Arrivederci Noma

The traditional welcome at Noma: the chefs from the service kitchen greet the guests. In the middle, Italian Riccardo Canella, who will help us describing the last menu in detail (photo gallery by Luca Iaccarino and Gabriele Zanatta)

Warm broth of cloudberries. It’s the last welcome dish at Noma. It’s cold outside but as soon as you sit inside, you get warm thanks to this hot broth made with cloudberries enriched with rhubarb root oil. You dip a bouquet of hay, lemon thyme and mountain pine. Corroborating

Riccardo Canella brings a preview of what will follow

It’s a dish with seafood, including a huge (and alive) king crab, sea urchins and oysters

Apple of the season

Apple of the season. Once you open the shell, many small apple parisienne appear in a juice made with centrifuged, clarified apple scraps, seasoned with verbena and thyme. There’s also a purée of apples fermented in broth. The dish is finished with oxalis flowers, tagete and oil of blackcurrant wood, made by beating the blackcurrant branches with a hammer, so as to extract their essential oils. A very pleasant dish despite its complex idea.

"The first time I saw it ", added Canella, "I was struck because it reminded me of the stuffed apples they used to make at restaurant Bulesca in Selvazzano, Padua, in the early Eighties. Except in that case it was filled with rolls made with granny smith apple and prosciutto from Montagnana" 

Fresh sliced scallop. It’s a scallop taken from the fish tank and shelled a few moments before serving it. It is then sliced, brushed with a reduction of vegetable whipped butter with cucumber centrifuge juice, then reduced, and piso broth (that is to say miso with dehydrated peas).

The technique is the same used for the broth ice-clarification made famous in the Nineties by Heston Blumenthal at Fat Duck: you freeze the broth then hang a table cloth so as to obtain the “pure” part of the liquid. A trick that adds the same satisfying sensation of a meat jus to a vegetable broth. The scallop is finally dipped into a classic mussel broth. An incredible mouthful of seafood and umami

A Winter Platter. Hidden among the leaves, are four edible tastings

He sums up in just one dish 4 snacks that he might would have served separately a few years back. A fun and tasty idea. In detail:

At 6 o’clock: Pear pressed in fermented red gooseberry with fully ripe common sea buckthorn. It’s a rather tart ensemble made sweeter by piso (again miso made with dried peas) seasoned with coriander seeds (supplied by Redzepi’s historic supplier Soren Wiuff). The external thinner leaf is a peel made with chicken broth and beech leaves preserved in vinegar.

10 o'clock: crispy black currant leaf-shaped sandwich, seasoned with yogurt, kombucha, elderberry flowers and red oxalis 

12 o'clock: malt branch with nasturtium leaves, creme fraiche, salt aromatised with pine and ants

4 o'clock: black garlic leaf with salt aromatised with kelp, a Japanese seaweed 

A detail of the malt branch, with well visible ants. At Noma, the study of the aromatic contribution given by formic acid to dishes continues. And even the service acquires elegance: in the past you might have seen ants floating in a few dishes. This is no longer the case

A Tupperware from the "ant library", on the first floor at Strangade

Radish pie. It’s an emblem of the latest menus at Noma. It’s been in the menu for almost a year. In the crunchy disc on the bottom there’s kelp seaweed and a vegetable reduction made with coriander pesto. The radish roses (22, no more, no less) were pressed in beetroot juice. Another formidable tasting

Interns roll the radish roses together, on the top floor at Noma. Loud music and teamwork help making the job less alienating

Natural fermented bread of Øland wheat and hulless barley.  Øland wheat is Danish, with 83% hydration. “Nerd” bread maker Rasmus Kristensen is obsessed with it: even though it could last a week, he bakes it fresh every day for the two services (see the interview on Vice). It has a crispy yet soft crust, and it’s a great progress compared to the early bread making at the restaurant.

The salted butter is instead Norwegian Røros, according to some “the best butter in the world”. One of the most extraordinary pairings ever tasted. We asked for an encore

Cooked oyster and broccoli stems. The oyster is blanched for two minutes and placed on a shell with the edges powdered with salicornia. Between the broccoli and the oyster there are some diced stalks of sorrel. There’s a reduction with kelp seaweed, whisked with butter, thyme and “capers” made with white currants [they’re not real capers but the currants are preserved for a year in 2% salt, like capers). The sauce for the oyster is made with white gooseberries. An artwork, but less convincing than the other tastings

Sea urchin and cabbage. It’s a cabbage leaf pressed with hazelnut oil, filled with sea urchin roe and seasoned with pine vinegar, water from fermented porcini and pickled chanterelle mushrooms. On top, there’s parsley pesto and salt aromatised with pine. It’s a dish that changes greatly according to the season: compared to September, the leaves are now smaller and woodier. Two extraordinary mouthfuls, the result of a rather simple intuition

Sea urchin and cabbage, a detail. Northern sea urchins are creamier than Italian ones. A blast

Langoustine, onion and lavender. The langoustine is the precious one from the Far Oer Islands. The onion is Danish and grilled, steamed in a vacuum bag with Koji oil (blended rapeseed oil with fermented oil) and then grilled again, only slightly, so as to get a golden nuance. The langoustine is instead cooked in its shell, seared in butter at 60°C for 2 minutes, then peeled, cut and served. Rose oil, vinegar made with lovage sprouts and dried lavender complete the picture. The dish is focused on the sweetness given by the onion, which has a similar texture to the langoustine. Very nice

