They’d make it from scratch. Chile chilhuacle negro and chile ancho are black to begin with, but they’d have to get blacker. The chiles were placed on the surface of the comal so that the heat could push them beyond darkness, beyond a mild scorch, into the heavy-metal realm of a starless night. “More burned,” Redzepi was told in Spanish as he tried to grasp the distance he’d need to cook toward darkness. “More burned than this.” A bottle of mezcal was opened, as if we would not be allowed to penetrate the Persephonic depths of gloom without a mind-altering intoxicant. The mezcal entered our bodies like a liquid key that unlocked our cellar doors.
Hernandez held in her hand a globe—a ball of mole base, a conglomeration of sesame seeds and almonds and raisins and garlic and onion and thyme and oregano and bananas and cinnamon and chocolate and pork fat and avocado leaf. The labor involved—“It’s insane,” Redzepi said. He wondered aloud: how much was necessary and how much signified little more than stubborn adherence to tradition? Young chefs around Mexico—Edgar Núñez at Sud777 in Mexico City, Jorge Vallejo at Quintonil in Mexico City, Francisco Ruano at Alcalde in Guadalajara, Angel Vázquez at Augurio in Puebla—were playing mix-and-match with the traditional recipes, taking mole in a range of new directions. Could the Noma team try to do something similar? To Takahashi, such an orgiastic paste of flavors was difficult to process. “I cannot taste what it is,” he told me. “They’re all mixed together and it’s like a new taste.”
Surrounding us in the patio kitchen were potted splashes of color: neon pinks and bruise blacks, rust browns and cactus greens: moles in motion. Redzepi peeled cacao pods and, taking turns with his Noma comrades, tried his hand at grinding them on the metate, a small stone table that required you to get on your knees if you wanted to make any progress. The stone rolling pin had to move forward at a distinct grinding angle to produce chalky globs of raw chocolate. It was hard work. It didn’t produce much, when the Noma folks did it. Lastra Rodriguez’s turn at the metate led to his athletically thumping the rolling pin over and over against the creamed cacao. “We’ve seen your sex face now,” Redzepi said to him. “You know that, right?”
“Perfect,” Lastra Rodriguez said with a sigh, looking at a feeble glob of cacao roughly the size of a pond frog. “We have one hundred grams.”
“We have chocolate mousse for two,” Redzepi cracked. “Can you imagine if we served people this—a homemade chocolate?” To make enough, men and women in the kitchen would be forced to grind it out all day and all night long. It would be worse than the clams in Japan. (For a single clam tart at Noma Japan, a tart topped with what looked like a briny tide of bonsai whitecaps, workers in the kitchen had to spend hours prying open freshwater clams with pins. “Too much labor had to go into each dish,” Frebel said. “It was a group of ten people. Four hours in the morning, four hours in the evening.” Just opening clams.) As Redzepi made this suggestion, I saw more than one of the Noma cooks visibly gulping. Don’t put it past him, they surely thought.
Making mole promised to be no easy undertaking. “Before I came here, I had no idea,” Takahashi said. Maybe the most elusive of the moles, the most complex and the most primally satisfying, was the black mole, which required some seven chiles and, under normal circumstances, weeks of study at Hernandez’s elbow. “Es el Mexico,” she said reverently. It was the peak, the underworld king of all moles. Could a European even dare to top a mole negro in its traditional form? “You can’t,” Redzepi said. “What you can have is new combinations—try to imagine a new textural delight within it. It’s the same problem as in Japan. Once you start fiddling with something that has a very deep tradition, you very quickly look very stupid. That’s when you get mole foam—just to do something.” He shook his head as an indication of what he hoped he would not be stupid enough to succumb to.
* * *
—
The flavors had to sit together.
Spend time together. Bind.
