Chef René Redzepi closed his restaurant – the world’s most influential – last February. Now, he’s returned to Copenhagen with Noma 2.0. We tucked into a meal featuring sea cucumber ovaries, ant sauce and more
The last of 16 courses from the debut seafood menu at the born-again restaurant Noma in Copenhagen is a plankton cake: a Kermit-green hockey puck, dusted with a reddish powder. Perhaps it was the cognitive dissonance of “plankton” and “cake”, but even now I don’t even know if I liked it or not. Before that, there had been venus clams, dried sea cucumber ovaries, ant sauce and sea snail broth – not as discombobulating as the plankton, but Instagram-pretty and cunningly delicious; a triumph of fresh thinking, immaculate technique and great suppliers.
Noma is perhaps the most influential restaurant of the past decade, responsible for all the foraged, pickled and dried stuff you see on menus everywhere. But in February last year, its head chef, René Redzepi, decided to close, throw all the pieces up in the air and see where they landed.
Related: Nadine Levy Redzepi: What do you cook for the world's best chef?
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