René Redzepi

New Danish cuisine, what the hell is that? Until 5 years ago, it was an undefined mix of non-authentic fusion ideas, built upon foreign ingredients like foie gras, extra virgin olive oil and dried tomatoes. In most cases it’s the same nowadays as well. But with René Redzepi advent, new objects and alchemies started acting on the food stage built on Hamlet’s lands.
Today René serves on dishes musk oxen, king crabs from the sea-abysses, Far Oer lobsters, Gotland truffles and fern sprouts from Danish woods. Furthermore, what’s the sense of using Mediterranean olive oil when your own country abounds with excellent rapeseed oil? And why offering fromage blanc when you have skyr, a cheese taken from fermented milk that Vikings used to raven when they stopped fighting?

Ladies and gentlemen, here you are the New Nordic Cuisine, a movement in whose manifesto, written from the little chef together with a bunch of clever colleagues, we read the ambition to «enlighten the world with the best distinctive flavors of our lands». The revolution took place on Redzepi’s right and left hemispheres after very important trainings by Californian Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, Catalan Adrià’s El Bulli and French Jardin de Sens, three chapters that dictated him those cutting-edge techniques that extend gastronomic horizons of the cold continental latitudes. Applications that the chef executes behind the sign of a futuristic restaurant, at the end of a seaport street: Copenaghen’s Noma, once a huge salt warehouse, today is a temple that celebrates gastronomic rites that are technically complex, but played on the principles of purity and simplicity.