Hungry Page 11

  I’m on a boat on the water somewhere above the arctic circle in Norway.

  I can’t tell you precisely where, because Roderick Sloan wouldn’t want me to, but even if I unwisely and uncharitably decided to blow his cover and reveal the GPS coordinates of one of his prime fishing spots, I would be unable to pin it down. The air out here, in the middle of February, is so cold that my iPhone keeps shutting down unless I tuck it into a pocket close to my chest. My fingers keep shutting down, too, so I can only jot notes by hand in fast, gloveless bursts, and even then the ink in my pen appears to have stopped flowing.

  “This is my yoga,” Sloan is telling us. “This is where I find my soul.” He’s standing in a second boat, swaddled in a puffy jumpsuit that protects his body from subzero temperatures. Flurries of snow shimmy around him. The small islands and peninsulas that surround our boats are caked with layers of snow and ice. The water looks dark blue and dark green, depending on the light, which is wan and short-lived at this time of year. I find myself thinking about how long I would survive if I were to topple over into the Norwegian chop. But Sloan does it on a regular basis. He found a way to earn a living, and has shored up a modicum of international fame, by diving into these chilly currents to haul up what he considers the freshest, purest seafood available in Europe. “The next time you look at seafood, the best stuff comes from here,” he tells us, a group of trembling chefs and journalists, in his barking Scots burr. “Everything here goes into my mouth first. Every box must be perfect. Every box.”

  I have come to Norway in the middle of winter because of the dish that dazzled me the first time I ate at Noma: the sea urchin with hazelnuts. That dish can be traced all the way here to the isolated frosts where Sloan lives with his Norwegian wife and their three sons. The Noma cult may have no more passionate an acolyte than Sloan. The writer Franz Lidz once described him and his profession this way:

  What makes Sloan perfectly risible in the eyes of many is the precarious career he has carved. In weather that would be considered mild only on Neptune, he dives into the icy fjord to gather sea urchins, those wee beasties that look like squash balls encased in pine thistles. Sloan’s aquatic treasure hunts for krakebolle (“crow’s balls” in Norwegian) are as dangerous as they are daring. Waves are often treacherous; squalls, gusty; and storms can appear in an instant.

  The first time I met him, at the MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, Sloan was sitting on a bale of hay. I suspected that he had had a few drinks, but with Roddie Sloan there was no way of knowing—his contact with people seemed heightened by a form of inebriation all the time even if alcohol didn’t happen to be involved. He proceeded to chat with me, and taunt me, in a manner that made camaraderie and hostility seem virtually indistinguishable. You couldn’t tell whether he wanted to hug you or smack you. With his beard and his cockeyed glance and his Scottish accent, he came across like Begbie in Trainspotting if Begbie had been played by Robin Williams in Popeye mode. He was lovable and irascible, openhearted and easily offended (or was that just an act?), sometimes all within the course of a single sentence. As was the habit with members of the Noma diaspora, he looked me in the eye and made an insane suggestion: Come up to Norway in the middle of February and we’ll go fishing. By now I knew I would have to offer an insane reply: Sure.

  Redzepi had made the same trip, of course. Sloan’s respect for the chef was fortified when Sloan took him out in the boat one day for about six hours. The temperature had sunk to around 5 degrees Fahrenheit, but Redzepi was wearing sneakers instead of the thick boots Sloan always hounds his guests into wearing. In spite of this the chef didn’t complain about the cold. “The loyalty between me and René is huge,” Sloan had told me. “He never lies. He pays on time. He never does anything bad.”

