Noma: A taste for changing the world

“Have you tasted this?” asks Noma’s head chef, Rene Redzepi, offering me a bunch of green berries. They look sour, but are almost as acidic as lemons, I discover with some surprise as I observe the kitchen – named in April as the third best in the world by the renowned English Restaurant Magazine – at work during a busy lunch service.

 “Normally you would put lemon on spinach to give it a sharpness, but you can just as well use these white currants, which grow naturally around us,” says Rene Redzepi, who has based his now world famous cuisine exclusively on raw ingredients sourced from the Nordic countries. You won’t find any olive oil, foie gras or sun dried tomatoes here. Instead, wild berries from Denmark, musk ox from Greenland or seaweed from Iceland often end up on guests’ plates.