a kitchen overpopulated with deep thinkers, Zilber stands apart. Fortune favors the bold, et cetera: Zilber had for years worked as a relatively unknown cook in Vancouver, but he got hired by Team Noma out of the blue after emailing an impassioned essay to three restaurants that he viewed as representing the vanguard in global cooking: Saison in San Francisco, Alinea in Chicago, and Noma in Copenhagen. The first two never responded. “I always say, if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not pushing yourself,” Zilber later told the writer Nikita Richardson, more or less encapsulating the core truth
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