Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World

by Jeff Gordinier

He has taken what could be a set of ankle weights and turned them into wings,

And saying yes to the primal forces of nature, as I would come to learn during the following four years, was what René Redzepi was all about. —

No, it turned out that Redzepi wanted to talk about tacos.

Sometimes Redzepi and his brother had gone to bed hungry. The seed of the New Nordic movement could be found in his desire to subvert the Danish establishment, not to enshrine it. By now he came across as the food world’s consummate insider, but, as so often happens, what had gotten him there was an outsider’s hunger to rise up and take charge.

Little did I realize that Redzepi viewed the word “no” as a minor impediment—no more of an obstacle than the buzzing of a mosquito, barely worth a swat. His brain appeared to be missing synapses that would help ferry “no” to the proper cognitive checkpoints. Maybe he had an enzyme that blocked it.

Los Taquitos de PM was tacky as hell—garish—with plastic chairs and corporate cola signs and the sort of lighting that induces migraines and instant hangovers. Redzepi

Those things had never been important to us; we’d always put all our efforts into people and creativity, not commodities.

Mexico was where he could see clearly, and the complexity of Mexican cuisine—the corn, the chiles, the fruits, the edible insects, the sharp differences from region to region—haunted him like a love affair whose memory he couldn’t shake. He needed to come back to these flavors.

In the following three years Redzepi would return to mole with the determination of a mathematician, the diligence of a yogi.

but even that litany of components didn’t capture what it tasted like, because mole was the game that moved as you played, the answer that was always in flux, sauce as quantum physics.

The first iteration of the mole joined the second version of the mole and then they both joined the third interpretation of the mole and on and on and on, for weeks on end, with new ingredients making their acquaintance with old ingredients and all of the old ingredients aging and deepening and acquiescing with the passing of time. The mole changed, the seasons changed, we changed, you changed—is this a restaurant dish or a passage from the Bhagavad Gita?

Redzepi, in contrast, was all about moving forward.

While I would nearly carve a furrow into the ground by walking the same stretch of trail for months at a time, Redzepi’s neural pathways appeared to have an insatiable appetite for fresh data. For new people, too. His international network of contacts was always expanding.

You could tell when you had been chosen. Your phone would ping. The sound was like the peal of a bell. “Hey buddy,” the text would say. There was something being asked of you and there was something being given. Being asked was the gift—being summoned to join the cause. Being asked meant that Redzepi had recognized some talent in you, ...

The club was a band of believers, sisters and brothers united in excellence—not merry pranksters, not a ragtag assemblage of misfits or whatever the going chef stereotype used to be, but a fierce, focused crew, akin to the NASA ground-control team in Apollo 13. If Redzepi was texting you, it meant that he thought your input was valuabl...

I began to view his method as a form of Tom Sawyer–ing. Redzepi was a tech-savvy version of the namesake character in Mark Twain’s novel, somehow persuading passersby to join him in the painting of a white picket fence, pro bono, because to paint a white picket fence was to pursue a noble cause. You were beautifying the community, which meant that you were contributing your portion of spirit to the betterment of our world. In ...

Restaurants give cities their hum. Restaurants are the ventricles through which the lifeblood of a metropolis pulses in and out.

Was there something swimming around in the global water supply in the year that gave us Star Wars and the first Talking Heads album? Or

hate to break it to readers who have come to these pages looking for reckless profanity and mischief, but Redzepi was a devoted husband and the father of daughters around whom he had a tendency to melt. He

was a worker. He was a builder. A perfectionist. A plodder and a plotter. His enemies were apathy and laziness.

Redzepi was no Sid Vicious. If we relied on the class of 1977 as our framework, I suppose we could compare him to David Byrne of Talking Heads, a band that seemed to expand onstage with each song in Stop Making Sense, gradually gathering force into a multicultural multitude of churning, bleeping, whirring, galloping accord.

Tom Petty was right. Waiting is the hardest part. Physically and spiritually, we’re in the Oaxaca airport—Redzepi

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Samuel Johnson once said. And when a man fails to be energized and levitated by the carnival of a Mexican marketplace, he must be dead inside.

