Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  I cannot answer this. I can’t reach the guy. I don’t even know him. I send another text. I send another email. Loathing the froggy, desperate sound of my own voice, I call and leave one of those disconsolate, withering messages that punctual people are always leaving for people who are habitually late. “Oh, hey, Grant? It’s Jeff again…”

  As I dangle in this moment of shame and confusion (everything must be perfect, the great hour is upon us, why did I invite this person?), I learn something about René Redzepi. We hang in the balance for a bit longer and then it becomes clear that his patience has been stretched beyond its limit.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  It’s time for lunch, I guess, and I don’t intend to register a protest. We get up from our place by the water and I walk through the front door of Noma for the first time.

  As I enter, I see a couple dozen faces looking right at me with the fiercely friendly, upright, eagle-eyed intensity you’d expect from a crop of West Point cadets on graduation day. (Years later, after my friend Pete Wells goes to Noma for the first time, he will describe his encounter with the Noma crew this way in The New York Times: “It is a little like meeting the von Trapp children.”) I greet them and Redzepi lets them know that the table that has been set for two people should now be reset for only one. Poor Grant Gold.

  Things move fast at Noma. You sit down and you can almost feel the motion of the bullet train gripping the rails beneath your feet. 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 going to assume you are a music fan. I’m going to guess that your connection to music was forged when you were young. A moment in solitude or a moment in a crowd, a Chopin prelude or a Cat Power ballad collapsing in on itself, high-gloss ear candy pumped out of speakers at a Saturday pool party or the swelling voices of a neighborhood choir at church on Sunday morning, the propulsive opening war chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or the unfolding modal blossoms of “So What”—whatever it was, something lured you in.

  If you are a certain kind of music fan, an obsessive, that initial swig led to a period of glutting, a slurping from the vat, fireworks flashing across your brain each time you made contact with the latest iteration of the greatest song ever. 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.

  If you ask me what it was like to eat at Noma for the first time, the best analogy I can offer is that it sent me wheeling back to that febrile receptivity I had once felt with music. Sure, I felt excited because here I was, I was in. I had managed to score a table at the restaurant everyone in the world apparently wanted to eat at—there’s no way to deny the anticipatory theater of that. But in the same way that some people get all swoony when they talk about seeing Hamilton on Broadway, it turned out that the show lived up to the hype. These dishes were like songs you couldn’t get out of your head. Maybe it was a stroke of good fortune that Grant Gold had flaked, because his absence allowed me to ruminate in solitude and get lost in each bite as if I were wearing noise-canceling headphones.

  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 these flavors could be compared to that “secret chord” that Leonard Cohen wrote about in “Hallelujah.” We grow up eating what we eat—corn, potatoes, cheese, bread, hot dogs, peaches, strawberries, cupcakes—and develop an interior lexicon of familiar flavors. Even if you’re an “adventurous” eater, wired to seek out the cuisines of regions other than the one in which you grew up—Mexico, Thailand, Tunisia, Japan, Peru—you’re often making contact with traditional staples whose component parts have been canonized over the centuries. What Redzepi was serving at Noma, well, I had never eaten these combinations and preparations before. I had never imagined them. I couldn’t help but think of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, an album of folk songs sung by a female vocal choir from Bulgaria, a country whose neighbors to the west are Redzepi’s ancestral turf of Macedonia and Albania. The women in this brightly garbed chorus are famous for singing in microtones, which might be described as the notes in between the notes you already know. Instead of sounding flat or sharp, the voices of these women, rising in mesmerizing unity, can locate unfamiliar modes of harmony. It’s not the conventional western euphony you hear when, say, a C note and a G note are played at the same time in a popular song or a prime example of Bach counterpoint; it’s a stranger and more difficult-to-achieve accord between notes that have been melted and bent until they’re several shades of blue.

  The food at Noma was delicious, but not in the ways that most of us have been conditioned to understand deliciousness. You crave a pizza, a cheeseburger, a mound of mashed potatoes with butter, and there have been chefs and delivery systems that have excelled at perfecting these undeniable pleasures. But Redzepi was a chef who could get you to crave a tart filled with slivered coins of razor clam or thin raw strips of beef tartare speckled with Danish wood ants. You didn’t just admire these thought experiments from afar, appreciating them as zany creative gestures. You forgot about their shock value. You desired them. You wanted to eat them again. Like earworms on the radio, they had melodies and harmonies you couldn’t shake.

