Hungry Read online

  Ruíz changes the subject. “You know what?” he says. “I’m hungry. My wife—she wouldn’t let me eat for two days. I’m using you guys as an excuse.” The food starts coming like an air raid. Enfrijoladas and entomatadas, chilaquiles and huevos rancheros. Redzepi downs a juice made with ginger, orange, and guava. He marvels at the yellowness of the egg yolks. When he tastes the enfrijoladas, a dish of consummate simplicity—nothing more than tortillas immersed in a bean sauce, the sauce carrying an invisible charge from a touch of avocado leaf—it’s as though he’s having an acid flashback. The dish tastes celestial even though it looks at first glance like a plate full of mud.

  “Chef,” he says to Ruíz. “Come on. You think you know what it’s going to taste like. This to me is the best mouthful I’ve had in Mexico. I can’t believe the flavor of this leaf. I’m getting chills.”

  “I never take pictures of food, but I have to,” Bowien says.

  “I can’t believe this is a bean sauce!” Redzepi goes on. “You know this sauce is something that has bubbled away for half the day. It’s almost as if you had a whole tasting menu smushed into three mouthfuls, because there are so many flavors.” You could not make this in Denmark. You could try but you would invariably fail. “You have to have an avocado leaf. From that little tree. On a hill. Near Oaxaca.”

  Sitting at the head of the table, Ruíz observes all this with quiet, avuncular satisfaction. The complexity of Mexican cuisine comes as no surprise to him, of course.

  “Something is going on,” Redzepi says. By this, I am coming to learn, he means that something is going on in his head. Something is going on in the sense that his reaction to the food is verging on the out-of-body.

  Ruíz smiles indulgently. “Sí, sí,” he says, “something is going on. It has always been here. It’s the way we’ve been eating all our lives.”

  Bowien is paying close attention. Up in New York, he recently—rashly, it seems—opened a Mexican restaurant called Mission Cantina. Reviews have not been charitable. Pete Wells of The New York Times gave it one star out of four, describing the place as “curiously unsatisfying” and “a book of wet matches from a chef who can make sparks shoot from his fingertips.”

  Here in Oaxaca, confronted with the truth and beauty of the cooking, Bowien seems to gulp down the bitter realization that he’s nothing more than an amateur when it comes to masa and salsas.

  “Chefs like you grew up making this, so it’s in your blood,” he confesses to Ruíz. “To me it’s a challenge to get the balance.” Bowien grabs a tortilla and bites into it, closing his eyes in an expression of both delight and shame. “My tortillas now…” He trails off. They’re dry. They fall apart. “I’m not adding fat. Maybe I need to add fat.”

  “I would say it’s the quality of the corn,” Ruíz says.

  “That’s my problem,” Bowien says. “I was using American corn.”

  “Later on we’ll try making one together,” Ruíz says.

  After breakfast Ruíz leads Redzepi and Bowien over to a comal, which looks as though it has been caked with chalk, to try their hands at making tortillas. It does not go well.

  “Why is it always women making tortillas?” Redzepi asks.

  “A man cannot make tortillas,” Ruíz answers. “It is a cultural thing. There are still villages where men do not even enter the kitchen.”

  This could be seen as both a lesson and a warning. Ruíz and the women who oversee the comal politely manage not to laugh as the masa dough sticks to the fingertips and palms of the two visitors. On the hot surface their tortillas are too thin, too thick, too sticky, dead on arrival.

  “If it doesn’t puff, it’s not a real tortilla,” Bowien says.

  “If it doesn’t puff, you’re a gringo,” Redzepi says.

  “I’m going to embarrass myself right now.”

  “Be gentle with it…”

  “I know,” Bowien says. “It’s hard.”

  Redzepi mumbles something about a clueless European trying to master something that Mexicans have been doing for centuries.

  “But you guys are more sophisticated, no?” Ruíz says slyly.

  * * *

  —

  Redzepi and Bowien stroll around the streets of Oaxaca, dipping now and then into hidden nooks where the decor looks like a pinball machine designed by Chris Ofili.

