“With larvae it does,” Redzepi says. “We’re experimenting with larvae. You toast them like you would an almond. We have several recipes right now where we use larvae instead of egg. It’s more umami rich—a more intense flavor. We don’t tell anybody.”
“The ants are our biggest problem here,” Werner says. “You’ll see, on the trail. Ants. Eat. Everything. It’s extremely hard to farm here.”
Meanwhile Redzepi’s sunburn, acquired during his slacker’s collapse on the lounge in front of La Zebra, has advanced into unexpected areas of agony. He carries around a plastic bag that’s got the arm of an aloe plant stuffed inside it. A green-orange goo seeps from a slice in the arm: aloe vera in its pure, freshly foraged form. “Unfortunately, aloe smells very bad,” Redzepi says. “It smells like sweat.” In fact, the inside of the Jeep, occupied by four adult men whose pores have begun responding in kind to the sweltering humidity outside, now fills with an odor that calls to mind the bowels of the Colosseum after a gladiators’ match involving gutted animals and festering wounds.
Phone service fizzles out. GPS goes kaput. If we manage to get lost now, we will be lost in radical fashion. Redzepi explains that the milpas can be identified by rudimentary, analog, and barely detectable signs. “You take the road until you see a yellow T-shirt, or take the road until you see six bottles in a tree,” he says. Indeed, Werner steers off the main highway when he happens to spy a faded red gas can and an old Dos Equis box.
“You’ll see monkeys back here at times,” Werner says. “You’ll see a jaguar.”
“A jaguar is a sacred thing to see,” Redzepi says.
“You hear them more than you see them,” Werner says.
We leave the comforts of the pavement and switch to the rustic charms of a dirt road, which in this case is more like a slalom course through a jungle in which the trees have come alive and delight in hazing the Jeep by swatting it with their branches. The road per se is not merely bedeviled by potholes; it is more accurately described as several miles of potholes along which, at rare intervals, a plateau of road reveals itself so that everyone in the vehicle can start breathing again.
“It’s like a whole new energy enters your body when you come out to these parts,” Werner says. That’s one way of describing it. The energy seems to be entering me through the bottom of my spine and shooting upward into my shoulders, neck, and skull each time the Jeep slams into another gouge in the roadway.
“It’s going to get worse, guys, I’m sorry,” Werner says. Pretty soon the Jeep is jerking back and forth as though it’s caught in the jaws of a creature from Jurassic Park. “This is where it gets worse,” he says.
“This is where it flips over,” Redzepi says. He scans around, noticing the hundreds of anthills rising like miniature pyramids from the red soil. He wonders aloud whether the ants are edible.
“You don’t want to get stuck,” Werner says. In spite of the ordeal of this journey, he comes here regularly to join members of the family who owns the land—farmer Antonio May Balan and his wife and their ten children—to roast meat and vegetables in an oven that Werner constructed in the humid tropical stillness.
“Why build an oven in the middle of the jungle?” Redzepi asks.
“Why not?” Werner says. “This is where I want to be.”
“You’re crazy, right? You know that?” Redzepi says.
But Redzepi doesn’t really think Werner is crazy. That’s obvious as soon as we climb out of the Jeep and stretch our battered bones. Redzepi sees delicious things sprouting out of the ground like knobs, like colored buttons and baubles. Werner is right—this looks less like a farm than it does some scrubby, stumpy patch of abandoned dirt over which Willy Wonka has scattered some flora-bearing pixie dust. Mangos, plums, pineapples, chiles; orange, red, purple, green. Redzepi becomes hushed, caught in the loop of a childhood memory. “In Macedonia, where we lived, it was exactly like this,” he says.
“Here, even the weeds have meanings,” Werner says. “They’re all used for something.”
“It’s kind of weird to eat a fruit that tastes cooked because it’s hot from the sun,” Redzepi says. “So what fertilizer are they using?”
“None,” Werner says.
“It’s so old school that it’s becoming the new thing,” Redzepi says.
“People are trying to re-create a wheel that was built thousands of years ago,” Werner says. “These guys have the answers.”
Antonio May Balan emerges from his tarpaper-roofed shed and greets us in Spanish, although Mayan is the primary language that he and his wife speak. Balan nods approvingly toward the oven. Werner built the oven for Balan and his family, as a gesture of appreciation for their hard work on the milpa. “I really wanted to take care of Antonio as much as I could,” Werner says in English. “He’s a very beautiful man. He has a lot of stories and a lot of insight.”
“That’s a big oven, man,” Redzepi says. “It looks like a big American car.”
“You can fit two whole pigs in there, all fanned out.”
Werner hands Redzepi a machete and tells him to keep it as a gift. Redzepi studies its blade and wonders how he’ll get it back to Denmark on a series of planes. Balan lets us know that lunch is ready. Inside the shed he and his wife have prepared a meal of tortillas, black beans, and pork and jungle squash that have been roasted to a char over a small fire. The accompanying beverage is Coca-Cola. Redzepi sits on a stool and eats, so sweaty that his hair is matted wetly against his scalp, his sunburn glowing like pomegranate seeds.