For Redzepi, his thoughts about mole had to do the same thing. He autographed a wall at Mi Tierra Linda and posed for photos and said his farewells to Juana Amaya Hernandez and her crew. There were more places to visit, some of which had to do with a concurrent quest for the pottery, the tableware, that would ferry each Noma Mexico dish to each table. We dropped into a shop nearby and his disappointment was plain as day. “This is not the stuff I like at all,” he said, surveying various plates. “It’s too glazed. It looks like something from a shopping mall. It’s not artisanal enough. I like it when things don’t shout at you.” In the van he admitted that he was coming down with chills and cold sweats, his bones and joints were aching. He felt weak. He’d eaten too much. He wanted to skip dinner. “Shall we just have a sit-down and go over the day quickly?” he asked the group. Thunder rumbled overhead. “Any of you have a rumble in the belly?”
* * *
—
This is how the conversations went in the van.
REDZEPI: To me the green moles—they’re just like green sauces, in a way. It’s a lot of ingredients in a sauce. [Pair them with jasmine rice and close your eyes and you might mistake a few of them for curries.] The black mole, for me—that’s where the money is, man.
FREBEL: We can come up with very special, amazing moles. Our watercress purée is almost a mole.
REDZEPI: It’s a mole.
FREBEL: I was saying to Mette and Jun, an insect mole would be amazing. [Cook it slow. Cook it for days.]
REDZEPI: I think burned coconut could be interesting as a fat. [He thought about that mole negro, its deep burn, its volcanic ash in the throat.]
SØBERG: The burned flavor was very pronounced.
REDZEPI: It’s true the burned flavor was a bit much, although you wanted the chile flavor. [He was starting to understand something. Enrique Olvera’s mole madre at Pujol in Mexico City had stunned him, perhaps induced temporary paralysis, but he was loosening up now.] I feel so much more comfortable after having seen this. You understand what it is—that there are many versions of it and you can do many things. It’s up to you to mix it well. [Could a green mole be made with herbs? Leaves? Could the color come from unexpected sources?] If we could make it so silken…[A custardy tamale like a pike quenelle. Like panna cotta, but suffused with corn. Chilled sticks of jicama as a crudité. The pulp of prickly pear. But back to the matter at hand—time to focus.] Black mole. All right. When the black mole is this intense, does it still work with truffle?
SÁNCHEZ: Maybe not. [Sánchez usually said next to nothing until the ripest moment, but then her insights regarding flavor were invariably spot-on.]
REDZEPI: Maybe not.
FREBEL: They might cancel each other out. [Still, a tortilla with truffle and black mole…]
SÁNCHEZ: Where did you have the burned coconut?
REDZEPI: I’ve never had it.
But he had an idea. He liked to understand things, and maybe in that way he liked to control them, and right now his understanding was locking into focus.
“I’m not afraid of mole anymore,” he said.
As soon as my plane landed in Mérida, I knew something was amiss. I could feel it. I’d been longing to get back to the city and its crumbling postcolonial beauty. I remembered the breakfast that Redzepi and I had had the last time we were here in 2014: cochinita pibil in a courtyard at the Casa Azul, one of the abandoned haciendas that had been restored to glory. I couldn’t land a room at the Casa Azul this time—the lovely family-owned refuge was booked—so I found something cheap on Expedia. After my flight landed, I gave a taxi driver the name and address—the Boutique Mansíon Lavanda—and the taxi began to inch toward the city in the middle of rush-hour traffic. Along the way, my phone began to run out of juice. I had about five minutes of power left on the phone when the taxi pulled up alongside the hotel and the driver muttered an apology. The hotel was closed. Closed in the sense that, at least for now,
it no longer appeared to exist. The building was gift-wrapped in the yellow tape you associate with crime scenes. Apparently the building had been condemned. No explanation. No alert. No refund. I had nowhere to stay.
I owe it to Lauren that I scored one of the last available beds in Mérida. There seemed to be some sort of conference going on. Preserving my remaining drops of phone power as if they were fresh water in the desert, I triangulated—while the patient driver waited for directions, Lauren, in New York, search-engined her way from block to block in Mérida until she turned up a sole available room at a corporate megalith where the prices far outstripped my budget. She booked it just as my phone went dead. I should have seen it as a sign.
