The Coming of Age of Copenhagen’s Nordic Cuisine

Tag: Fish Powder
THE waiter wore the kind of mad grin normally seen on movie villains as they unleash mayhem on an unsuspecting city. A silvery industrial canister dangled from his hand. It looked like something for transporting dangerous radioactive isotopes. More alarming, it was emitting thick clouds of cold white smoke through the lid. “These are frozen elder flowers,” he said, reaching into the canister with a small scoop and sprinkling tiny white nuggets into my dessert bowl. “They have been chilled in liquid nitrogen.” The frozen petals fell like hail onto the small mound of red elderberry jelly, vanilla ice cream and chocolate foam. Everyone in the restaurant, a fast-rising newcomer called Geranium turned to look at this impressively futuristic concoction. Was this really Denmark? Because my father and Danish stepmother live in Denmark, I’ve been visiting the small seafaring nation of Carlsberg beer and Lego for almost two decades. With very few exceptions, dining out has mostly been a banal, underwhelming experience. For years, the country’s staples — pork, potatoes, herring — were predictably reshuffled from restaurant to restaurant in a culinary three-card monte. In a country famous for avant-garde furnishings and sci-fi housewares, there was no food halfway worthy of gracing them. But the last five years have seen a sea change in Copenhagen kitchens. Young Danish chefs, many of whom have apprenticed in celebrated kitchens abroad, have returned to Denmark with fancy ideas and hopes of elevating their country’s cuisine. The efforts are paying off. In the 2008 Michelin guide to Europe, 11 restaurants in and around Copenhagen captured a total of 12 stars, more than Norway and Finland combined. The excellent crop of new gastronomic destinations all but guarantees Copenhagen’s continued ascent. Claus Meyer, the co-owner of this vanguard Copenhagen restaurant writes in “Noma: Nordic Cuisine” what could be called the rallying cry of the city’s new restaurants: “It was crystal clear to us that somebody had to face up to the challenge of dusting off and updating traditional Danish cuisine, so that it could be lifted out from the nationalistic stench that fills the air in bodegas and inns, so that it could be resurrected in a modernized rendition.” Barely four years old, Noma already has two Michelin stars, the most in town. Along with Mr. Meyer, the head chef, co-owner René Redzepi — a veteran of top international restaurants like El Bulli in Spain and the French Laundry in California — has scouted out unusual, distinctive regional ingredients from the forests and fjords of the remotest North Sea countries. (Many of the best new Copenhagen restaurants have enthusiastically followed suit.) It’s not uncommon to find Greenland cold-water shrimp, Faroe Island langoustines or Icelandic seaweed in their frequently changing menus. No wine is used in soups or sauces; sweet and sour flavors often involve sugar beets or herbs like wood sorrel. Food preparation, too, hearkens back to time-honored Nordic traditions like smoking, salting and pickling. The afternoon I ate there, the harborside space — a low-slung 18th-century brick warehouse with raw plank floors and exposed beams — was a tranquil hum of businessmen and couples. The four-course lunch menu (495 kroner, about $100 at 4.78 kroner to the dollar) began with not one but three successive amuse-bouches, including a peeled, pickled and poached quail egg. The preparation created an unexpected woody-toasty lushness. The first course underscored both the inventiveness and wit of Noma’s kitchen. A small plate arrived bearing a greenish gelatin tube — made from parsley — topped in a cold, white, snowlike powder made from horseradish. The verdant patch under the white powder was clearly an allusion to the winter season outside. But this was much more than a visual gimmick. Invisible inside the parsley gelatin tube were razor clams, which would have been too unsightly if placed directly on the plate. Biting into all three components at once produced the salty flavors of cold North Sea (the clams), a taste of chilly fields (the parsley) and a pleasing bite of winter frost (the horseradish snow). This culinary metaphor of the December landscape was also proof that a near-frozen dish need not be flavorless. In between bites of warm bread and some intriguing jazzed-up butter (one made with pork lard, giving it a bacon-y taste) came a bowl of smoked liquid egg yolk in a mushroom-birch sauce. To balance the heartiness of the main course, reindeer, each cut was topped with an ultra-thin slice of apple (for an iota of acidity) and dime-sized disk of jellied woodruff (for a very delicate herbal sweetness). It was excellent.