“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 try to control a disaster,” Redzepi says. “You can’t control it.”

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

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 Mission had failed city health inspections, Chang told Bowien that he had to foster a culture of accountability, cleanliness, and organization in the kitchen. “ ‘You’ve got to get tough on these guys,’ ” Bowien recalls Chang saying. “ ‘You’ve got to yell at people more.’ ” Redzepi disagrees. “The future is not any more of that screaming,” he says. “I used to be so angry in the kitchen. Insanely angry. A monster. I made a decision: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ You have to make a choice. Do you want to go to work and be miserable? Or be happy?”

When I did finally land a table at Noma, everyone was suddenly too busy. The kids had hockey games and oboe recitals. The in-laws were visiting. It was Yom Kippur. Money was tight. Their wives would kill them; their husbands would kill them. The hamsters had fallen ill. The weather forecast looked dicey. There was a tag sale down the street. Sorry, I so totally wish I could, but…

Anyone who’s allergic to the stuffy, stifling languors of a tasting menu—one of those meals in which you’re compelled to screw your ass to a stool for five hours of churchy rigidity, watching the clock backstroke through bottomless Inception-like pools of time until someone shows up by the side of the table with a single North Sea oyster that has been brushed with a froth of stinging nettles, fermented passion fruit, cod milt “snow,” and eighty-day aged pigeon brains—would find unexpected relief at Noma. At Noma the dishes start getting airdropped onto your table within minutes of your having sat down, and they keep coming with the tallyho alacrity of invading paratroopers. It’s never boring. You’re in and out in a couple of hours. Bliss for me, but rather unfortunate for Grant Gold. —

I’m willing to bet that these songs contributed to the formation of your identity. They became tiles in the mosaic of your self. But after a while the rush began to fade. The years pass and you go back to old songs seeking the comfort of recognition instead of the thrill of the unheard. You try and fail to connect with much of the new stuff. This band from 2014 reminds you of that band from 1994, or 1964. This new song strikes you as little more than an abstracted algorithmic reference to that old song. Music starts to become, in your mind, a museum of half-remembered associations. There are still many years ahead, you hope, but it feels as though you will have to rely on music as a vehicle for carrying you backward, not forward.

Fresh berries and lemon thyme. Hip berries and walnuts. Flatbread and rose petals. Turbot roe and parsley. Burnt onion and walnut oil. Shrimp and radish. Pumpkin and caviar. The effect of encountering

He looked back at the cook. He had concerns about the temperature and the texture. “It’s too cold,” he said. “Like, cold. Like, hurt-your-teeth cold.” I couldn’t tell whether Redzepi actually liked the dish; nevertheless he found a way to leave its creator with a frisson of achievement. “You today have taught us something new about flavor,” he told her. “You have a gift that’s very rare.”

the time I was trying to create a team of bright chefs who were fully present and adept, but what I had for the most part were robots: human machines who’d been trained to follow a recipe as though it were some sort of absolute truth, forgetting the impulses and reactions that are necessary when working with something that’s alive. After all, it’s the chef cooking the food who makes the magic, not the recipe; a drop of acidity here or there, even when not called for in the recipe, can make all the difference….Recipes should be strong guidelines, not fixed scripture.

last millimeter of the kitchen. Giusti told me that Saturday Night Projects seemed, on the surface, like a natural source of anxiety, especially for those participants who spent a full week fretting over it. “It’s always super-stressful,” he said. “When they sauce the plates their hands are shaking.” But its purpose was to restore the troops, not to drain or dispirit them. “We try to keep it as constructive as possible,” he said. “It’s not a very good exercise if people are afraid. If it’s a negative experience, it’s a disaster.” Rarely did any of the Saturday Night Projects experiments end up as part of the Noma repertoire. (That would be sort of like the equivalent of a homemade iPhone video winning a top prize at the Sundance Film Festival.) But the exercise helped the cooks understand more about themselves and their chosen profession. And from a leadership perspective, it helped Redzepi learn more about who was working for him—their strengths, their weaknesses.