  For me the tune I couldn’t resist—my “Hey Ya!,” my “Crazy in Love,” my “Shattered”—was the one listed on the menu as “sea urchin and hazelnuts.” The dish itself was almost as simple as the language used to describe it. Fresh tangerine-hued, tongue-like lobes of uni roe lay curled up in a bowl of pale milky liquid with beige slivers on top. The slivers were slices of raw hazelnut; the liquid had been extracted from pressed hazelnuts; a few crystals of sea salt rested here and there like flavor-enhancing Pop Rocks. That (at least to the naked eye) was the sum of it. Sea urchin with a counterpoint of…nuts? And then with each bite from a small wooden spoon my eyelids lowered in quiet euphoria. This dish had the deep, primal deliciousness of cultured butter spread on top of Saltines, but the butter in this case was oceanic and the crackers were earthy. I tasted just what it was and yet I tasted the microtones—the flavors in between the visible and obvious, as if tiny bridges of taste had been built between them.

  In a way, the secret of the dish came down not to cooking but to shopping. The source of Redzepi’s sea urchin was a wild, unpredictable character named Roderick Sloan, a Scotsman who lived above the arctic circle in Norway and went diving—alone and in all seasons—for seafood of nearly impossible purity. Hauled up from the sea in the morning, Sloan’s urchins were delivered immediately to Noma (by boat, by plane) so that they arrived, still alive
, ready for consumption that same day. The orangey meat of the urchin that I had slurped down with abandon? Instead of being served from an imported tray (where it would’ve sat for an incalculable amount of time), it had been scooped out by one of the cooks at Noma seconds before it was placed down in front of me. No, it was not a bowl of cacio e pepe or a gooey cheeseburger, but it was probably the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

  As for Grant Gold, he missed it. He missed the sea urchin and hazelnuts, just as he missed the lobster and nasturtium and the soft funky custard of egg yolk nestled in a field of tiny potatoes (about the size of chickpeas) and the essence of rose petals. He missed the lingonberry juice and the apple-pine juice and the natural wines from producers like Christian Tschida and Bruno Schueller and Franz Strohmeier. An exquisite meal was being served and Gold had forked out the financial resources to have access to it, but he was somewhere across town, asleep, having made the fateful mistake of succumbing to jet lag, and having (as a result) sunk into a slumber from which there was no reviving him or retrieving him. The absence of Grant Gold carried through my first meal at Noma like the pathetically comic low note of a bassoon. Now and then I would raise a glass of wine to the empty space at my table, toasting the man who failed to show up at the best restaurant in the world.

  And then, like Kramer bursting through the door of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment in a frantic huff, Grant Gold tragically appeared. He arrived in the foyer of Noma with a look of horror and shame on his face. He had come very late, but not too late, which almost made it worse. Ever the delicate conductors of hospitality, the Noma team restored Gold’s chair next to mine, and his tableware, and granted him the dignity of enjoying three savory courses as well as pastry chef Rosio Sánchez’s desserts: a giant chicharrón covered in chocolate, a buttery Danish pastry, a sort of ice cream tart made with aronia berries and the seaweed known as dulse, cold creamy quenelles that managed to match the flavors of potato and plum.

  Grant Gold had missed most of the concert, but he did show up for the encore—not that that was enough to erase the glaze of embarrassment from his eyes. When the meal had ended and someone at Noma handed us our printed menus so that we would have a memento of the experience, mine listed all of the dishes that I had eaten. Gold’s had a big blank space to remind him of all the dishes that he had missed.

  * * *

  —

  Matthew Houck, the musician who goes by the nom de plume Phosphorescent, has a song called “C’est La Vie No. 2.” It’s a plaintive ballad of lost love, the “After the Gold Rush” of twenty-first-century heartbreak. Here are some lyrics:

  I stood out in the night

  In an empty field and I called your name

  I don’t stand out all night in empty fields

  And call your name no more

  The narrator of the song may seem to have evolved to a healthier place. He’s no longer howling out a woman’s name in an open field, after all. But he’s still dealing with the aftermath. Old love hasn’t been replaced by new love. Old love has turned him into a ghost. If he no longer haunts the moors, standing in the rain and calling out her name, he is nevertheless haunted by the memory of having done so. He does not expect to get his former life back, but he has fetishized what it felt like to lose it. He is longing for longing. Pain is preferable to numbness—c’est la vie.

  It was a numbness I had slipped into myself. My headscape from day to day was the opposite of hunger, the antithesis of engagement: the walking trance. I interviewed people for a living yet I had less and less patience for what they wanted to tell me. When Redzepi had reached out to meet, I had come very close to saying no. Saying no increasingly felt like the only sensible response. But now I had said yes at least twice, and I was standing in the middle of Saturday Night Projects, surrounded by people whose hunger and engagement could only be described as ferocious.

  Do you get tired? I mean really tired—weary from your eyes to the soles of your feet. Just…spent. That feeling of having nothing left to give, mentally or physically—that sense of seeing no other solution than to forklift your own bones into bed and mummify them in layers of blankets and sheets. Well, magnify that fatigue. Triple it. Imagine that you’ve been on your feet all week hustling in the kitchen at Noma. You have helped deliver dinner (and sometimes lunch, too) every day, preparing dishes of beef tartare and langoustines with a summoning of mental attention comparable to that of an opera singer or a grand master of chess. You and the rest of the team in the kitchen have been careening toward Saturday night, counting the hours as you’ve approached the much-needed Sunday-Monday breather, gasping for that relief like a pearl diver chasing bubbles as you return to the surface to refill your lungs. Sometimes Sunday comes and all you want to do is sleep through the day. Sometimes your body just does that.

