Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  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 tell you the truth, it’s the only restaurant in the world right now where you can get this,” Redzepi said. “The element of surprise—how often do you actually get to experience new things? That’s fucking rare.”

  * * *

  —

  “They did sound a bit nervous,” Holland said as he tucked away his phone.

  He knew where to find the watercress. But it was not in the pocket of pastoral greenery I was expecting. Holland’s “secret” extravagance of watercress was spread out adjacent to one of the most famous and photographed sunbathing spots on earth: Bondi Beach. Watercress grew thickly on a rocky slope just around the bend from the primary spit of sand and surf. Holland and Larsen and their team spotted the clumps of flora and got to work. The cress sprouted out of wet crevasses in the rock—places where liquid sluiced through. Apparently that’s why they call it watercress.

  The foragers unholstered their pruning shears and scrambled up the hill. They snipped watercress at assembly-line speed, conscious in the back of their minds of the tempers likely to flare up in the kitchen if they pulled into Barangaroo Wharf too late. “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.”

  Surf pounded and sprayed a few yards from the hillside. The sun started going down and the sunlight went fractal in the ambient sea mist. Joggers dashed by while the foragers kept bending and plucking.

  When they sensed that they had enough, Larsen and Holland and their crew raced back to the car. They climbed in. Holland started the engine.

  “Who. Is ready. For traffic?” he said.

  “I can’t wait,” said Larsen.

  Eventually, if you wormed your way deep enough into the Noma cult, you were invited to do the Workout. I say “invited” because participation in the Workout was theoretically a privilege. Let’s say there was an advancement in the belief system of a religion that required you to pierce your own cheeks with a metal rod that was attached to a car battery. That, too, might be presented as a privilege.

  So it was with the Workout. René and Nadine Redzepi had, in the name of longevity and vitality and a barely hidden masochism, availed themselves of a personal trainer named Johan Troels Andersen. As far as I could tell, Andersen seemed to emerge from no known school of exercise—not Pilates, not yoga. His approach to fitness might best be described as “primitive.” Just as Noma itself had been founded on a philosophy of rustic, back-to-the-land resourcefulness, so the Workout hinged on making the best use of whatever was around. What was around in the Redzepi family’s backyard in Copenhagen was, for the most part, grass and dirt, as well as tree branches and spare wooden beams from which a rope could dangle.

  When I was invited to participate in the Workout, I said yes primarily so that I wouldn’t disappoint Lauren—or, for that matter, Redzepi. A Meryl Streep–level master of the imperceptible glance, he would from time to time shift his eyes in the direction of my gut, which looked like a centurion’s breastplate that had slipped downward and melted—an occupational hazard for a food writer if ever there was one. Redzepi would say something like: Now is the time, Chef, now is when you have to start exercising to keep yourself from falling apart later in life.

  Yeah yeah yeah, I’d mutter. I couldn’t seem to make it a priority. Ever since childhood I have found it mortifying even to be in the presence of other people who are working out. Exercise may be noble, but it’s embarrassing to watch people doing it. Their Lycra getups, their sweat towels, their cheerful spirits, their habit of reeling off numbers and, in yoga, woefully mispronounced Sanskrit words that are meant to convey something about personal superiority—I find the whole production ghastly, even though I realize that avoiding it will kill me. I did yoga for a while, then I let it peter out. I did meditation for a while, then I let that peter out. As I have written here, I do like to go on walks. Long walks. If it’s walking you want, I can walk for hours on end.