I met Redzepi and the Noma crew at La Rosita, across the street from Los Taquitos de PM, the al pastor shrine that had changed the chef’s life years before. Right away I could tell that something was amiss here, too. Gloom flickered in Redzepi’s eyes like fast-moving storm clouds. Roberto Solís was with him at the table, and what should have been the occasion for a toast—those first bites of al pastor had made Redzepi fall in love with Mexico years back—felt more like a premature wake.
“Our main partner pulled out,” Redzepi said.
“When did you find out?” Solís asked.
“Two days ago,” Redzepi said. “Big, big, big, big crisis.” With a deep-pocketed patron pulling out, Noma Mexico’s budget was now at least $600,000 in the red. The wealthy investor had gotten cold feet in the toxic churn that had followed Donald Trump’s election to the American presidency a week or so earlier. He had originally promised to chip in a million dollars.
“In the thirteen years I’ve had Noma, I don’t think I’ve ever been this stressed before,” Redzepi went on. The team had planned to make a formal announcement about the Tulum pop-up in a matter of days. A piece by Tejal Rao in The New York Times was lined up to run, but the Noma Mexico website wasn’t up and running. Now Redzepi didn’t know whether he’d have the money to cover the event. It was too late to find another benefactor. “If we raise the price, we’re not going to be able to sell this,” he said. “We’re very nervous.” A number was starting to surface. Redzepi didn’t like this number. He knew how the number would be perceived—the optics of it. The number was $600 per person. For dinner. In Mexico. “Just to break even,” he said. I watched him as he started stress-eating—power-inhaling panuchos as if they were peanuts. “I’ve had like nine of these,” he said. “I’m so hungry.”
His fingers drummed an invisible bongo. “Do you have cigarettes?” he asked.
“No,” Solís said.
“Of course it could be delayed,” Redzepi mused aloud. “This is the first time I know what stress feels like. We are six months pregnant with this project. There’s no aborting it.”
* * *
—
The next morning I walked from my corporate digs to the small inn that the Noma reconnaissance squad had taken over. I arrived to find Redzepi dangling from a tree—more precisely, he and Frebel had found a way to hang gymnast’s rings from the branches of a tree in the inn’s front lawn, and Redzepi was using the rings to do pull-ups. He powered through his exercise routine and then marched over to an outdoor table for breakfast. He rhapsodized about the trips he and his colleagues had taken through Mexico. “We went to a town where they said ‘If you take pictures here, people might kill you,’ ” he remembered.
“The grapefruit here is so much better than anywhere,” he said. “I feel so good. A workout. Eggs and bacon. The sun is shining. Now if someone would just hand me a check for a million dollars, it would be the perfect morning.”
At around lunchtime here in Mérida, Tejal Rao’s piece would go live on the New York Times’ site. “It’s so nerve-racking,” Redzepi said. “We need to find someplace to take some photos.” Somehow the Noma Mexico site was prepared to launch. “Yeah, they’ve been up all night,” he said. “The site says: ‘You like tacos? Email.’ ”
“Minimalist,” said Lastra Rodriguez.
Redzepi returned to being transfixed by breakfast. “Look at this fruit—is that dragonfruit?”
* * *
—
Like the spectral shuttering of my hotel, the loss of a seven-figure investor was but one of the surprises I encountered upon arriving in Mérida. Another was this: Redzepi and Sánchez and their lieutenants planned to cook a meal—sort of a trial run for Noma Mexico. The dinner hadn’t received a whisper of notice in the stateside press. It would take place at Nectar, the restaurant where Solís still insisted on serving a trailblazing tasting menu in a city that didn’t appear to have enough of an audience to support one. Much of the time leading up to the meal would be spent in marketplaces on a quest for the Best Ingredients. “They said ‘You’re gonna help us to find the best ingredients in Mexico,’ ” said Lastra Rodriguez, upon whose shoulders sat the task of tracking them down once again. “Okay. I don’t know what is the best. Then you find that they’re the things that are made with respect.” To locate the Best Ingredients you had to understand the Best Ingredients. A shrimp that was still alive; an avocado that had just been picked.
