Restaurant Noma, Copenhagen
Vegetable Field with Malt Soil and Herbs
Broken birch slates of meringue, birch sorbet and jelly made from mead and honey, embedded with baby sprigs of chervil
Soft Smoked Quail Eggs in Aromatic grass
Beet Raisins, Horseradish Snow and Vinegary "Sago". It is a play with textures and temperatures. The Sago (which is like tapioca) goes POP! in your mouth, the beets are slightly chewy and sweet, and then there's cold, strongly hot flavored snow.
Turbot, Apple, Celeriac, and Sweet Cicely
Parfait of pickled elder flower, violet ice cream, rose-hip meringue and thyme gel
As of late I have been hearing a lot about the city of Copenhagen. From its efforts to re-configure itself as a sustainable, green city, to its art and culinary feats. With my particular interest in food lately, I have been very interested in Copenhagen's very own restaurant NOMA. It was recently named third best restaurant in the world. One particular thing that defines NOMA is chef Rene Redzepi's focus on regional ingredients, resources and seasonality. He sources his food mainly from the Scandinavian regions and as a result has come up with some very interesting ingredients. Redzepi has creatively organized and composed these ingredients into original, beautiful, and apparently very tasty dishes that blur the lines between art and cooking. Dishes such as sea urchin and grilled cucumber, cloudberries and wild thyme, langosine and seawater, musk ox and smoked marrow, marinated beach plants and mussel juice, steamed spinach and tea, and others, such as the ones above. Like many of the world's contemporary leading chefs, Redzepi is challenging the way we eat and think about food. In deciding to use only seasonal and regional ingredients, he has not limited himself, like some may feel, but he has opened up the nearly endless possibilities of what can be done within those limits. In this sense, it is more like an in depth focus than a barrier or limit. He has proven that even in a region that has not previously been known for its food, there is so much to be discovered and done with the local products... Aside from that, the design of the place looks fantastic. No surprise, it is in Copenhagen after all.