  But walking was not part of the Workout. As I found out when Lauren and I showed up at the Redzepi family courtyard one morning in the fall of 2016, the Workout emphasized more arduous forms of movement, such as scuttling back and forth on the grass like an upside-down crab or running back and forth on a dusty, pebble-strewn strip of ground. You had to run forward and you had to run backward, and you had to finish each sprint with a flash round of push-ups. Redzepi wanted the Workout to hurt. He wanted to feel the burn. He wanted results. He had experienced an epiphany about his health after throwing his back out while playing with one of his daughters, Genta. Plus he was perpetually exhausted. “I had always worked out when I was younger: I was athletic, I played soccer,” he told the writer Lisa Abend in a Men’s Journal article about the Workout. “But it had been about six years since I’d done anything, and I’d gained 20 to 25 pounds since my mid-twenties. I was up to 180. I wasn’t fat, but I was soft. I looked at these other guys in the industry, people I knew who had heart attacks in their forties or had to go into observation for high blood pressure, and thought, ‘That could be me. I’m almost 40. Now is when things go downhill.’ ”

  Central to Andersen’s New Nordic calisthenics was a militaristic series of dance moves known as the burpee—an innocent name for an agonizing punishment. The burpee worked as a sort of test: Even if you harbored memories of having been an athlete, and even if you felt certain that a remnant of robust health must be present somewhere in your body, the burpee would disabuse you of that notion. It looked easy. It was not easy. Its alternative moniker, the squat thrust, does a more efficient job of describing the countervailing forces of energy—the feeling that you were somehow pushing a wheelbarrow uphill while balancing a melon on your head and trying to use your feet to stop pebbles from rolling in the opposite direction. One burpee would make my eyesight go all splotchy. In the middle of one burpee, I’d feel as though I was going to topple over from dizziness. That swirl of delirium that sometimes overtakes you when you lean over to tie your shoelaces? This was it times ten. At least it was for me. The act of repeatedly dropping from a standing position to the plank of a push-up, and then unwinding backward and hopping upward with arms raised high? One burpee and I thought I was having a stroke. I was nauseous and loopy. I hated it.

  So did Redzepi, apparently. Or he used to. “I hated working out, every single moment,” he’d told Abend. He’d spent six months dreading it. The spirit of Saturday Night Projects infected everything Redzepi did. Just when his team seemed to have reached the brink of exhaustion, he would jolt them with a fresh challenge: make a new dish right now in the middle of the night…pack your bags, guys, we’re going to Australia…say goodbye because we’re blowing up the old Noma and leaving it behind. His approach to the Workout was no different. Just when I thought it was over, I heard those fateful syllables—“Okay, buddy”—and realized that the exhausting exertions of relay running and rope-dangling had served as a mere prelude to the main event, a simple game that I imagined dated back to centuries uncharted. Surely the Vikings had sparred this way in the sylvan glades in between bouts of burning and pillaging. In this game, two players faced each other in a crouch. At the ap
pointed moment, the objective was to scamper around until you felt like you were in a position to slap the other person on the back of a knee. Harmless enough—fun, even. Except that the price of losing was steep. Each time you got slapped on the back of your knee, you were required to pay with a burpee. Or maybe three burpees. Or ten. Those burpees could add up, especially if you, like me, were chosen to face Redzepi himself in the Viking grab-a-knee game. It would be an understatement to describe the man as a competitor. He roared into matchups like this with the rowdy vigor of a young Teddy Roosevelt. When it was over, my abs felt like they had been used as a bobsled.

  When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light, which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner, I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  * * *

  —

  “Welcome to heaven,” Redzepi says.

  Evening is falling in slow motion over Copenhagen and Redzepi’s backyard is aswarm with people. It looks like Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte crossed with the bacchanalian inside sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, the one in which Mick and Keith and company lounge like Renaissance noblemen around a table piled with meat and fruit. No wonder Redzepi’s workout is so important to him. Without exercise, chefs are basically counting the days until the onset of diabetes and gout. We sit at long tables where bottles of wine and platters of food jostle for space. Some of us sit on the lawn. Redzepi is addressing the crowd. “Just be here,” he tells the assembled group. “Just be. The best restaurant in the world is actually here. Tonight.”

  It’s hard to argue with him on that point. Gathered in his yard—summoned together like the Avengers of cuisine—are famous chefs from around the world. Alex Atala from Brazil and José Andrés from Washington, D.C. (by way of Spain), Kylie Kwong from Australia and Jessica Koslow from Los Angeles, Jacques Pépin and David Chang, Danny Bowien and Bo Bech, Michel Troisgros and Daniel Patterson. It is a testament to his status that Redzepi has been able to persuade these people to travel to Denmark from as far away as São Paulo and Sydney for what amounts to a picnic.

