Dear Rene and Team Noma,
Has it really been 20 years since it all began? God, you were young. We all were.
In 2003, the last year of the era BNN (Before New Nordic), I moved to Finland and found mainly herring and potatoes, sausages and beer. Everything in the supermarkets was mass produced and distributed. Fine dining meant going to what American food writer Calvin Trillin satirically dubbed La Maison de la Casa House. You know the one. Like a ubiquitous franchise, it serves international Continental Cuisine with imported lobster and foie gras and lots of snobbery. Except for a few local specialties like reindeer, crayfish and chanterelles, the only way to experience true Finnish cuisine was to go to the forests and bag it yourself.
The rest of the Nordic region was not much better. The 1987 film Babette´s Feast played up the contrast between spartan Danish cooking and the lavish pleasures of French cuisine. Clearly, the only way to eat well in the far North was to pretend you were somewhere else. Kong Hans Kælder won Copenhagen´s first Michelin star with its classic French cuisine. In Sweden, Matthias Dahlgren´s Bon Lloc won Michelin stars for Catalan-inspired food. A few avant-garde chefs were serving lingonberry foams over their pike perch a la elBulli. In November 2003, Noma opened in a 250-year-old dock warehouse.
In November 2004, you, Matthias Dahlgren, and a motley crew of chefs and other Vikings were inspired by the 1973 New Basque Culinary Manifesto to write your own Nordic Manifesto. I wish I could have witnessed that epic (and likely akvavit-fueled) session where you hammered it out. New Nordic cuisine would showcase artisanal, sustainable local products prepared in a way that combined traditional Nordic foodways with cutting-edge culinary technique. Finally, the world would discover skyr, Gotland truffles and Arctic musk ox. Like a kind of culinary AA support group, the New Nordic signatories collectively swore off their addiction to hothouse tomatoes, imported lemons and olive oil. Thank God you kept wine and coffee on the menu. You were revolutionaries, not fucking anarchists.
By the time my husband Alberto had a business lunch at Noma in 2005, you had a Michelin star but not that many diners. Do you remember how you used to freak out if a 6-top canceled their table at the last minute? Danish people didn´t understand what you were serving them, which was neither traditional nor trendy. “The Stinky Whale” was only one of Noma´s many colorful local nicknames. Alberto loved his lunch so much that he went back the next day. He said I should write about you. I called my editor at TIME Magazine and got the assignment. TIME is not in the business of individual restaurant reviews, but since a signed manifesto showed that it was a movement, they were interested in finding out about New Nordic.
When I landed in Copenhagen in early February 2006 there was a Danish TV news crew waiting for me at the airport. They had read my email to the Nordic Council of Ministers requesting an interview about its €3 million investment to promote New Nordic gastronomy. I was surprised the press could read government emails, and they were surprised that a foreign journalist wanted to come to Copenhagen to eat. They wanted to follow me to see where I went. That episode in the Dags Dato news archive serves as a virtual introduction of the New Nordic project as well as a historical record of the early days.
The camera was rolling nonstop for the four days I spent visiting Noma. The camera was rolling when you introduced me to your purveyors, like farmer extraordinaire Søren Wiuff. His farm was once just ordinary carrots, but that day we dug up curly crosnes that look like chubby fingers but taste something like artichokes. The camera was rolling as my Prada heels (the only shoes that were not lost by the airline) punched through the frozen cow pats of Niels Stokholme´s biodynamic dairy farm, where 50 rare heritage breed Danish cows grazed on the ruins of an ancient altar to Thor. When the Nordic Council official I interviewed declared that New Nordic would become the next hot trend, it sounded more than a bit far-fetched.
Twenty years later, with YouTubers filming in all the Copenhagen hotspots that have opened in your wake, it sounds prescient.
Today, Copenhagen is a world gastronomic capital to rival Paris and Tokyo. According to figures from the tourist board, travel to Copenhagen has doubled in the past 20 years, and Noma must be one of the biggest reasons for that boom. Copenhagen is now bursting with gourmet shops and gangs of people showing up at The Alchemist wearing “I´M A HUNGRY TOURIST” t-shirts.
More importantly, you have inspired chefs around the world to throw out their Escoffier and forage their own backyards and traditions to create their own modern local cuisines. True, sometimes it is a little weird to see sheepskins and moss on tables in Spain or Korea, but we´ll take inspiration wherever it comes. Inspiration is also a two-way street. Noma 2.0 is no longer the ideological only-Nordic purism of the early days; it embraced the techniques and flavors you have learned in your travels around the world. When you pop up in Japan or Mexico, it is not as another gastro tourist. You literally immerse yourself in learning new culinary languages, making those foreign flavors your own.
NOMA IS CLOSING!!! Blared international headlines in January 2023. We immediately booked a table and flights to Copenhagen – the only rational reaction. I count myself very, very lucky. I´m lucky a table was made available. Social media is groaning with the laments of those who know they will never get to experience noma except on social media. I’m lucky my husband, Alberto, is as food-obsessed as I am, and that we can pay 3,950DKK (530€) per person, not including wine, for a meticulously prepared wild meal from field and forest. Hey, our kids are still young and may not actually want to go to college, right? Carpe diem. I´m also super lucky that we have been at Noma and its various pop-ups in London, Japan, and Mexico many times since 2005/2006, enjoying a front-row seat view of the New Nordic movement from its early beginnings.
As we walked through the bustling Copenhagen airport in October 2023 on the way to a 4-day binge at Restaurant Barr, The Alchemist, Noma and Kadeau, I couldn’t help thinking what a difference a couple of decades had made, not just to the Copenhagen dining scene, but to global cuisine and the way it gets reported.
I also wonder what Copenhagen will be like when and if Noma does close. Is this, as the international news media speculate, the end of fine dining?
René, you have been careful to put sustainability and creativity and mental health as your highest priority, even if it means public mea culpas or gutting your own restaurant from time to time and starting over. I´m happy that you have achieved everything you set out to achieve, and more. There are no accolades that Noma has not won. It has not been easy, and there were days you did not like what you saw in the mirror. Thank you for your honesty and for acknowledging the need for change in fine dining culture. The recipe has always called for blood, sweat, and tears, but the new vision should add respect for producers and workers as well as product. Truly great food is healthy for body, mind, soul and planet, and Noma has always been about great food.
Please keep leading the way to a better way to eat.
Happy New Year 2024 and looking forward to seeing the birth of Noma 3.0.
Love,
Lydia