  At first, the bond between Sloan and Redzepi had been forged over a shared love for a single ingredient: sea urchins. Sloan’s urchins were so fresh—shipped out the same day they were caught, placed on a boat, then on a plane, and delivered alive to Noma’s tanks by four in the afternoon—that they required no adornment beyond the milk and meat of raw, unripe hazelnuts. Sloan’s discovery of a bumper crop of krakebolle happened to dovetail with the moment in global gastronomy when chefs suddenly couldn’t get enough of them. As Lidz wrote in 2014,

  In the brave new world of fine dining, the roe of the humble urchin—a shellfish once cursed as a pest to lobstermen, mocked as “whore’s eggs” and routinely smashed with hammers or tossed overboard as unsalable “bycatch”—is a prized and slurpily lascivious delicacy. Unlike caviar, which is the eggs of fish, the roe of the urchin is its wobbly gonads. Every year more than 100,000 tons of them slide down discerning throats, mainly in France and Japan, where the chunks of salty, grainy custard are known as uni and believed to be an uplifting tonic, if not an aphrodisiac. The Japanese exchange urchins as gifts during New Year celebrations.

  But Sloan’s rise to fame as Noma’s urchin wizard also coincided with a cruel stroke of fate. One day, without warning, his undersea stockpiles of urchins simply vanished. The oceans can be fickle, especially with the vicissitudes of climate change wreaking havoc on natural habitats. “Both fragile and destructive, the urchin is a tempest in an environmental seapot,” Lidz has written. “In every corner of the planet, there seem to be either too few or too many. The French and Irish exhausted their resident stocks years ago. In Maine, Nova Scotia and Japan, urchin populations have been drastically reduced by overfishing and disease.” All Sloan knows is that he went out in the boat one day, squeezed himself into his sixty-five pounds of scuba gear, plunged into the water, risking getting trapped in tangles of seaweed, and came back to the boat empty-handed.

  The experience left him shaken. He still has a hard time talking about it, in spite of his usual bluster. “They’re gone, man,” he tells me in a near-whisper. “It’s feast or famine.” He has maps. The maps are supposed to lead him to clusters of thousands. There were magazine profiles about him. “All of a sudden every chef in the world wants my product,” he says. “I go back to the ocean and the ocean is empty. How embarrassing is that?”

  He had to break the news to Redzepi, had to tell his best customer that one of his most prized ingredients would no longer be available.

  “That’s a shame, Roddie,” Redzepi told him. “What else have you got? I’ll buy it all.”

  I was, by now, riding high on escapist delirium. Noma juice was like a case of Lapierre Morgon I couldn’t stop pouring for myself, and it made for a potent buzz when coupled with the elixir of my having fallen in love with Lauren, the escapist Bonnie to my Clyde. After hanging out with Sloan in Norway, I located, online, a $33 flight from Oslo to Paris, and I booked it without a second’s thought. The walking trance had turned into a manic dance. I flew to Paris to explore the natural wine bars of the 10th and 11th arrondissements—places like Le Verre Volé, La Buvette, Aux Deux Amis, and Septime La Cave that represented a casually revolutionary leap forward in our consumption of wine. The natural wine movement in France had found an ally in Noma, whose ethos of organic wildness lined up with the ideology of le vin vivant. Living wine, raw wine, natural wine—whatever you wanted to call it, it was meant to be made with minimal interference from human beings, and (if possible) none of the additives that were frequently used to manipulate the color, stability, and hue. What morphed the fruit was the yeast that flourished by itself in the presence of sugars—on the grapes, on the leaves, on the stems, on the walls of the cellar. This was terroir to the nth power: The land created the wine that told a story about the land. If you imagine an ancient Roman sybarite mashing up fruit and letting it ferment in an amphora, you’re not far off from the beau ideal. To make wine this way was to run the risk of letting the wine go in a bunch of different directions based on a range of unpredictable elements, and it’s not hard to see how such a credo appealed to Redzepi. Noma’s decision to serve natural wines had been a radical one at first, but it had cleared
a path for other restaurants and bars around the world to start doing the same, from Frenchette in New York City to Ordinaire in Oakland, California. All that said, some kind of wild yeast was apparently at work on the vineyard of my brain, too. I had by now quit my job at the Times and sold my house in Westchester County, and I suppose I had booked the flight to Paris because of some remembered youthful exhilaration that I hoped to reconnect with. I found it, too, as I stood on the expanse of the Pont Neuf and surveyed the city at night and began sobbing hard enough that it felt like another burpee. Few things are as exhilarating as a wholesale unloading. I knew the rush wouldn’t last, but I was determined to relish it while I could.