  “Imagine if we were here for longer,” Redzepi says. “How much more we’d have in our hands…”

  Bowien nods, but he’s got demands back at home in New York. He and his wife, Youngmi Mayer, have a newborn son named Mino; they’re still in Mexico City.

  “See if you can get to Tulum by three,” Redzepi tells him. “You’ll have a swim in the Caribbean Sea. That’s better than fifteen thousand Xanax.”

  This time away is good for both of them, and they know it. The challenges at Mission Cantina and Mission Chinese Food have made Bowien reevaluate everything he is doing, and for Redzepi last year brought Noma the norovirus and the hard fall from grace. “The negative spiral was complete then,” Redzepi says. “It made me so angry. It was like a bombardment. It was, like, ‘When are we gonna have good news out of Noma?’ You think we are celebrated as heroes back home? It’s not like that at all.”

  In the kitchen, in interviews, Redzepi wasn’t inclined to hide his anger. He poured his fury into the cooking. He coached his kitchen to cook from the standpoint of focused rage. That’s what he called it: cooking angry.

  “It was like a hunger,” Bowien says.

  “It was a positive anger,” Redzepi agrees. (He knew firsthand what negative anger looked like. It looked like the time years back, as legend had it, when he had marched every single member of Noma’s team out of the kitchen en masse, lined them up outside, and screamed “Fuck you!” into each individual’s face like some kind of deranged drill sergeant.)

  Whatever it was, it worked. Just weeks ago, in April, Noma regained its crown at the annual 50 Best Restaurants gathering. Bowien watched the broadcast as it was livestreamed.

  “You looked insanely surprised,” he says.

  “Insanely surprised,” Redzepi says. “This year. We were, like, ‘No way, this is not happening.’ It wasn’t so much being number one. It was 2013—that was a very tough year for the team. On the outside we couldn’t say we had a tough year…”

  Bowien says, “But inside…”

  Vindication.

  “All these people come out of the woodwork,” Redzepi says. “ ‘I know we haven’t talked in two years, but can we have a table?’ Anyway, I don’t at all think we’re number one. I don’t think the best restaurant in the world exists.”

  “I do,” Bowien says, “and I think it’s Noma.”

  “Anyway, it fired us up. We got angry. And the team got closer.”

  By now we’re on the rooftop of Casa Oaxaca. Ruíz and his crew have laid out a spread of fresh fruits and tortillas with salsas.

  “That’s the best salsa I’ve ever had,” Bowien says. “I’m very relaxed.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to change your plane ticket?” Ruíz asks him.

  “This has been so cleansing for me, this day,” Bowien says. He muses aloud on how he went through the phase of partying too much, letting his ego lap up the praise. “All the while my restaurant was crumbling, because I wasn’t paying attention to what got me there in the first place.” He looks as though he might cry. “I took a step back and I just grew up.”

  “You know, Chef, nothing is life or death,” Redzepi says.

  “Best of the year in The New York Times—and then the next year to have the rug pulled out from under you.”

  “You walk into the forest and you get a cut and the wolves smell the blood.”

  “It sucked,” Bowien says.

  “Don’t ever t
ry to control a disaster,” Redzepi says. “You can’t control it.”

  Speaking of control, I’m wondering about our flight out of Oaxaca. The hour is getting late, but no one seems to be saying anything about luggage or a ride to the airport. We’re still on the rooftop at Casa Oaxaca, sipping mezcal, scarfing chips, watching the sun go down over the cathedral across the road. Time does seem to slow to a crawl here in the purple of a Oaxacan twilight, but…aren’t we going to miss our connections? Don’t we have a flight back to Mexico City at 5 or 6 P.M., and isn’t it 5 or 6 P.M. already, and don’t we then have to fly from Mexico City to Cancún and drive for hours through the jungle to Tulum? Am I the only one getting antsy about this? Is everyone in a trance?