“This is what makes you feel good. Being in a place like this,” Redzepi says. “La buena vida, no?”
* * *
—
On the way back to Tulum, we stop the Jeep to buy fresh coconut water. It doesn’t come in a bottle. It comes in coconuts that have been chilled by the side of the road. Their furry tops are hacked off with a machete and you slide a straw into their cavities to draw out the tropical elixir. When we pull into Tulum, we see him floating along the road like a lost pilgrim—Danny Bowien, powerless to withstand Redzepi’s Svengali-like coaxings, has indeed circled back to the Yucatán to meet up with us for dinner.
Hartwood, at night, glows in the coastal blackness. Torches flicker. Palms sway. Orange light radiates from the ovens. “Look at the heat in that kitchen—heat and smoke,” Redzepi says admiringly. The place has a kind of wild, primitive elegance: If Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music had existed back in the Stone Age, this is the brasserie he would have dreamed up. Werner and his castaway comrades take slabs of local flesh—grouper collar, octopus, those pork ribs swaddled in jungle honey—and furnace-blast them to the point of tenderness and char. With each platter that comes to the table we wilt with pleasure.
“It’s insane that they built this out of nothing,” Bowien says. “That’s a lizard above your head.” Although we can’t imagine it yet, building something out of nothing is precisely what Redzepi has in mind for this same stretch of Caribbean shoreline. Bowien talks about his son, Mino, who is three months old; Bowien can’t wait to give him solid food.
“They will put anything in their mouths—a raw razor clam that’s still wriggling,” Redzepi says.
Becoming a parent is leading Bowien to reevaluate everything. How he lives his life, how he runs his kitchens. David Chang, the chef and Momofuku empire builder who’s a friend to both Redzepi and Bowien, gave Bowien some advice regarding his leadership at Mission Chinese Food. 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?”
“You have to chill out or you’re just going to kill yourself,” Bowien says.
“One morning I woke up,” Redzepi tells him, “and my whole back was covered in shingles. I looked like a dinosaur.” He had to make changes. Coming to Mexico to let off steam is a part of that. Going home in the evening to have dinner with his wife and children is a part of that. Bowien listens closely and then gives the space a glance after a period of silence.
“How hard do you think it is to score weed around here?” he says.
* * *
—
We’re full, we’re fading fast, we’re ready for our hammocks, we’re beyond exhausted. But Redzepi has one last command. “One thing we have to do?” he says. “We have to go to the beach. We have to go look at the stars now.” Moments later we’re huddled silently on the shore, scanning the night sky and scouting out the rim of the waves for sea turtles. Bowien and Redzepi pass a smoke back and forth, the leafy fragrance mingling with the sea mist. Naturally, it is Redzepi who sees the racing flare that the rest of us manage to miss. “Did you see that shooting star?” he asks. “It was the brightest I’ve ever seen.”
Five months later
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
—WALLACE STEVENS, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”
I arrive early. I always arrive early—to airports, to appointments, to concerts, and then I dawdle around pointlessly for hours. But this is ridiculous. Noma isn’t even open yet. The way Noma is set up, jutting out onto a Copenhagen dock like the prow of a battleship, with expansive windows that provide views of the waterway, everyone in the kitchen can see me loitering idiotically a few yards from the front door. I try to blend into a park bench. Lau Richter, Noma’s lanky and gentle emissary of hospitality, comes floating out with an expression on his face that resembles the look homeowners give to pathetically costumed trick-or-treaters on Halloween. He hands me a glass of champagne. I thank him and sip it on my bench.
Before long, Redzepi himself, wearing a chef’s apron that calls to mind the smock of a medieval blacksmith, leaves the kitchen and joins me at the end of the dock. I snap a phone photo of him. We chat. He gestures toward the water and tells me something that seems incidental, although it will, a year later, come back to me as a scrap of significant news. Right over there, a few yards from Noma’s ramshackle fermentation laboratories, a bridge is being built. The bridge will connect Nyhavn, the touristy strip whose colorful boats and building facades dominate Instagram feeds about Copenhagen, to Christianshavn, the tranquil, island-like neighborhood that Noma has occupied since it opened in 2003.
We wait for a while. Redzepi seems to sense, before I do, that something’s amiss.
“Where’s your friend?” he asks, flashing a faint smile, his voice a mix of bemusement and consternation.
It is at this point that I take pains to explain that Grant Gold is not, strictly speaking, my friend. In fact, I don’t even know the guy. The person who will be joining me for lunch at the greatest restaurant in the world is, if we’re being blunt about this, a total stranger. In the rush to make plans to fly to Copenhagen, I could not convince any of my friends, family members, former college professors, or fellow poetry lovers to join me. This has given me an instructive life lesson. For years, many of my friends have expressed, with clarity and directness, a plea: “If somehow you ever land a table at Noma, please please please let me know. I will move mountains. I would do anything to join you.”
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…
Because of this, I wound up inviting a random guy from the office.