  Ferran Adrià told this paper that after years at El Bulli, it became extremely difficult to develop new ideas. How about for you? Where do you go from here?

  I think it is quite natural at a certain point you have nothing more to offer. You will start repeating yourself and in the worst case become some type of cliché. I can’t think of a restaurant where I haven’t seen it happen.

  I’m sure I can find inspiration again at some point, and I can reboot myself creatively, in a new project and a new frame of work, and somebody else can take over at Noma. That is for sure my plan.

  Once you reach No. 1, of course, it’s the beginning of the end.

  —RENÉ REDZEPI INTERVIEW WITH KATY MCLAUGHLIN, Wall Street Journal, June 2010

  * * *

  —

  And then it’s happening, Noma is ending, there’s no turning back.

  I arrive in Copenhagen from Paris just as the team at Noma is riding headlong into the final lunch at the original location on that Christianshavn dock, the cobbled-together, never-quite-big-enough place where manifestations of Redzepi’s ambition orbited the building like space junk. The barbecue grills out back that could’ve doubled for a carnitas operation down an alleyway in Tijuana; the fermentation laboratory a few steps farther back that looked like a loading dock full of shipping containers in San Pedro. The “greatest restaurant in the world”—did people realize what a tottering, improvised pile the place was? Did people understand that many of those opulent nibbles emerged from a warren of rooms and nooks and tubs as ramshackle as a punk band’s rehearsal space? Did people comprehend what a weird miracle the whole thing was? To emerge from out of nowhere—like Bob Dylan out of Hibbing, Minnesota—and change the cultural conversation for a while?

  “If you want to keep your mind young, you have to keep moving,” Redzepi tells me as I drop my bags and head into the kitchen. Just last Saturday he sank into a depression, a dark one, but today he’s aloft; he says the trillions of cells in his body are telling him it’s the right move at the right time. I’m expecting some sort of nature metaphor—something about the seasons, the circle of life, renewal and decay—but instead he tells me that the whole thing could be compared to a jumbo jet. Imagine that Boeing 747’s first flight on February 9, 1969. Imagine the force and faith required to get the tonnage of one of those behemoths to take wing. All of that weight, rising into the air. “We are the jumbo jet,” Redzepi says.

  I am spun around in the kitchen and there are two desserts that Malcolm Livingston has left on the counter: a bowl of milk ice cream with a gamey paste of ants on the bottom and a sweet-sour syrup of apple vinegar and quince on top. Then, as a final flourish, a second treat: a featherweight Danish pastry that’s twisted and elongated like a stretched-out curly French fry. Redzepi encourages me to eat them. These are the last dishes that will go out to the dining room in the old Noma. Everything that has been built since 2003 will now dissolve like flakes of pastry on the tongue. Maybe that fleeting quality is part of what makes eating so euphoric. Take all the pictures you want. Preserve them on Instagram. But no image can reconnect anyone with the flavor of a dish, its contrasts of texture and temperature, the way it collapsed beneath your teeth. Thousands of meals contributed to Noma’s rise to prominence over the years—plate by plate, bite by bite, murmur by moan—but everyone in the kitchen knows they’re about to become nothing more than a rumor: “Hey, did you ever try the sea urchin with hazelnuts?”

