Helen Rosner

Noma destroyed my passion for the industry.

Noma broke me in so many ways.

Noma is quite simply the most important restaurant in the world.

Mm-hmm.

Which sounds like a big hyperbolic thing to say, but it is the truth.

I think that there is no single restaurant on the planet that is as influential for the fine dining scene that is as contributive to this sort of trickle down of trend and philosophy and the way of thinking and the way of doing business.

Rene Redzepi is the face and avatar of this restaurant that any chef, any chef, any cook in the entire world is aware of and almost certainly is in some way modeling themselves on.

Noma is...

To maybe oversimplify it, a restaurant in Copenhagen in Denmark that was opened in the early 2000s by Chef Rene Redzepi with Klaus Meyer, who is no longer affiliated with it, and sort of took a couple of years to find its footing.

But when it really burst onto the international fine dining scene, what Noma was doing was a type of cooking that was really rooted in a phrase that they used that has now become kind of a cliche in the culinary world.

But it's because Noma made it a cliche.

And that phrase is sense of place.

And what Redzepi was doing was a lot of foraging, a lot of going out and finding ingredients, plants, animals, funguses, insects.

It, at this point, has become almost a joke, this idea of, like, you know, a few ants and a piece of moss plated on a piece of driftwood and a rock that you found, and then calling it, like, the sense of the sea.

But what Noma did was actually quite revolutionary, and like a lot of...

silly-seeming descriptions of art, when you were actually experiencing it in its execution, it was pretty extraordinary and transportive.

Well, yeah.

You know, it's the kind of thing where I think from the outside you might think of it as pretentious, but I genuinely think, and I've eaten at Noma twice, that I wouldn't call it pretentious because I don't think it was pretense.

I think that Red Zeppi and the team that he cultivated believed quite passionately in the innovation and the creation and exploration that they were doing.

They communicated it to diners with extraordinary clarity.