Thomas Frebel was gone now. A core member of the Noma A-team, one day he had announced that he was moving to Japan to open his own Noma-influenced restaurant, Inua, and that was that. Malcolm Livingston was gone, too. He had parted ways with the restaurant after the curtain fell on the original location, moved back home to New York, and teamed up with the Bronx-based Ghetto Gastro collective to cook and travel around the world. Back in New York, Danny Bowien had closed Mission Cantina—his attempted mastery of the tortilla never having clicked—and reopened Mission Chinese Food in a new Chinatown space, personally evolving along the way into a gym rat and a cheekily insouciant style icon. Enrique Olvera had opened two successful restaurants in New York City, Cosme and Atla; Pete Wells had named Cosme the best new restaurant in New York in 2015. Redzepi’s wife, Nadine, had published a cookbook called Downtime. Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park had topped the 50 Best Restaurants list in 2017, and Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana had followed at the top the next year. In both years, 2017 and 2018, Noma had been out of contention because of Redzepi’s mission to reinvent the whole enterprise. There was bound to be news in the spring of 2019, when Noma would be back in the game for good.
In another room next door, here in Copenhagen, David Zilber was experimenting with the changes wrought by time and air. “Peaso”—miso made with peas—lined Zilber’s shelves in various fermentation permutations. “You can’t see that last drop that goes into the mussel,” Redzepi said. “But that drop is like ten years in the works.” Time—that was the secret ingredient at Noma. Time would pass, and everything would change, and more would be learned, and people would come and people would go, and stuff would break and stuff would get fixed, and everything would inch closer and closer to some new frontier of deliciousness.
“We believe this is our future,” he went on. “Fourteen years of trial and error—you start to know things.” Even the rooms themselves would move forward—they’d be adapted to new uses with each passing season and each new flood tide of ideas.
“We’re in here for life,” Redzepi said, waving his arms as if they could measure the expanse of this new home. “But we’re not in here for one thing. It can change. It can change. It can change.”
In memory of Jonathan Gold,
who showed us the road
&
for Lauren,
who showed me the way home
THANK YOU to these people, without whom I would’ve remained lost on that beach:
Lauren Fonda
Anna Lipin
Steve Diamond
Scott Waxman
Ashley Lopez
Timothy Hodler
Gabe Ulla
Amy and John Risley
Steffi and Curt Gordinier
Susan and Richard Gordinier
Margot, Toby, Jasper, and Wesley Gordinier
Judy and Peter Fonda
Lisa Abend
Jay Fielden
Michael Hainey
Kevin Sintumuang
Helene Rubinstein
John Kenney
Stephen Satterfield
Ian Daly
Melina Shannon-DiPietro
Nadine Levy Redzepi
David Chang
Alejandro Ruíz
Omar Mamoon
Daniel Patterson
Pete Wells
Phyllis Grant
Adam Sachs
Jason Tesauro
DeLauné Michel
Tom Junod
Fabienne and Jeremy Toback
Rosie Schaap
Peter Tittiger
Arve Podsada Krognes
Annika de Las Heras
Katherine Bont
Lau Richter
Ali Sonko
Dan Peres
Jesse Ashlock
Deborah Needleman
Whitney Vargas
Sam Sifton
Patrick Farrell
Emily Weinstein
Tiina Loite
Carter Love
Jeff Oloizia
John Cochran
Klancy Miller
Julia Moskin
Melissa Clark
Mary Celeste Beall
Brady Langmann
Adrienne Westenfeld
David Zilber
Bente Svendsen
Becca Parrish
Sean Donnola
Signe Birck
Lærke Posselt
Evan Sung
Candice Peoples
Sara Bonisteel
Kim Severson
Santiago Lastra Rodriguez
Andre Baranowski
Dennis Beasley
Dody Chang
Nicole Miziolek
Joshua David Stein
Laura Wanamaker
Alexandra White
Marina D’Amore
Sofia Clarke
Hotel Sanders
Hotel D’Angleterre
Café Det Vide Hus
Villa Haugen in Leinesfjord, Norway
Norwegian Seafood Council
Marc Blazer
Ben Mervis
Peter Kreiner
Ben Liebmann
Anders Selmer
Mads Refslund
Roderick Sloan
Diana Henry
Howie Kahn
William Wolfslau
Aubrey Martinson
Killian Fox
Christopher Sjuve
Christine Johnston
Dyana Messina
Melissa Esner
Tim Duggan
1René Redzepi in the Noma kitchen. Photograph by Evan Sung.
2René Redzepi and Danny Bowien at a Oaxacan street market. Photograph by the author.
3Alejandro Ruíz with Danny Bowien and René Redzepi in Oaxaca. Photograph by the author.
4A road through the Yucatán jungle. Photograph by Sean Donnola.
5Eric Werner grilling at Hartwood in Tulum. Photograph by Sean Donnola.
6Malcolm Livingston II in the Bronx. Photograph by the author.
7Elijah Holland brandishing a monstera deliciosa. Photograph by the author.
8The MAD Symposium tent, Copenhagen. Photograph by the author.
9Fisherman Roderick Sloan on his boat. Photograph by the author.
10Somewhere above the arctic circle in Norway. Photograph by the author.
11René Redzepi taking down the Noma sign. Photograph by the author.
12Junichi Takahashi prepping the cod face. Photograph by Signe Birck.
13David Zilber at Noma. Photograph by Signe Birck.
14The new Noma near Christiania, winter. Photograph by Evan Sung.
15Mette Søberg at Noma. Photograph by Signe Birck.
16René Redzepi on the beach in Tulum. Photograph by Sean Donnola.
JEFF GORDINIER is the food and drinks editor of Esquire and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, where he was previously a reporter. He is the author of X Saves the World and coeditor of the essay collection Here She Comes Now. He lives north of New York City with his wife, Lauren Fonda, and his four children.
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