognise these local resonances is far less important (and far less plausible) than recognising how they resonate beyond a low-lying complex of buildings on Copenhagen’s industrial lake. It’s how they resonate into what ingredients might be in (probably high-end) supermarkets and where they come from; into the kind of restaurant that’s likely to open and thrive in cities around the world. When so few people can eat there, who cares what the food even tastes like, to a point? Isn’t it far more important how this mode of dining and sourcing — responding to what’s good beyond seasonality — will affect restaurants that are far more democratic? We might never taste a clam that’s over 100 years old, but we might eat at a restaurant that only serves vegetables in the summer. In Copenhagen, Denmark, and across the Nordic region, Redzepi’s ethos has rehabilitated a region down on its food, instilling fresh pride in local ingredients and home cooking, laughing in the face of sneers and smirks. Further afield, his influence winks at tables. If we’re talking about allusion as Gold does, we might look at how the trout roe starfish looks very like the butternut squash dish at 108 in Copenhagen, which recently alighted at Portland, London during a collaboration. Such contagiousness has also infected ill-informed apings, void of that restless spirit. All of this is resonance, even if some clangs rather than chimes.
Taking “better” as the operative word treats Noma versus Noma (dir. David Chang) as an outlier from everything else, when it is in fact part of an accretion that looks back as much as forward. Redzepi is as much in thrall to Japanese influence as any given restaurant in the world is to him; as the paradigm-shifting article linked makes clear too, culinary influence is “often messy and untraceable.” There’s an argument to be made that this latest iteration, which champions the north’s seasonal idiosyncrasies — cold seas for ocean dining in winter, a fleeting riot of summer fruit and vegetables, a dankly brooding autumn of game and funghi — is in allusive debt to Pia León and Virgilio Martinez at Central in Lima, Peru. Their menus are based on Peru’s own idiosyncrasies: availability is guided by altitude, place overshadowing time; in turn, Martinez’s impulse to reclaim Peruvian products over imports is firmly in the Noma wheelhouse. This all to say that when talking about Noma, “new Nordic” is now firmly out of date — its influence is nuanced by where it is felt. Time. Place. Now. Here, or there. That’s indisputable. What’s indisputable too is that talking about Noma as “better” or “worse” is pointless.
It’s pointless, because talking about what’s better helps people make practical decisions on how and where to spend their time with friends, family, lovers or themselves; talking about what’s better between a nigh-on unbookable restaurant and one that no longer exists is at best a wistful circle jerk. Whether or not Noma 2.0 is better than 1.0 really doesn’t matter at all. What matters most is how Noma influences our noms.