  There is a touch of chaos in the air. You can talk about change in the abstract, but everything feels charged with extra layers of drama when the change finally arrives. Mads Refslund has flown to Copenhagen from New York, and Anders Selmer is here from across town to raise a toast to what Noma once was. Both were part of the crew that opened Noma in 2003. The three of them, Redzepi and Refslund and Selmer, pose for portraits together. As if the intensity of the crescendo were not enough, Nadine Levy Redzepi has just endured dental surgery and is speaking as if her mouth were stuffed with cotton balls. “Half of her face is completely numb,” Redzepi says. “I’m, like, ‘Nadine, why’d you have a root canal today? On a fucking Saturday? And this Saturday?!’ ”

  There has to be a speech. Redzepi doesn’t want to give one. He stands in front of the team, an hour or so before the dinner rush begins, and freezes up. He can’t locate the words. Emotion overwhelms him. Thomas Frebel steps in.

  “Well, then, maybe it’s me, guys,” Frebel says.

  “Thank you,” Redzepi says, the rasp of hoarseness in his voice.

  “Everybody knows I don’t like to talk too much—speeches and stuff like that,” Frebel says. “But I think I’m talking for everyone in this room and everyone who has been part of this restaurant just to say thank you, René, for having us.” The room erupts in wave after wave of woofing and clapping.

  Again Redzepi tries to talk. “I promised myself that I would not do a long trip through memory lane because we will have the time to do that over the next two days, while we’re partying…also because it would be too much…”

  He stops midsentence with his hand on his hips. He shakes his head. Refslund steps up from behind him and grabs Redzepi around the neck and shoulders. The chef is crying. He tries again to say a few words.

  “It would be too much because everything I have in life has come through here,” Redzepi says. “My wife. My kids. My friends.” His voice cracks. He pulls his apron up to his eyes to sop up the tears. “The reason why I told myself not to do this is because, you know, I want to kill it so bad at the next place. You know what I mean? It’s a very difficult step—to break with something. But this is what I need to do, and this is where we think that we’ll be able to do even more amazing things. I don’t at all doubt that. I don’t at all doubt that. Thank you. For the past thirteen years, it’s crazy, I didn’t expect it to be like this. There’s two people here—they were part of the first service. And some of you’ve been part almost since day one. It’s crazy.”

  He remembers people walking through the front door for the first time. He remembers shouting at people. All at once, he remembers breakthroughs and breakdowns.

  “This place has given me insane amounts—insane amounts—it’s unbelievable. I truly truly truly believe that what has made us is the sum of all of us. I know I’m on the magazine covers and all that. But I know you feel it from the guests, right? They all say, ‘There’s something more than the food. The food is great, but there’s something more.’ How many of you have heard this? Everyone! There’s something more. And that something is what people do. It’s something with people. And that to me has been the most amazing thing at Noma. It’s all the people. So thank you for being here and listening to all my crap and my shit and my temper swings, my mood swings, you know? I know that I’ve been a dick. A lot. Thank you for bearing through it.”

  Suddenly the tone of his emotions shifts—from nostalgia to fervor.

  “And Noma 2.0? I haven’t had this feeling since I was with Mads like thirteen years ago. I almost can’t control myself when I think of it. You’ve all watched me these days. I don’t know where to stand. I feel like my head is about to explode. I feel like shaking people. I feel like cracking the wall. I feel like fucking going crazy. That’s how much I want i
t. You understand? Have you ever felt that way, where you just fucking want to grab it?”

  He scans the crowd and looks into the faces of everyone he works with.

  “Okay. Now? Let’s have a great service.”

  At the end of dinner, as the desserts are fussed over and sent out to the last table, the cooks in the kitchen pop the corks on some shaken-up bottles of champagne and spray Redzepi with the culinary version of a coach’s Gatorade shower at the Super Bowl.

  The next morning, Redzepi and Lau Richter and Ali Sonko and other folks from the restaurant gather around the iconic NOMA sign that’s attached to the outside wall. They take it down letter by letter, a cheer rising from the scrum with each alphabetical amputation. The progression seems rife with meaning. NOMA becomes NOM, and then NO, and then N, and then there’s an emptiness, nothing more than holes in a wall. Some tourists wander by, probably having walked over the new bridge, to see what the fuss is all about.