  Well, imagine reaching Saturday night—watching the last dessert of the week depart from the kitchen, hearing Lau Richter accepting the final expressions of gratitude from a few guests who seem too enchanted to leave the lounge area—and gearing up for a whole new task. Imagine you’re that tired and you still have to talk yourself into cranking up the energy to cook all over again. Immediately. That’s Saturday Night Projects. Because of Redzepi’s devotion to the gospel of Always Moving Forward, the denizens of the Noma kitchen could not content themselves with a cold beer as midnight loomed. Instead what went down on Saturday nights—except on those rare occasions when Redzepi himself was too exhausted or when he sensed the same near-collapse among the troops—was something of a competition, a cage match, a culinary version of Mad Max at the Thunderdome. Saturday Night Projects—the name sounds tame enough, and it’s true that Redzepi was more inclined to shower compliments on his gastronomic gladiators than to cast aspersions. Nevertheless, on the nights when I was invited to stand in the kitchen and witness Saturday Night Projects, I couldn’t help but think that there was something superhuman in the effort required to make it happen.

  The front doors of the restaurant would close. The guests would go home—except for the few who, now and then, decided to stick around and be spectators. The lights of the dining room would dim. The countertops in the kitchen would be cleared off. Off in the margins, young cooks would have their heads lowered as they fussed over the elements of dishes that they had been dreaming up and adjusting all week long. Most of the time these were the youngest, greenest cooks in the kitchen, and because of the global nature of Redzepi’s hiring practices, Saturday Night Projects would wind up looking like a weird subcategory of the Olympics: Finland versus Mexico versus Japan versus Italy versus Ecuador in a transcontinental cookoff. The athletes, as it were, had been instructed to come up with a new dish. Something to eat. Something Noma-ish but personal as well—something that, ideally, represented the essence of their own relationship with cooking as interpreted through the foraged-and-fermented filter of the Noma philosophy.

  The cooks would ceremonially bring the dishes out to the counters, which were illuminated by an overhead light, even though the rest of the restaurant seemed to have gone dark. This heightened the sense that we were in an arena, and the drama would build as Noma’s leaders and the spectators would crowd around the counters to get a good look at the food. The dish had to be prepared in ample quantity so that everyone attending Saturday Night Projects could dip in a spoon or a fork and get a taste—after, of course, Redzepi and his lieutenants had gone first. There wasn’t a winner per se, but even a couple of sweet droplets of approval from the boss constituted a victory that could nourish a young cook during the long sleep of the two days off. “Wow! Delicious! If you had that at a Michelin-starred restaurant, the best restaurant, you wouldn’t blink,” Redzepi announced one night when I was there, after having tasted an unlikely number made with Danish summer tomatoes and artichokes. As Redzepi said this, I watched a weary young Italian cook fill up with fresh energy like a pitcher replenished with water. “Honestly I think it’s in
credibly high level.”

  “I didn’t taste it, Chef,” said someone in the crowd.

  “You have to be aggressive,” said head chef Dan Giusti.

  Once when I was a spectator at Saturday Night Projects, I saw that Fabian von Hauske was in the crowd. A young chef who had grown up in Mexico and had, while still in his twenties, opened two successful restaurants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side—Contra and Wildair—with comrade Jeremiah Stone, von Hauske counted himself as a member of the Noma diaspora. He had staged in the kitchen in Copenhagen for a few months in 2010. He had participated in Saturday Night Projects in the past; now he got to observe it. The push that Saturday Night Projects embodied—the challenge of coming up with a new delight week after week while in the midst of doing your regular job—had become part of his culinary DNA. But he continued to marvel at how Noma insisted on reinventing itself season after season. “A different mentality” is how he described it to me. “The restaurant has changed every year. It keeps changing, which is crazy.” As he and I talked, a young cook from Brazil described the dish that she had conjured for Projects. She was serving lamb liver, and when she was growing up, she said, liver would be served still warm from the body heat of the slaughtered animal that had supplied it. To replicate the spirit of that, she had given the liver a quick char over flames but left the interior more or less raw, then had dressed the organ with nasturtium flowers and an oil derived from St. John’s wort.

  “It’s pretty daring to put up liver,” Redzepi said to her after he sampled it. “I’m like you—I happened to grow up on liver and to me it’s the best damn thing in the world.” While he spoke, the young Brazilian chef visibly gulped. Redzepi conceded that “raw liver might scare off the in-betweeners,” but, hey, the in-betweeners were not exactly Noma’s target audience.