The place itself is utterly charmless, spare in its decor, overpoweringly noisy, and utterly lacking in anything resembling ambience. Which is true off most great restaurants here. What kept it from being utterly abysmal was the lack of a television. But — Oh! — the food. (via Pizza worth a detour)
Maybe I’m a restaurant purist. Maybe I’m just a massive arsehole and not down with the kids. But most of all, I hate feeling like I’m being taken for a ride when I’m eating out, or expected to fawn over the Emperor’s new clothes. That said, if I can’t beat them, I may as well join them, so look out for my new pop-up lard shack where I rub fat directly into the customers eyes, slap them round the chops with a spam fritter and call them slags. And if you want to know where it is, then you’re not cool enough to come in.
Some people see going to Noma as a religious experience,” said Michael Bom Frøst, a food scientist and director of the nonprofit Nordic Food Lab, which was established by Noma’s owners. This was several days before my own meal at Noma, and we stood in the lab’s shiny test kitchen, inside a houseboat moored across the canal from Noma. The brilliant Nordic sun shone in the bluest Nordic sky as we ate a pink ice cream made from seaweed and looked across the cold water toward Copenhagen’s center.
A biggish piece about Noma in Copenhagen.
http://tablematters.com/2012/12/10/the-meal-as-manifesto/
Bringing a Buon Appetito to Rome (via Bruce Palling on Food: Bringing a Buon Appetito to Rome - WSJ.com)
Didn’t think much of the article, but could be persuaded to try this place. Of course Roman cuisine is traditional, almost to the point of being preserved in aspic. Not that the Romans would ever do anything so frou-frou. But there is also a lot of innovation within the standard parameters.
Noma Staff Meal
Not exactly sure how to embed a video from this site; just watch it, if this sort of thing interests you.
Danish photographer and filmmaker Simon Ladefoged captures a never-before-documented dimension of Noma, revealing what the chefs at the award-winning eatery cook for their own pre-service meal. Famed for artful Nordic dishes involving delicate, laborious work such as preening deep-fried moss and drying wafers of scallop, Copenhagen’s gastronomic mecca re-energizes its chefs with the daily ritual of a boisterous communal staff lunch, held at 5pm before the evening’s guests start pouring in.Thanks to @anissahelou for the link.