  Tomorrow brings the kickoff of the MAD Symposium, an annual convergence of chefs and food media illuminati who are intent on chewing on and hashing out the most pressing issues of the moment, but for sheer exuberance nothing under the MAD tents is likely to top the Valhalla-ishness of this under-the-radar A-list cookout. (Before it begins, Redzepi asks everyone to refrain from posting about it on social media. Miraculously, we obey.) Redzepi being Redzepi, it has been deemed insufficient for these chefs merely to meet up and eat. It’s not even enough for them to cook. What transpires instead is a Battle of the Network Stars–style showdown with the chefs divided into pairs in the afternoon and instructed to deliver a delicious dish for the picnic by sundown. Go.

  “Everybody cooks,” Redzepi says in the courtyard before it gets rolling. “That includes you.” He means me. I can’t imagine what soupçon of expertise, or even basic competence, I bring to the party here, but I work up my courage (I don’t want to be forced to do any more burpees) and volunteer as a deckhand for the coolest duo in the arena: Jessica Koslow, the Southern California pioneer whose restaurant, Sqirl, serves the most distinctive breakfast in America, and Kylie Kwong, whose flagship in Sydney, Billy Kwong, has won global praise for incorporating indigenous Australian ingredients into the Cantonese recipes of her heritage. That aha moment—the realization that you should use what grows around you—can be traced, for Kwong, to a single, specific moment. In 2010, Redzepi traveled to Sydney and gave a speech. Kwong was there, and she left with the flush of energy that accompanies any creative person’s visualization of a breakthrough. “That’s when I started using them,” Kwong tells me, while holding a bowl and whisking a mix of white miso and cherry blossom vinegar. “The next day. The next day! René prompted me to create this revolution at Billy Kwong. It was a lightbulb moment for me—‘who is this guy?’ ”

  Here in Copenhagen, Kwong tells me that she is third-generation Australian but twenty-ninth generation Kwong; she can map her lineage back to the Song Dynasty. The moment of clarity at Billy Kwong came down to an embrace of these interwoven threads of identity. “René has really inspired me to open up so much, discover my Australian-ness and my Chinese-ness through food,” she says. That means stuffing dumplings with warrigal greens and fashioning savory cakes out of saltbush instead of turnips; it means dishes like red-braised, caramelized wallaby tail. She uses these ingredients because they’re local and they taste good—because the John Nash–ish insight into René Redzepi could be described as a kind of Magnum Terroir, the concept that the foods that grow near you are the foods that are the most desirable for this place and time. “To quote René, it’s actually delicious,” Kwong goes on. “From a gastronomic perspective, it actually works.”

  Kwong may be a visionary chef, but I am not. Before long it becomes clear that my primary role in this makeshift al fresco kitchen is to commit mistakes that amuse everyone else. Brisk, clear, and patient—up to a point—Jessica Koslow comes across as the consummate professional in the kitchen, at least based on my couple of hours of nodding and chopping at her side. She decides on her dish—a salad—and gathers her ingredients from a game-show display a few yards away and tells me what to do. Which should be simple enough: grab these clumps of mint and thyme and strip the leaves from the stems. I do this dutifully, if clumsily, for a while, until a question percolates in my mind. Koslow is standing to my right. I should point out here that I tend to have an unruly habit of gesticulating. My arms, at times, weave and bob like snakes. “Chef?” I ask, and I turn to ask Koslow the question, and some bizarre quantum alignment of space and time brings us to a rare and sudden intimacy: because of my flailing forearms, my herb-scented right index finger has gone sailing right up into her left nostril. I will forever admire Jessica Koslow for the kind look of forgiveness in her eyes as I extracted my gesticulating digit from her nose. She must be a nice person to work for.

