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

by Jeff Gordinier

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.

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.”

A thesis behind Noma Mexico was that the perfection of traditional dishes like cochinita pibil and mole poblano could never be topped. There was no point in trying. (To attempt to “top” them would, of course, be colonialist and autocratic, and offensive in that regard, but it would also be…patently impossible.)

Taking apart mole was like taking apart a river. Mole was fluid and endless. Its very nature was elusive. You couldn’t “get to the bottom” of it. It was more of a mosaic of sauces than a sauce per se, more a manifesto than an ironclad recipe, and yet mole meant to Mexico what pesto meant to parts of Italy and tahini meant to the Middle East.

In 1988 his mother was allowed to make a visit to West Germany, and she brought back with her a small assortment of mandarin oranges. Biting into the juicy citrus was, for Frebel, like pouring a flood of sunshine on the cinder-block gray of his East German surroundings.

But…how would all these conversations and meals manifest themselves on a menu? “We have no clue yet,” Redzepi said. “We are just absorbing everything.”

There were the detours of what-if speculation that took on the form of a jazz improvisation whenever a new flavor presented itself. This

All the fruits, all the chiles, all the nuts, all the herbs. You could come to a knowledge of them individually, but even to brush up against the surface of the identity of Mexico, even to pretend to get it, you’d have to make mole. It all came back to mole. Lightning wouldn’t even threaten to strike unless the everythingness of mole could be meditated upon.

There is the panic when you realize you’ve lost your wallet. The panic when you think someone is illegally buying things with your credit card. The panic of your phone conking out precisely when you are trying to locate one of your children in a busy, dicey part of town. The panic of learning that someone has hacked into your social media account and begun sending scurrilous messages to your friends and colleagues. In spite of—or because of—a torrent of technological advancements, our civilization seems to have multiplied the number of opportunities for things to break. There are days when our lives amount to a blur, a feverish hopscotching from one glitch to the next—trying to fix things in order to stay put as opposed to trying to create things to move forward.

For anyone who has ever imagined a different way, an alternative mode of occupying the earth in which every action was the fruit of some higher purpose, a few days spent in the company of Team Noma could feel positively ambrosial.

To watch the Noma crew at work was to come to understand why otherwise intelligent people join religious cults.

The farmer’s land was being incinerated. Lastra Rodriguez needed to find an alternative source. “So I had to drive around asking people in the community. You drive two hours and you ask for Juan. You go there and you ask, ‘Where is Juan?’ They say, ‘Juan is in church.’ ” The hunt goes on and somehow, after six hours of driving around looking for Juan, Lastra Rodriguez comes back to the Noma Mexico kitchen with a crate of piñuelas. “What took you so long?” someone asks him.

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 of the Noma gospel. “So I sent out just a handful of résumés and a really long cover letter to my favorite restaurants.” Around the kitchen in Denmark he became known as the “walking Wikipedia.” Even a casual conversation with Zilber was likely to swerve its way into references to mathematics, history, quantum physics, biology, chemistry, and cinema.

Whether or not Redzepi qualifies as an artist, his chosen medium is one in which the most impressive creations evaporate from view within seconds of being witnessed. You pick a mango. You suck the juice out of the mango. You finish off the sweet remnants of the mango. You’re left with the pit. You plant the pit. If you’re lucky, you get to watch the pit sprout into bloom and the cycle shudders back to its stations. Redzepi’s food is not simply a communion with nature. His very approach to the restaurant—the rhythms of create-and-destroy, bloom-and-decay—can be viewed as an ode to nature itself. In

“Like many others before and after him, he spent much of his life in an adopted country, toiling as a manual laborer, cleaning dishes, hauling fish, driving taxis, cleaning floors. A lifetime of double shifts. My father took comfort in cooking a good meal, and the pleasures of family around a table, eating and sharing. I remember waking up in the morning, the smell of burning wood, seeing my father tending the fireplace, hearing the crackling sound of chestnuts roasting for breakfast. His tomato salad, sliced wafer thin, with a dash of vinegar and a fistful of sweet parsley leaves. The bean stew. The sauté of spicy sausage and onions…those are only memories now. Everything he did was to bestow his family with happiness and better opportunities. Never once in his life did he complain, not even when the cancer ate him from within. Every success I have found in my life, I can connect to a sacrifice he made.”

The menu, the team, the purpose of each room would only change and change again.

Copenhagen. It was a long, commodious space punctuated by islands, at intervals, where squads attended to specific dishes with practice-it-ten-thousand-times precision.

works.” Time—that was the secret ingredient at Noma. Time would pass, and everything would change, and more would be learned, and people would come and people would go, and stuff would break and stuff would get fixed, and everything would inch closer and closer to some new frontier of deliciousness.

“We’re in here for life,” Redzepi said, waving his arms as if they could measure the expanse of this new home. “But we’re not in here for one thing. It can change. It can change. It can change.”