  * * *

  —

  Hours later, sweating and bleary, I crawl out of my mosquito-netted bed at Nueva Vida. New Life—could a journalistic way station have a more perfect name? I am tired, and the mezcal and fatigue seem to have given my brain’s internal wiring a sour coating of rust, and yet for the first time in weeks I feel energized by a sense of possibility. The Noma playlist teems with nourishments that many of us didn’t even know we could eat: musk ox and milk skin, sea buckthorn and beach mustard, bulrushes and birch sorbet, ramson leaves and rowan shoots, Cladonia lichen and Icelandic dulse, pig’s blood and ants and hay. Somehow Redzepi zeroes in on the peak deliciousness of his foraged, fermented, smoked, and salvaged ingredients, and, perhaps even more surprisingly, he makes you want to pick them up with your fingers and place them on your tongue. He comes across as a man with a mission, and his overriding sales pitch might boil down to this: Take another look. There is so much to eat.

  This habit of mind of his—this insatiable appetite for new sights, scents, flavors, conversations—can’t help but rub off on anyone who wanders into his orbit, and that’s especially true here in Mexico. Traveling alone, I might be content to lounge around on a hammock reading a book until dinnertime. But Redzepi doesn’t let me stay idle. He’s got plans. When I eventually drift along the beach to La Zebra, the beachside inn that has become the equivalent of his country cottage in Tulum, I find him conked out on a lounge chair by the waves. He’s wearing a red bathing suit and his torso already looks sunburned enough to match its hue. “It was worth it,” he says. “I slept well. I was in a happy place.”

  He points at the water. “You have to jump in the Caribbean,” he tells me. “I’m going to force you in.”

  It was on a beach very different from this one that Redzepi experienced one of his signature breakthroughs as a chef. He was walking along the shore in Denmark and he spied some arrowgrass. Being who he is, he put the plant into his mouth. He chewed it. It tasted like coriander. His mind reeled with thoughts about how he could use this overlooked beach weed to flavor dishes at Noma. “That was a real epiphany,” he tells me. “First thing is I want to show this to the team. ‘It’s a native plant: you’ve probably stepped on it on the beach a hundred times.’ And they go, ‘Ahhhhh.’ The world is bigger than they thought.” (When the decomposed remains of the Egtved Girl, a young woman who had died in the Bronze Age, were found in Denmark in 1921 inside a coffin fashioned from a tree trunk, she had beside her a bouquet of yarrow as well as “a bucket of beer made of wheat, honey, bog-myrtle, and cowberries,” according to one report. This suggests that when it comes to Noma and its approach to foraging and fermenting, the Egtved Girl may have scooped René Redzepi by a few millennia.)

  Now, he tells me as we sit here a few yards from the sea, he’s mapping out some new directions. I can’t figure out what he’s alluding to, but the coming years will reveal that the push and pull of Redzepi’s early years at Noma have been a mere prelude to the risks and changes he has in store.

  “I’m very inspired by moles,” he says. “There can’t only exist moles from Mexico—I’m sure of that.”

  Meaning what? That there could be Danish versions of mole?

  “Maybe there is something. I’ve just got to figure out what it is. Finding new flavors—that excites me tremendously.”

  He’s proud of the way Noma bounced back from adversity in the previous year. “We definitely reached a new level in 2013. We opened a door to a new world. New creativity. New confidence. I guess sometimes it’s good to have a chip on your shoulder.” Sometimes it’s good to brush up against the possibility of losing everything. Sometimes, maybe, it’s good to throw out all of the old routines and start over. Sometimes, especially for those in a walking trance, it’s good to shake things up before you become complacent. “Change things. Change your routine. Don’t do what you’ve been doing for the past five years. Read a new book,” he says. “I’m just in a spot right now that’s really good. I’m satisfied. It’s really working. I can see the next three or four years of creativity lined up already. After that I have a big shift that I have planned at Noma. We’ll see if it happens. But I have an idea.”

  * * *

  —

  Our next visitor materializes on the beach. His beard is thick and he wears Jesus sandals. His eyes and teeth glow with a surreal brightness. “You’re like a guy who lives in the mountains somewhere in California,” Redzepi says to him. Our guide’s name is Eric Werner.

