I had the good fortune of attending the talk that Rene Redzepi gave last night (thanks for letting me be your +1, Stuart!). In case you’ve been cooking and eating under a rock the last 6 months, Rene Redzepi is the chef owner of Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen, which was recently named the best restaurant in the world. He is on a whirlwind book tour promoting his new cookbook from the restaurant, Noma – Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, which you can get at Omnivore Books.

The topics were wide ranging, from his personal history to global culinary history and trends, to videos and discussion of how they create dishes, to how may cooks (30+  for 40 customers a night) to the hours (“I’m not in Denmark so I can say we work 75-80+ hours in the 5 days we’re open” – working this much, even with pay, is forbidden in Denmark!) and every bit of it was fascinating. This is a very driven and very succesful, but at the same time very humble, man. He repeatedly highlighted the works of the staff in the kitchen, and the hard work and passion of the foragers and farmers who supply the restaurant.

Let me just highlight two parts that were the most interesting and inspiring to me.

Acknowledging that we were sitting in California he said “eating local is easy… the difficult part is to make it taste like the culture of place.” Huh? What the hell does that mean?! He elaborated with an example. If you have gooseberries in season, then you should use those in your dessert instead of importing some other fruit from somewhere else. But if you put the gooseberries into a creme brulee, then you’re still just making a creme brulee. He said he couldn’t do that at Noma, because a creme brulee isn’t Danish, and even if the gooseberries were replaced by an indigenous fruit that only grows off the North Sea in Denmark, it would still not be Danish. He set up his restaurant to reinvent, or perhaps to even just plain invent, true Danish food. Now, Daniel Patterson, who was the moderator, challenged that this is indeed difficult in California, because the references of our cuisine are inherently imported, but Rene challenged back saying we have to try – and if a truly pure food reference does not exist, then it should be created.
But the real interesting part of this topic to me was the way he makes a dish truly Danish, and it is a multi-faceted approach. One direction is to go backwards, searching for true historical food references that could only be Danish, or shall we say even Viking or before. What vegetables were eaten, how were they prepared? Then he finds the foragers, or just forages himself, to get these products. And he finds farmers who are willing to grow odd and distinctly Danish vegetables. But once he has these products, how are the dishes created? Well, he repeated talked about harvesting, and picking, and foraging. He said that the most crucial lesson for a cook is to pick/forage a vegetable and then eat it on the spot. To taste it in the environment it lives in. Only then can a cook truly appreciate what it is supposed to taste like. And there is the rub, here is how he creates dishes, at least as I could figure out. He will pick a vegetable, and then try to recreate how that vegetable tasted at that time when he ate it out at it’s source.

Here’s an example. He showed us a video of the creation of an oyster dish. They went out to the coast line and harvested an oyster. Then they picked the edible seaweed, water plants, and beach plants that grew near the oyster. In the kitchen, they opened up the oyster (it was a big one) and placed little bits of the edible plants they picked onto the oyster and covered it back up. Then they put that oyster into a heavy pot that was filled with other seaweeds, and with sea water. A couple minutes on the stove and the oyster is steamed. When the pot is opened, he said the aroma is exactly like they bottled up the coast line where they picked the oyster. The oyster tastes like where the oyster is from!

Another example. For those of you who are, dare I say smart enough, to get your eggs from truly happy chickens, you’ll notice a clear difference in taste between them. A Clark Summit will taste different from a Marin Sun Farms which will taste different from the eggs from your city neighbours backyard coup. Why? Breed sure, but alot of it is what they eat! So here’s another Noma dish he told us about. An egg cooked by the guest (yes, by the guest!) at the table in a small cast iron pan. The pan is laid on a bed of straw, which, from the heat of the pan, releases straw (dare I say barn) aroma. As the egg is finishing cooking, plants, from around the paddock where the chickens roam, are placed on the egg – seeds, leaves, hay, grass, all edible. That egg then tastes like the items that accompany the egg on the diner’s plate beacuse that’s what the chicken was eating!

Sorry if I seem so giddy, but this is mind-blowing stuff to me. “Local is easy”, I love it. Now turn it up a notch and make it taste like the culture you live in, and then make it taste like where it is from, and I mean “from” in terms of feet of distance!

The other eye-opening aspect of his talk was about his relationship with the farmers. The local, seasonal, organic movement in Denmark is very young at this time (the last time I was in Denmark a couple years ago I was told by friends and relatives that the public had a “distrust” for organic food) and the relationship we have with our farmers and that restaurants have with farmers is far more advanced. (I’m curious though if there are any CSA’s yet in Denmark!) He said that the farmers who supply Noma are a hardcore lot, going against the grain, for little monetary benefit. They do it because they love it, and know it’s the “right” thing to do. But Rene stressed that for the Danish farmers it is a thankless job. Truly thankless, in a literal sense. He said that farmers don’t get told “Thank you for growing the food we feed our families” enough. It got me thinking? Do I say it enough? The food that comes from Two Small Farms and Marin Sun Farms is so important to me and my family that it’s immeasurable. But they need to know that, so here goes …

To Andy Griffin, Julia Wiley, Stephen Pedersen, Jeanne Byrne, David Evans, and all your crew, from the bottom of my heart and from the hearts of Melinda, Alexis, and Emma, THANK YOU for growing the food we eat. Our lives would be so much less without you. Thank you so much.