Redzepi’s approach was a way of hitting the reset button and asking, What if we were to see this land with new eyes? What

“Balkan dog”—that’s what people would call Redzepi back in Denmark. For those who happen to notice that his kitchen at Noma was staffed with and powered by immigrants, it’s useful to remember that Redzepi always viewed himself as one.

Here you have Malcolm Livingston’s dilemma—and, paradoxically, the source of his drive. He’s not an MC, but he’s gifted nonetheless.

At some point he got a book about volatile compounds from the New York University department of food science—a book that helps explain why, say, honeydew melon and jasmine and cucumber might play well together. “That’s how I’m able to break down unusual flavor combinations,” he says. “That’s kind of how I break down food.”

He thinks of it as a young restaurant, its brain and limbs still developing. Pretend you’re looking at an odometer or a digital scale. You have to add the zero in order to let yourself think in terms of centuries instead of decades. “I feel that we are infants in our life span,” he says. “If you put a zero in front, you foster that kind of long-term thinking. We should make decisions that make this evolution last for 912 years.”

“We’re not looking to change the very spirit of who we are,” Redzepi says. “We’re amplifying it. From day one we’re not going to be perfect. It’s probably not going to be as good as the old Noma was at the end. But give it time and we will be better. Much, much better. An even better restaurant. A more profound experience. An even deeper understanding of ingredients.” Broken down into three distinct seasons (seafood in the winter and early spring, the plant kingdom in the summer, wild game in the fall), the Noma menu that Redzepi is dreaming about won’t repeat a single dish or idea from the previous playbook. He’s been thinking about time—he’s inspired by the Long Now Foundation, the San Francisco–based institution devoted to shifting human thinking so that people consider, and plan for, the farther-out ripples produced by a pebble dropped into a pond. He wants more than what’s merely immediate. “Of course we could just continue as is,” he says. “Just stay put and do what we do there. But I genuinely think we won’t progress.” Maybe his children will inherit Noma. Maybe it will flourish under his great-grandchildren. Redzepi is playing a long game.

Zen Buddhism, teachers talk about the wisdom of seeing the world, when you can, from the perspective of a “beginner’s mind.” Even if you’ve seen it countless times before, you hit reset and see it anew. Up there on the roof, Redzepi is trying to see the future through just such a lens—at least until his impatience gets the better of him.

Instagram overflows with images of the destinations that have been reached—the hotel beds as inviting as layer cakes, the mountain vistas, the cobblestoned alleyways—but to savor these delights you must pass through a series of terminals. How you feel about airports, and airplanes, might determine how suited you are to such an existence. Do you like to remove your shoes and your laptop after inching through the serpentine spirit-killer that is the security line?

And travel is an intoxicant, particularly for those of us who loathe the sedimentary layers of undone to-dos that pile up at home like domestic fossils. Insure

The truth is that for years I managed to turn escapism into a source of income. Real

Over the years I got to know Lauren, through conversation and emails, and I became captivated by her sophistication and composure. I had mentally filed away this crush as one of life’s many impossibilities, but during this time in my life I was coming to learn that impossibilities weren’t always as impossible as they seemed.

“The impact from Japan? It keeps going. I think it influences us for sure. The meaning of everything in Japan. Everything has a purpose.

Success meant this: a meal that had never been eaten on earth, one that tasted simultaneously contemporary and ancient. “What we are doing is not new,” Redzepi told me. “We are dealing with things that are as old as time itself.” For forty thousand years the people who inhabited this continent had found ways to cook with what the landscape provided to them. “They’ve had a way of cooking and surviving for thousands of years.” The task was vast because the land was vast. “Here in Australia, there’s so much,” he went on. “It’s like sourcing from Denmark to Morocco, Denmark to Jerusalem.” Scour those acres, come back to the kitchen, coax nature into singing a song no one’s ever heard—no big deal. “To

“To me, foraging is a skill set that’s as important as learning to braise,” Redzepi would tell me later. “It’s so intricately a part of what we do. A mistake in the kitchen? You can’t just call the grocer. You have to go pick the stuff.”

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.

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,