  If Redzepi has made a habit of coming back to Mexico for inspiration and restoration each year, Werner has taken that itch a step further. He is a Yankee, orphaned as a teenager, who soured on life as a chef in New York City to such an acute degree that he and his wife, Mya Henry, transplanted their lives to Tulum. The two of them run Hartwood, a restaurant without a roof, where Werner can be found, night after night, wild-eyed and caked in sweat, roasting pork ribs and octopus tentacles over a punishing wood fire. He may’ve escaped the grind, but he hasn’t abandoned the burn.

  “When I came down here there was a void that needed to be filled in my life,” Werner says. “We cook everything that’s local—everything from the Mayan world. But I would never produce a Mayan cookbook, because that’s theirs. I would never go out and buy their land, because that’s theirs. There are many worlds that exist here. The sea. The above. The below. Pink rivers. Up near Rio los Gatos, there’s a pink river and it’s all full of shrimp.” He talks about cenotes, the deep refreshing lakes that were formed millennia ago when an asteroid and its fracturing debris smacked down in the Yucatán, and he talks about river snails and salt flats and freshwater fountains that shoot up from the underground.

  But living here is not some magic-realist daydream. Werner has suffered through typhoid and a 105-degree fever. “It almost killed me,” he says. “Full-on hallucination.” He finds scorpions in his shoes, and when he goes out among the trees to cut wood for the fires at Hartwood, tarantulas crawl out of the trunks and branches. He views snakes as an example of how an ecosystem can work in harmony. “You’ll have one that’s poisonous, and then five or ten feet away is the antidote.” He believes in medicinal herbs, natural healing. When the heat overwhelms him, he’ll put a pinch of Mexican oregano behind his ears. “It cools you right down,” he says. Just the night before, as he was preparing for a busy night of service at Hartwood, a tabano—a vicious local horsefly—left a munch on his arm. His elbow swelled up. He sliced open a succulent and squeezed its gooey aloe right onto the bite as an ointment.

  Werner comes across like John the Baptist in the wilderness, a locavore zealot, except that the divine voice comes to him on a milpa, a jungle farm, hours from Tulum, where a Mayan family grows fruits and vegetables that populate the menu at Hartwood. No pesticides are used on the farm, and no fertilizer. For a visitor from the United States, the place might not even meet the conventional expectations that come along with the word “farm.”

  “A lot of people think if you have a farm you have to clear all of these trees,” Werner explains. “A bad farm—it’s going to look like that.”

  It turns out that we’re going to visit the milpa today—right now, in fac
t.

  “Got my knapsack, got my machete,” Werner says. “I’m all ready.”

  “Okay,” Redzepi says. “Vamos al rancho.”

  As we roll out of Tulum, Werner remembers something. “Wait,” he says. “Nobody’s got any joints on ’em or anything? I’ve just gotta check.” Armed police tend to be stationed here and there around the peninsula. It doesn’t take much to encourage them to stop and search a vehicle, particularly one occupied by four white guys who look like they just spent the night on a beach. Pretty soon we leave the resort-hotel outskirts of Tulum and the jungle thickens. Winged insects blur by in dense multicolored blooms.

  “The butterflies on this road are always so intense,” Redzepi muses. “They’re everywhere. It’s like bug mania here. Splat splat splat splat.” As he says this, Redzepi leans forward and studies the bloody, purpled smears on the windshield, and it dawns on me that he might be the only person who has ever mulled over transforming this Jackson Pollock–y roadkill into a meal. I’m not incorrect. “Scrape it off,” he says. “Make a garum. Salt it. Wait for seven months. See what happens.” Lately he has been reading about garums, which are pungently funky fish sauces whose roots reach all the way back to ancient Rome and Greece. “Gotta go home and try it with baby crickets,” he goes on. “We have a fermentation kitchen now. In Copenhagen we just emulated a garum recipe with insects and it just fucking worked.”

  “I wonder if that could work with bees,” says Werner, who’s behind the steering wheel in the Jeep.