Grant Gold worked with me at The New York Times—in what capacity I can’t say for sure. Social media? Web design? Something like that. Anyway, he had heard about my golden ticket—my extra seat at the Noma smorgasbord—and having his generation’s trademark obsession with all things gastronomic, Grant wanted in. He offered himself up as a blind date. I later learned that a glittering assortment of Danish scholars, poets, and runway models had been standing by to join me for the dining experience of a lifetime, but in a moment of panic, I opted for Grant.
To be fair, the guy didn’t have much time to get ready. Neither of us did. During my Wanderjahr through Mexico with Redzepi and his motley entourage, it gnawed at me that his cooking remained, in my mind, no more than an abstraction. I had drooled over the cookbook photographs, but I had never eaten the food. (And by now, thanks to Redzepi’s kinetic fixation on propelling himself forward, those cookbook photographs were more or less obsolete. Noma didn’t serve any of that food anymore.) After the Mexico article was published, I figured our adventures had come to an end. But before long, I began to feel as though I had been inducted into a secret society.
One day I received an email letting me know that I had secured a reservation at Noma. I don’t remember having asked for one. It just happened. I was as bewildered as I was excited. In my mind I made a checklist of the responsibilities that would need to be attended to: schedule adjustments so that my two kids would be cleared to stay with their mother, flights booked, hotel booked, money discovered under a mossy rock in Central Park. I would have sufficient time to plan, right? Well, no. It didn’t work that way. A table had opened up. I could snatch it or I could let it go: about this, Noma’s operatives were clear. The date remained fixed. Should I stay or should I go? I gnawed on this carpe diem case study for a few hours before haphazardly clicking on the Kayak website and spending—not for the last time—thousands of dollars of my own money.
Nevertheless, I had no doubt that the experience would be worth the expenditure. Evidently Grant Gold felt the same way. He bought plane tickets and booked a place to stay. Noma! L’chaim! Soon we would cross the threshold and enter the inner sanctum of global gastronomic glory. We had a table. At the best restaurant on earth. Our palates quivered like tiny trampolines in anticipation.
* * *
—
Upon arriving in Copenhagen, I spend my hours preparing as an athlete would. I check into a hotel right across the waterway from Noma. (There is no bridge yet, however, so I have a direct view but a rather circuitous walking route to the restaurant. Within a few years, the new bridge will change everything.) I take a vigorous stroll around the city and then, duly fatigued, I swaddle myself in bed on the early side, having asked for the quietest room in the hotel so that street noise will not jar me awake in the middle of my virginal pre-Noma slumber. I need to be on my game. This is not a drill. The next morning, my coach, Redzepi himself, steps in to fine-tune my training exercises. The texts blurp up on my phone minutes after I have awoken.
Go to Café Det Vide Hus for coffee
get the skyr and Nordic fruit
say hi to Claus
I follow these instructions as if my life depends on them. I walk to a coffeehouse that resembles a divorced bachelor’s cramped apartment in the seventies. I order the skyr and Nordic fruit. This turns out to be a bowl of plain, thick yogurt topped like a Parisian tart with a regal red, green, orange, and blue crown of natural sweets. The coffee is of the variety favored, as I will learn, by the culinary cognoscenti in Copenhagen. This means that it is thin, watery, and sour—on purpose. It looks and tastes more like a tea steeped from coffee beans than the dense, brown, milk-frothed mud beloved by my fellow commuters back home.
Redzepi is right about the breakfast—not only its deliciousness bu
t its proportional suitability as I psych myself up for a lunch that I want to appreciate to the fullest, with every molecule of my being chiming like a tuning fork. Everything must be perfect. What is the next thing he wants me to do? Walk across the street. Here are the Rosenborg Castle Gardens—the king’s backyard, you might say. Look for the black walnut tree. Is this some kind of test—an initiation? Regardless of his intention, Redzepi’s text directives amount to a New Nordic version of “stop and smell the roses.” How often does a stroll in the park entail an examination of the foliage? How often do we get to reframe the way we see the park itself—to slip on a sort of virtual-reality headset that enables us to see that park as a garden, a farm, a wild larder stocked with food that had heretofore remained invisible? Can we actually eat the park?
I find the walnut tree. Or I think I do. I am not entirely sure what I am looking for. I Google “black walnut tree” and compare the Internet’s images to what my eyes find in the park. From there I walk with calorie-shedding briskness to Noma, arriving early enough to embarrass myself, and I prepare for the restaurant to open—and for Grant Gold to arrive. Surely he is on his way. The great hour is upon us.
Redzepi sits with me at the edge of the water. A current of worry begins to hum, like a lost cell phone buzzing beneath a sofa cushion. Does Grant think we have a dinner reservation? I check my emails to him. No, I have been clear. A lunch reservation at 1 P.M. I have mentioned it repeatedly. With a mounting frenzy inside my skull (everything must be perfect), I send Grant a fresh text. No reply. I send a new email. I call his cell. No answer. Maybe he’s in a cab. I mean, it is not possible that someone would manage to score the most coveted of restaurant reservations only to blow it off, right?
“Where do you think he is?” Redzepi asks me.
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