Noma - Copenhagen
Path to Noma’s front door
Rating: 17/20
Where: Copenhagen, Denmark
When: Dinner for 3 on 23 March 2022
Cost: Tasting menu 2900 DKK
Accolades: 3 Michelin Stars, #1 on Top 50 Restaurants list (2021)
Why: Technically and artistically amazing dishes at the forefront of modern cooking that one can’t get anywhere else
Our first visit to Noma was back in the summer of 2015. Constantly mentioned as the world's best restaurant since El Bulli closed, Noma has to be on any world-traveling foodie's itinerary sooner or later. In 2015, the restaurant had two Michelin stars, and I thought the food matched that. The dishes were the very definition of "local" - no ingredients outside of Denmark were used. If acidity was needed in a dish, crushed ant paste was used, for lack of locally grown citrus fruit. The dishes were educational, technically impressive, and occasionally delightful. Worth a visit, and definitely worth a revisit if I happened to be in the area.
Fast forward to 2022 - Noma has finally received three Michelin stars, and has again topped the list of the World's 50 Top restaurants. Time for a return visit.
Compared to 2015 where the menu "simply" followed the seasons, the year is now split into three distinct seasons, each having its own menu and theme. We visited during the Ocean season where the menu is fully pescatarian. The other menus focus on vegetables and seasonal produce (summer) and game and meat (fall). There is just a single fixed tasting menu, but dietary restrictions are being honored - to the extent that it makes sense for the season, vegetarians are probably going to have a hard time in the game and meat season...
Noma also moved to a new location in 2018, a custom-designed set of buildings on an island in greater Copenhagen, just a 10-15 minute car ride away from downtown Copenhagen. Lots of wood and glass is used, green houses flank the walkway from the car drop-off to the wooden door that leads into the restaurant proper. Opening the large wooden door leads immediately into the kitchen, where the staff greats all newcomers. We even saw René Redzepi in the reception line - just standing casually with the staff, so if you didn't know that he runs this place, you wouldn't have guessed. Well, a very observant person might have noticed that he seems to be the only one over thirty among the kitchen staff.
Noma has multiple dining rooms, but they are spread out and each room has maybe six tables or so, so that the restaurant does not feel that large. But the total size is a significant upgrade from its old location that was maybe five minutes away. Our impression was that the new location felt a little bit more impersonal due to its size. Every guest in our dining room was from out of country, most here just for the night. Whereas we received an extensive tour of the kitchen and experimental lab on our 2015 visit, in 2022 we didn’t get such an offer, so pretty much just ate and left, even though the green houses and labs looked interesting while walking past.
The only choice when dining is here is what to drink. In fact, the meal needs to be prepaid when making the reservation, so the drinks are the only thing to pay for onsite. A wine pairing at a staggering $260 or a juice pairing for $150 are on offer. We went for the wine pairing, and while it was pleasant enough, none of the wines stood out, and the price for the pairing definitely seems to be on the high side.
Dinner started with a bang. Crab broth was served in a vessel made from crab shells, and one had to drink the liquid from the crab's "mouth". Intensely flavorful, this was a perfect start to the meal 20.
The next course was stone crab meat salad with a hazelnut milk dressing. Served in a "flower" of seaweed (which we were informed not to eat), this was a stunning presentation that must have taken a while to assemble. The dish itself, however, was somewhat lacking in flavor, the hazelnut taste being very subtle, and the crab not really shining through the dressing. Maybe we should have eaten the seaweed after all to add flavor? Or a bit more salt could have been helpful 15.
The third course looked to me like the eye of Sauron. A blue mussel was braised in lapsang tea and stuffed with half a quail egg. The mussel was cooked to be very soft, no bite or chewiness was left. That's obviously a conscious choice, but I think I'd have preferred a bit more texture. Otherwise a fine dish 17.
Our table's opinions were split on the next dish, a Norwegian scallop glazed with seaweed (I think), served with the scallop's roe and some horseradish. We were instructed to eat this like a steak, adding a little horseradish to every bite of scallop. I thought this was a nice, meaty dish (without the meat), the horseradish adding just a little bite. The scallop roe tasted similar to uni. My dining companions thought that this dish was decidedly underwhelming, but maybe that's because neither of them are in the target audience of "meat eaters" 18.
The following dish can best be described as frozen snow of shrimp, covered by a piece of seaweed. A brush of parsley puree adorned the serving dish. Once put in your mouth, the snow melted to almost nothing, essentially you're eating air with a faint shrimp flavor. This is technically very impressive, not a dish you'd routinely make at home. However, the flavor was also pretty light (airy?), so not very satisfying 16.
