For me, cooking is something that's completely transparent and without pretense.
That's honest and generous and that has something true and original to it.
Noma is a word that in Danish means Nordic food.
We make N-O and food in Danish is mel, so N-O-M-A, Noma.
You had a long term dream, which I really honestly only thought could be a dream, that
this term, a Nordic cuisine, could be something that was known in gastronomical levels and
perhaps the extreme dream that one day it could be used as a gastronomical term.
I see a restaurant having some type of pact with nature and people growing in nature and
that is simply the essence of it and that shapes everything.
Through the seven years we've been open, it's been one big learning curve of understanding
our region and understanding the soil, the seasonality, what does the weather give us
and so on and today nature is our biggest inspiration right now.
I think it teaches you some type of respect.
When you harvest things yourself, you will force yourself to use all of it and be true
to its original flavor.
It's a whole new palette of flavors you can play with, it's like a present.
I think we've come into some type of in-depth knowledge of our region, the soil, what grows
well that really makes us understand how we should keep the connection from the product's
origin unbroken to when it hits the plate.
Once we've picked it here now, it's just one steady decline of flavor.
So if this is your reference point, you've tasted it here in nature, you've just picked
it, this will always be what you want to put on the plate of course and that's a very important
lesson that of course brings much more life into your food because you're tasting it now
and it's full of life.
I want first of all the guests to have a sense of time and place.
The guests should experience something that can only happen in this part of the world,
in this particular city, right here in Restaurant Noma.
If you want that as a restaurant, you're going to have to and you will naturally fall into
working with all these indigenous products.
San, I found some beach cabbage.
This is very good.
This cabbage that grows in sand, so full of flavor, so intense you see, it's as if it
has wax on it.
Once you polish it a bit, you get this green flavor, it's so intense.
Maybe we'll put that with the oyster because oyster in this cabbage building is fantastic.
In many cases what people come to a restaurant is to experience new things, new ways of putting
ingredients together or preparing ingredients.
So that's a big thing and it's a thing that we work a lot on and it's very difficult to
somehow format innovation.
But then again, still we have various techniques on how to come forward with new ways of thinking.
A very good example is just simply take any given ingredient of high quality and looking
around, seeing what grows naturally with it.
This is scrubby grass, rich in sea vitamin, has a horseradish tone with a slight bit of
finish and with that you perhaps look at the water and you'll say, well, right out here
there's mussels and oysters and razor clams, so perhaps this can be a dish.
But usually when we start a dish of any kind, it starts with a given ingredient of high quality.
We want to show it how it grows, their origins and what we feel is their best quality.
That's what we're playing with.
Anything else we put around it onto the plate is something that brings that forward somehow
or somehow showcases that.
Even though I consider myself a dame, my father's from Macedonia and until 1992 when the war
broke out I spent quite a lot of time in Macedonia every year.
It was a completely different lifestyle from the Western world.
Back then it was extremely rural.
You ate what you had yourself, which meaning what you could grow.
You worked the land, you harvested, you did everything.
It's quite a hard life to work like that, but as a child it's fantastic to grow up in
that sense because you're out there on the fields, you're eating things when they're
just harvested and it makes me perhaps see possibilities in some products where hundreds
of natives just see it as something old-fashioned or that can only be seen in one specific context.
It's a fantastic spot right here because you have elderflower, you can smell the elderflower,
you can actually pick wood sorrel here.
They look a touch like clover.
This is sour, lemony, but more complex I would say with a herbal tone to it.
This is delicious, one of my favorite bands.
We have two Michelin stars and we've been voted number one on this ranking list and I've
been asked this before, what do you say to that and how do you feel?
Honestly I don't know how to feel because you're just so busy and you're just working
at it.
I don't know, maybe I'll have time to enjoy it in ten years and look back at it and say
wow something really truly amazing went on there.
I would say that for the city and the whole country in itself, I think it's very important
that we have been able to break through the way we are because it will open a lot of doors
for other future chefs and hopefully they won't have the hard time that we did.
The next thing is the same, we're not changing.
I feel we have years still to explore.
We just need to go deeper into what we do, understand it more and make the link clearer
from the ingredient to when it hits the plate.
This is what makes me happy, being with my team, visiting the people that supplies us
and keep going into depth with what we do, deeper and deeper and deeper.