The challenge ahead would entail more than zeroing in on the Best Ingredients. It would mean securing a consistent supply—in bulk, for weeks. With the Noma Mexico announcement about to go viral online, Redzepi seemed to be juggling several imagined glitches at once. There were the critics who would howl about the ticket price, and there were the critics who would take note if, months later, Noma’s $600-a-plate menu began to wobble and derail because the Best Ingredients were stuck rotting in a box three hundred miles away. Visibly on edge, he and the group pulled into the offices of an organization in Mérida that sought to support and protect Mayan artisans and farmers throughout the Yucatán Peninsula. When we walked in, we saw arrayed on a large table examples of their wares: chiles, radishes, herbs, cobs of red and purple and orange corn, pyramids of a local salt called espuma de sal, and a dark watery honey, suggestive of vanilla, that the Mayan people used for medicinal purposes. “It’s from the black bees, right?” Redzepi said, tasting a droplet of the honey. “It’s amazing.” He took a whiff of a peppercorn that gave off an aroma like a clove. He spoke to the people behind the organization with a warm but forceful directness.
“We’ve taken over a jungle site near Tulum where we’re going to build a restaurant,” he told them. “Actually it’s going to be announced in The New York Times in about ten minutes. We’ll be serving five thousand people in two months. So if we want these ingredients, suddenly we’ll need a lot of them.” He paused, then continued. “So if we want to get these things, can we get a lot? We’re coming here, almost ninety people, setting up lives. We’ve actually been to quite a few places in our inspiration journeys. We’re trying to find the ingredients and be more inspired about how we cook. We’re on the hunt for things like this that would inspire even Mexicans. Let’s say we wanted eight thousand eggs over two months.” He pointed to a bouquet of dried herb—wild oregano. “What if we wanted one hundred thousand of these?”
He was given the necessary reassurances. He was told that about three hundred and fifty Mayan families could provide the goods. It was this community, this network of subsistence milpas, that would receive much of the money being funneled into Tulum for Noma Mexico, but how could Redzepi explain that to the press without looking patronizingly magnanimous? Was there a right way to say it? The attack mobs of social media had made such utterances automatically perilous. Even when you were doing the right thing, someone was perched ready to ambush you on Twitter.
The Times story went live while Redzepi was tasting the honey. He was in the midst of telling me a story about how once, when he was sick, he had mixed the Mayan honey with some lime juice—and a spoonful or so had cured him.
I looked at my phone and saw the link. I told him.
“So it’s out there,” he sai
d. “We hope for the best now.” He picked up a toy—a woven wicker replica of a sea turtle.
“Let’s imagine,” he said, “that we need five thousand of these.”
* * *
—
The rest of the day Redzepi struck me as teetering on the edge of a breakdown.
It was not something I had ever witnessed. Around him there always hovered a bubble of composure. He usually seemed to be thinking three steps—or years—ahead of everyone else. To say that he favored control would be an understatement. All chefs are, to some degree, control freaks, meticulous with instructions, infuriated by careless deviations. Redzepi could not have powered Noma to fame without a hunger for control bordering on the fanatical. But he obviously liked to play with control, too—he liked to test it, the way a child learns to master the quantum chaos of a spinning top or a yo-yo at the tail of its leash. The pop-ups in Japan, Australia, and Mexico would stand as examples of this. He liked to blow up the Noma solar system so that he could race like hell to wrestle its planets back into a new alignment.
This time, Redzepi could not be sure that he could restore the orbit. This realization was written on his face. On the way to the market he murmured about what the servers would wear at Noma Mexico. “I don’t want a group of very, very white Northern Europeans looking like a circus act in Mexican clothes,” he said. He seemed to be analyzing the optics of every gesture, but he was worried that one false move would ruin the whole endeavor. He and the Noma cohort hit the Mérida market like agents in a Mission: Impossible movie. The best way to stop worrying was to get to work—to cook.
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