  Bo Bech, a lumberjack-proportioned flavor virtuoso here in Copenhagen, indulges my blundering with similar élan. (Being a food writer for The New York Times and Esquire means that when it comes to the possibility of being on the receiving end of a fiery kitchen tantrum, I am my own human shield.) Bech has teamed up with Atala, which means that the most overtly macho duo in the bunch—Bech with his supersized Viking scaffolding, Atala with his tattooed forearms and feral Amazonian gaze—are working alongside two women, Kwong and Koslow, who keep their mise-en-place theatrics to a minimum. Maybe it says something about the implied droit du seigneur of male chefs that after an hour or so, Bech makes it clear to me that I am now staging with him and Atala. “Jeff, I need you,” he says. I can’t tell whether some kind of negotiation has gone down. Maybe I’m being stolen. Or maybe Koslow, in the wake of my nose-probing mishap, has quietly traded me to the rough boys. (Take this amateur off my hands, I imagine her whispering. He’s slowing us down.) Either way, Bech will soon sour on my apprenticeship. As I click into my servitude with the Bech-Atala crew, I see before me a plastic tub full of celery greens. Bech is pouring a glass of water on the pale green leaves to wash them. Easy enough, I think—I grab a glass and do the same. The look in Bo Bech’s eyes as I pour his portion of nicely chilled white wine all over the celery greens is something I shall not forget. Bech is, as I have indicated, a large man, yes, but in this instant he appears mountainous, King Kong–like, capable of swatting me across the face with a paw that would most likely contribute to early-onset dementia.

  Bech does not hit me, of course. “No, no, no,” he says as if scolding a toddler. He tells me to start over. He points toward a sink, and to that sink I haul the tub of celery gr
eens and wash the wine off them. Bech rewards me, when I return, as if he’s tossing a treat to an obedient dog. He is known in Denmark for creating complex bites composed of no more than three or five ingredients. He creates one of these on the spot. He takes a knife and cuts a slice the size of an anchovy from the uncooked carcass of a lamb that is being dressed for its date with a roaring fire. Bech curls the sliver of raw lamb on top of a green, unripe strawberry and pixie-dusts the bite with sea salt. Then he places the bite directly onto my tongue.

  “Jeff,” he says. “Raw lamb. That’s Denmark.”

  There is a thing you learn about chefs when you spend time with them: Even though they may cook complex food, they revere simple food. The word “simple” is an incantation, music to their ears, and they long for anything that doesn’t seem fussed over or full of itself. For Redzepi that simplicity was expressed through a pot of beans or a plate of tacos. After enduring a tasting menu in Copenhagen, David Chang would predictably head straight for a late-night dive called Kebabistan for a gooey, salty heap of shawarma. Francis Mallmann, on his island in Patagonia, relished a simple repast of Persian rice saturated with butter and crusty from a cast-iron skillet. Massimo Bottura might be spotted walking a block away from his Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, so that he could refuel with prosciutto, Parmigiano-Reggiano, bread, and wine.

  The same principle is at work here in the Redzepi courtyard, with twin sets of toques marinating and chopping and spatchcocking dishes at whim. Nobody pays much attention to what has been cooked, and most of the dishes (a roast lamb, assorted salads) wind up reflecting that longing for simplicity. It’s like a jam session at which famous musicians cover a bunch of folk songs. It’s not really a competition. There is no prize at the end. Redzepi hands out no trophies. The dish that “wins,” by informal acclamation, is the simplest one: a turbot, properly seasoned and grilled whole, cooked without fanfare by Olivier Roellinger, a French chef and gentle leftist known for having forfeited his three Michelin stars, in tandem with his son, Hugo. Redzepi grabs my arm and nods toward the fish. “That’s what you don’t want to miss,” he says. He’s right—the flesh of the turbot is firm and light and steamy from the fire—and as night falls I can’t help but wonder whether someday René Redzepi will be like Olivier Roellinger, a man who has bypassed fame and found contentment on the sidelines. No one can be hungry forever, after all.