Butternut squash, barley and caviar. The butternut squash is confit in oil aromatised with seaweeds later roasted and placed on top. It is completed with beechnuts, a sauce made with fermented barley and butter and a handful of Finnish caviar. A sweet interlude

Claws and heads of a langoustine from the Far Oer Islands, cut in two. The heads of the langoustine are braised with a paste made with the entrails of the langoustine and a reduction of yeast and thyme and lemon on top. A very pleasing neo-primitive tasting with a strong dose of umami

Steamed king crab and egg yolk sauce. A new take on a classic Japanese dish, learnt in Tokyo and applied in Australia to a snow crab. Global nomadism made Redzepi’s cuisine rounder, less extreme than in the past

In this case, the king crab is steamed and seasoned with smoked salt. The sauce is made with egg yolks marinated in beef garum, a trick that gives a significant sour component to the recipe. Finally, there’s a seasoning made of butter and piso. An interesting depth

Charred greens with a scallop paste. There are plenty of seasonal herbs and vegetables, in this case cabbage, black cabbage, sage, verbena, nettle and the first sprouts of wild garlic. The caramel is made with a purée of fresh scallop, rolled out for 48 hours on a silpat. Once dehydrated, it becomes dark orange. They then blend it, powder it, mix it with bees’ wax and rapeseed oil. Finally they cover the caramel with horseradish juice. Another interlocutory tasting, fun and very much appreciated thanks to the crispiness and the bitter-sweet herbs. Trivia fact: the dish is served with a steak knife. That is to say: herb is the new meat

Roasted Bone Marrow. It’s not the first time they serve grilled bone marrow at Noma, legitimised in fine dining by English Fergus Henderson. What’s new is the way in which they have been serving it in Copenhagen for around one month now: the bone marrow is surrounded by many small plates and garnishes, so guests can enrich it to their liking. A similar idea to what Paolo Lopriore does every day at Portico in Appiano Gentile

Among the garnishes that can enrich the bone marrow are pickles, wild mushrooms with beef garum paste, wild herb paste, fresh garlic, leek flower sprouts preserved in salt and salt aromatised with roasted seaweed

Other complements for the bone marrow: to the right, chicken "skin" made with dehydrated jus ("the skin is the best part of a chicken", once Redzepi demonstrated in Belgium) and next to it a vegetal reduction with black garlic

The slices of truffle from Gotland (Sweden) paired with bone marrow are not as strong as those we’re used to. This is why at Noma they add oil aromatised with porcini, aged Danish whiskey and a garum made with Dryad's seddle mushrooms, with a delicate pineapple scent

A dessert of potatoes and plums. Another great emblem of the most recent offer at Noma. Three creams stand out on a sauce of juice and plum aquavit: right to left, a compote of plums (dehydrated in the oven so as to concentrate their aroma), a purée of sweet Danish potatoes and a cream seasoned with plum nuts, which surprisingly recall almonds

Black currant wood ice cream and roasted konini. Also known as "No-Magnum", Noma’s Magnum, unites konini [an ancient Swedish wheat] roasted like coffee, oxalis, a reduction of quince syrup and a few leaves of verbena. Every day the guys sharpen some 200 branches of black currants

Moss cooked in white chocolate. It’s the sweet version of the famous Moss and Cep, a “savoury” dish from the early days. It’s fried musk covered in white chocolate. Next to it, a disc covered in chocolate with powdered liquorice on top (even Redzepi had to surrender to the exotic deliciousness of cocoa)

A note on the beverages: after a welcome glass of champagne (André Belfort Brut 2008, curiously the same tasted the previous night at Christian Puglisi’s Relae), we chose to continue with the juice menu, 6 glasses of variably good organic juices for 700 Danish crowns each (around 95 euros)

There’s a person in the staff at Noma who’s dedicated entirely to the juice menu. The first juice served was apple/pine. Each glass stays on the table for around 3 courses on average. Food and juice pairings are partly designed, partly casual

The apple/pine juice is followed by glasses of green gooseberies/tarragon, rose/redcurrant, red gooseberries/geranium, cabbage/lovage and, in the picture, the eldelflower/spearmint juice paired with the dessert. The drops you can see are made of oil from the black currant leaves

The final bill for 4 people: 11880 Danish crowns, that is to say around 1,600 euro. Per person this means: 2000 Danish crowns (around 270 euros) for the tasting menu, plus 700 crowns (94 euros) for the juice menu, plus 175 (23 euros) for a glass of champagne, plus 50 (6.50 euros) for four jugs of water (in fact they only served one) and 45 (7 euros) for a superb Koppiane espresso. Add to the total 2.13% extra for commissions on foreign credit cards, which makes a total per person of 420 euros

The back of Noma 1.0 is full of grills, Josper ovens, storage rooms for miso, fermented products, garum... The current location will not close. They’ll probably serve a simpler offer here, with craft beer taking on the main role

Next to the old location, there will still be the Nordic cuisine bistro 108 founded by Noma’s alumnus chef Kristian Baumann. It gained a Michelin star a few days ago

At the end of the meal at Noma, they give you a map of Copenhagen with dozens and dozens of delicious destinations. A great example of courtesy

And now, all off to Mexico (in the photo from Instagram, Renè Redzepi is holding a Mexican swamp root)