OK here we go. WARNING this is going to be a long post. I have 40 pictures. It was a 12-course meal with like 7 amuses-bouches. If you want to just look at the pictures, feel free.
Last May, Noma was rated the #1 restaurant in the world by Food+Wine magazine, so like 10,000 other people, one of my friends called up for a reservation. They told us, yes, we have a table for you. Next October. For four people. For lunch.
Whatever, you take what you can get, and so last October we had an excuse to spend the weekend in Copenhagan (BTW have I mentioned that this is the #1 reason I moved to London, so I could travel on the weekend for silly things like "I have restaurant reservations"?) Copenhagan itself was a great weekend, including a top-notch cocktail bar and an afternoon in Christiania, a hippy commune with an open-air weed market (
Freetown Christiania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
So Noma. It is a restaurant cheffed by Rene Redzepi, and its cuisine is traditional Nordic cuisine with VERY local, and VERY natural ingredients. Here is an article about the dude
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/dining/07chef.html .
The restaurant is next to a dock, pretty simple exterior, I got there a few minutes before my friends so I walked around the art gallery next door. Here is the outside of the restaurant.
And here's the inside.
When we got to the table it was decorated with some flowers. Pretty standard. BUT WAIT. The waitress told us that the flowers were edible. The petals were very soft and sweet, and there was a shrimp in truffle butter inside.
This part of the meal is before we even ordered anything. Amuses-bouches are just little samples, usually more inventive than the main dishes, often just a bite of food. Also usually my favorite part of the meal. One was this leather made out of pickled rose hips, whatever that is.
Another was live shrimp. Still-conscious shrimp. The idea was to dip them in a sauce to confuse them long enough that you could pop them in your mouth and end their life with your teeth. Fuckin A. I ended up with the largest, which kept hopping out of my hand before I chomped him. His last though was "Wow, Kremlin's breath smells like snail and rose hips."
Next were some toasty sandwiches that had some sort of pate in the middle. Oh by the way, at this point we're sipping on some house-brewed beer, was hoppy the way I like it, they also had champagne available but we planned on doing the wine tastings. We're also munching on the bread, which is still warm from the oven and paired with the best butter I've ever had, but this definately qualifies as one of the meals you don't want to spoil your appetite with fucking bread.
The next two were probably my favorite parts of the whole meal. The first was a salad made of freeze-dried spinach and feta, with chilled urchins (the orange things) and tiny cucumber balls, which I've never seen. It blew my socks off. The greens and feta were so fresh-tasting, and the urchin tasted like the ocean smells, like oysters except super clean and crisp.
The next one represents the restaurant best, I think. The bottom layer is a piece of sesame toast, the top layer is a very fine layer of duck fat. In the middle, various herbs and flowers, all picked this morning. It was perfect.
The next one wasn't super-tasty, but was kind of cool. It was a radish plant in some mixture that looked like dirt but tasted like chicoree.... You didn't eat the green leaves, but there was a radish in the dirt.
So now we're JUST to the part where we ordered. I wonder if we could have walked out right now and been like "Nah we're full." Anyway, we ordered the full tasting menu with wine accompaniment. The wines this day were all from Austria, and with each glass we got a description of the wine and some trivia with it. Was pretty cool. And there was a lot of wine, over the 3 hour meal we probably had 12-15 glasses, plus the beer at the beginning and some fruit liquoer at the end... well it's no wonder I jumped in a canal after the meal. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That was a SPOILER.
So the meal started with a "salad" made of liquid lettuce and almonds. Tasted like, well, lettuce, but more so, because it was much more concentrated. Even f3lix has to admit that's cool.
This dish was the biggest presentation but my least favorite taste. But it's a cool picture.
This one was phenomenal. A piece of lobster tail, so simple, but honestly the best piece of seafood I've ever eaten. Fucking phenomenal.
This one was a piece of beef carpaccio with chives and onions and other cool stuff. Reminded me of my world-favorite food, pho, despite clearly not being soup.
The next dish was a lot of fun, basically they gave us ingredients and a hot pan, and let us fry our own egg. Left you thinking "Wow I can cook like this at home*" (*If I had the world's freshest ingredients and richest truffle butter.) But it was fun. Also the straw underneath the pan is lit, so the whole time you smell smokey hay and it's supposed to give you the sense that you're on a farm. OK.
Next we had some meat-and-potatoes type stuff. Piece of filet, piece of chicken, that type of stuff. Our designated picture-taker kind of dropped the ball on this part I guess....
This was a piece of steak with apples. Notice the badass knife they gave us.
This was the first of the deserts, coins of something that tasted like malt cocoa but was something else (don't remember what) and wafers over some ice cream.
MORE DESSERTS
Fruit liquoer, made on-site
Best dessert right here, bone-marrow caramel. Served in the bone. Incredible.
That was it. We had been there for three hours and consumed a total of 22 different "things", drank an obscene amount of wine, and the funny thing is, we weren't stuffed and sluggish or drunk. Well a little drunk but in a nice way, not stumbling at all. Afterwards we asked to tour the kitchen and they led us around, was slower since the lunch hour was pretty much over, but there people are ALWAYS busy.
Completely unforgettable meal, and while it was extremely expensive, I would do it again. Well not the same meal, but I will be trying similar places (in fact I will def eat at Alinea next time I'm in Chicago). And if I was upset about the price of the meal, I made up for that but QUICK. Copenhagan is a city full of canals, and on this sunny OCTOBER day, my three friends each agreed to pay me 167 pounds (total of 500) if I swam across one.
THATS HOW YOU DO IT NUBBLITES! THATS HOW YOU FUND THE MOST EXPENSIVE MEAL OF YOUR LIFE.
And that's how you summarize a restaurant visit.