If Spain was the new France, gastronomically speaking, Scandinavia must be the new Spain. During the month of October, guests at Ikarus, the restaurant at Red Bull's Hangar-7 at Salzburg Airport, will be treated to René Redzepi’ s northern nouvelle vague.
'Noma' is the magic word. 'No' is for 'Nordic', 'ma' is for 'mad', meaning 'dish' in Danish. Noma is also the name of a restaurant in Copenhagen’s misty docklands, set aglow with two Michelin stars in 2008 and listed as the third best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine.
Here, Scandinavian cuisine gets elevated onto a refreshingly higher level, night by night. Situated in the 250-year-old North Atlantic House, owned by a shipping company, Noma has been synonymous with contemporary northern European cuisine since 2000.
In Noma’s kitchen, we find a young chef who knows his way to the stars through their hearts and their tastebuds: René Redzepi, whose professional domains have been Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli on the Spanish Costa Brava and Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California, among others, is putting to use only personally selected Scandinavian products, which he transforms with refinement and an aesthetic feeling for the avant-garde into unique taste sensations.
Within the last six years, Noma has thus become the first ship in a steadily growing fleet of new Nordic restaurants. Its captain, Redzepi, born in 1977 of Macedonian and Danish descent, has already skippered many expeditions to the polar sea to investigate ancient food products of the Arctic Ocean and its islands.
He brought back fascinating comestibles that have been on the northern nomads’ and inuits’ diet for centuries but sound fairly exotic to the European ear: vinegar of heather and erica, huge scallops from Norway, Swedish truffles, deep sea crab from the Faroe Islands, tang from Iceland, portulaca and sorrel, sea buckthorn, aniseed oil, skrye (an almost fat-free sheepmilk curd) and musk meat.
Redzepi put himself to work with the newly-acquired polar potions und preciosities. He started brewing beer from cloudberries, cultivated vinegar from bramblewine and moonshined schnapps from birch tree sap. He started curing meat and fish, marinates and grills over the gnarled branches of northern trees, baked bread on hot basalt stone, and spiced up vegetables with the ashes of burned hay.
Results of these creative labours look gorgeous and taste delicious: marinated shrimps from Greenland on a hill of frozen buttermilk or reindeer with tartare sauce offer a whole new international spectrum on purely regional products of the Arctic, to the extent that Italian-born Hangar-7-executive chef Roland Trettl didn’t even bother to get an espresso after tasting the results of Redzepi’s recipes. That's understandable: coffee beans don’t grow north of Copenhagen...
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