Next were raw oysters covered by a slice of apple. A gooseberry broth and oyster leaves (an aromatic herb that tastes a bit like oyster) completed the dish. The other ingredients hid any flavor of the oyster itself, which is a shame. Why bother with a wonderful oyster if you can't taste it? One of my dining companions didn't even realize that there was an oyster in the dish. A decent dish, but not living up to its potential 16.
Much better was the following squid dish, seasoned with peppers and poppy seeds, the latter were added by shaking a punctured dried blossom of poppy. The squid melted in your mouth, among the most tender I've ever had. The peppers added a nice spiciness, I'm not sure the poppy seeds were as integral, but maybe I didn't add enough of them. Wonderful 19.
A "sea snail skewer" was a shish kebab of venus clam, truffles and a saffron sauce. Eating the skewer was a bit tricky towards the end since it was, well, very pointy, and we had no utensils. The clam had some bite, the saffron sauce was delicious and added nice creaminess, but the truffles were mostly there for texture, and unfortunately contributed little flavor 18.
A buckwheat corn "waffle" topped with cod roe and hazelnut oil was next. Essentially a crumbly cookie, this was good, but the seafood taste was very, very light 17. I probably liked this better than my dining companions.
The next dish was paired with a Swiss orange wine that reportedly had one year of skin contact. In addition, the wine was grown in highly adverse conditions, hence labeled as a "heroic alpine wine" on the bottle. I mainly mention this because I've never had aromas of sauerkraut on a wine before - this was a funky wine indeed.
The paired dish was a local fish that we'd never heard of, fjæsing, served with cod broth, braised cabbage and pepper. The fish apparently has poisonous parts, which thankfully were not present in the final preparation. Like blowfish, a dish that can literally kill you. Unlike most blowfish, however, this fish was actually delicious. In this dish, every single ingredient sang. The cabbage was cooked perfectly, the sauce wonderful, the fish fell off the (potentially poisonous) bone, the pepper added just the right level of spiciness. Magnificent 20.
Back to reality (sadly), an eclair with oyster emulsion and caviar topping was next. This was a serviceable eclair, but the caviar got totally lost in the dish. According to my wife, this was the second worst dish on the menu (with the low point still to come). I didn't think it was quite that bad, but lackluster, for sure 16.
The main course was a disassembled-then-reassembled langoustine with langoustine broth and a quince to squeeze over the dish. Different parts of the langoustine had distinctly different flavor and texture profiles. Whether the dish looks pretty is probably dependent on whether you think pinned butterflies in museums are pretty. Some parts of the langoustine worked better than others for me, but the broth was delicious, I wish we'd had more of it. (Or some bread to sop it up with, for that matter - this dinner had to do totally without bread, unless you brought your own - BYOB indeed). Maybe 17, but with a great variation across the different parts of the langoustine.
Next was the intermezzo: a quince gelee, with oyster powder and other ingredients that I didn't catch, served in an oyster shell. This dish was just plain weird. Odd flavors, bitter, and not really coming together with a coherent message. If the goal was to reset the palate, then it definitely succeeded by shock value alone, but as a delightful dish, it failed 13.
The first of two desserts was an ice cream sandwich of sorts. Between seaweed crackers was a plum seed mousse. The plum seeds imparted an amaretto like flavor, in my mind this was a very nice dish 18.
Finally, a cookie with candied chanterelles and berry powder. Fine, but lacking some pop 15.
Overall: Noma serves dishes that you will not see anywhere else in the world. The technical ability and creativity that goes into making them is second to none. That said however, the result is intellectually impressive, but not necessarily very tasty. Should you go to Noma? If you are someone who either (a) wants to brag that they have been here, or (b) just wants to see boundless creativity and experience what modern cuisine is capable of doing, then by all means go. But if you're looking for a meal what will blow you away in terms of deliciousness again and again, then there are many better places to go.
I don't know what prompted Michelin to finally elevate Noma from two to three stars, but while the kitchen is evidently capable of hitting high-end three star cooking, on average a two-star rating still seems to be more appropriate 17.
And is this the best restaurant in the world as judged by the Top 50 Restaurants website? In terms of technique, maybe, but not in terms of deliciousness by a wide margin. A high rank on that list seems to correlate more with how hard it is to get a reservation rather than the quality of the food...
Tasting menu and wine pairing