Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  “Right now the idea is that we select ingredients that we want,” he said. “So what do we want?”

  “Do we want the pumpkin?” Mette Søberg asked.

  “Yes,” Redzepi said. “Pumpkin. Calabaza. Also the lime that tastes like bergamot. We’ll see how the urchins are. When they come in. If they come in. Should we do a taco?” Apparently there wasn’t a menu yet for the Noma dinner the next day.

  “Maybe with the octopus,” Rosio Sánchez said.

  “We have the clams from Nayarit,” Santiago Lastra Rodriguez chimed in.

  “The clams,” Redzepi said. “They might go well with the white beans.”

  They were planning dinner on the fly. “This is very spontaneous,” Redzepi told me. “Sometimes it’s okay to be more spontaneous.” Was he trying to convince himself? He found a seat and tried to jot down the order of the dishes:

  scallop mole

  clams and beans

  avocado tamal

  sea urchin

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s try to write the menu. What should we start with? I mean, we don’t really know if it’s gonna work. It’s just a plan. We’ll see what happens. Let’s see if the urchins come in. Let’s see if they taste good.”

  His mind was not really on the menu. The menu would take care of itself. His mind was in his fingers and his fingers were fidgeting with his phone and his phone wasn’t getting a clear signal. Service here in the Mayan world could be spotty at best.

  I mentioned a news email I had just received. It said, “The Zika virus is no longer a global emergency.” This was another one of Redzepi’s growing concerns. Zika had been tearing through the Caribbean, embedded in mosquitoes and tied to awful birth defects in babies born throughout the region. Many of Noma’s workers were in the prime of their childbearing years. Persuading them to venture into a veritable hot zone posed an ethical risk that no one wanted to tangle with. “I’ve followed the Zika alerts,” he told me with a sigh of relief. “I was so nervous about it.”

  At the moment, though, he was nervous about the whole enchilada. The news about Noma Mexico had, thanks to the Times, entered the mediaverse, the terrordome of Twitter, but…he couldn’t access it. Response had slowed to a crawl. Was the price putting people off? Would Zika anxiety sink the ship before it even had a chance to set sail? Redzepi was hearing from back home in Copenhagen. At the equivalent of this stage in the process—after the news had broken—Noma Australia had already been fully booked, with a waiting list numbering in the thousands. Noma Mexico…the enrollment…gulp…so far was a trickle…

  “If it doesn’t work out, Noma’s bankrupt,” Redzepi told me. He had already taken on a huge burden of risk by closing down the original location in Denmark. “I’m very, very, very, very nervous. For the first time, it’s a make-or-break year for Noma. It’s all amazing stuff. We just don’t have enough money to do all of it.” He looked at his phone again. He wanted to know how many people had touched base with the site about Noma Mexico.

  “It’s a lot less,” he murmured. “It’s alarming. People are not signing up.”

  How many had the Sydney pop-up attracted this early out of the gate?

  He gulped. “Thousands.”

  There are those days when nothing seems to be going right and the only cure just might be a heap of al pastor tacos. Redzepi and his team crowded around a table on the edge of the Mérida marketplace to wait for platefuls of the finger food that had kick-started Redzepi’s love affair in the first place. But the fire wasn’t burning. A few yards away, the trompo—the spinning spit on which the pork for al pastor tacos slowly cooks in a live flame—had conked out. “I think the trompo broke.” Redzepi sighed. “It’s pastor tartare.”

  Roberto Solís, who apparently had operative phone service, optimistically announced that he had spotted some online item about Noma Mexico.

  “Don’t retweet that,” Redzepi said. “They’ll just make fun of us. And it’s all about the price.”

  * * *

  —

  His temper was fraying. His nerve endings jangled like a hundred invisible car alarms. Everything grated on him. He saw a mother on the outskirts of the marketplace furiously slapping her daughter.

  “I got beaten so often as a kid that I could never imagine doing it to my own kids,” he murmured. He looked at the team. “Vamos,” he said weakly. Into the crowded aisles of the marketplace. Into the crush. How often had he gone searching through these aromatic mazes? He delivered instructions: “Two kilos of caviar.” He was joking. But he did want that lime, the one that smelled like bergamot. He checked his email again. Jay Cheshes, a food writer, already wanted to do a piece for the Wall Street Journal. Redzepi checked the Noma site again. About two hundred people had registered. A shudder of phantom pain passed over him. He suddenly looked a decade older. He grabbed lime after lime. He brought lime after lime to his nostrils. He needed the fucking lime that smelled like Earl Grey tea. Where was it? He was Ahab and the white whale was the lime that bore the odor of bergamot. How could you find it?

  “Get lucky,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  They sped off to the kitchen of a culinary school to test the flavor combinations.

  Pretty soon the room turned into a chamber filled with tear gas. Rosio Sánchez was roasting chiles for a mole negro and the stinging vapors began attacking our eyes and lungs. Not that this dissuaded her. “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones started loping out of her phone. “Too soft,” she said. She switched the soundtrack to “Paint It Black.”

  Blackness hovered over the proceedings. The Noma crew got to work with the silent industry of astronauts who had but a few minutes to take soil samples from a previously unexplored planet. The Copenhagen office had gone to bed, so Redzepi was forced to sit tight for the next round of updates. “Everybody’s sleeping back home, so that’s really annoying,” he said. “Let’s see how this whole thing is going to go down. Hopefully the public is not going to slaughter us. I wish we could’ve charged $250. Our dream was that we would get help from the government.” There were plans in place to fly ninety people round-trip from Denmark to Mexico—the travel cost for that alone would tally up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Noma would rent out an entire apartment complex in the urban precinct of Tulum. International currency rates were in flux. The American election seemed to have thrown everything into chaos. “Every time the dollar drops, income drops for us,” Redzepi said. “I need another cigarette. I’m so stressed.” He stepped outside of the kitchen with Thomas Frebel.

  “Are people only going to talk about how this is too expensive?” he asked.

  “No,” Frebel said.

  “I am worried,” Redzepi went on. “We’ve had so many setbacks on this. It has been so much harder to do this than the others.” Second guesses swarmed in his head. Should they have selected Oaxaca instead of Tulum? Oaxaca was being paralyzed by strikes and protests. “The week before we were there, we couldn’t have entered Oaxaca,” he said. What if they’d chosen Oaxaca for a $600-per-person pop-up—only to see the city shut down by political strife?

  The blackness was a moveable feast. They carried it with them to Nectar, where they were scheduled to sit for a tasting menu prepared by Solís and his kitchen. The signature dish at Nectar was an onion encased in the powdered blackness of ash. Biting into this onion produced a collision of smokiness and sweetness and cream—the interior cradled a marble of mayonnaise. I ate several of these deliciously char-brushed onions. Redzepi could barely get one down. “I have, like, no appetite,” he said.

  Midway through the meal he cleared his throat and summoned a huddle at the table. “Okay, guys,” he said with forceful dejectedness. “I need to speak with you. Because I’m kind of half depressed right now.” He mentioned the coverage online—the tweets, aswarm in the mediaverse like taunting hor
nets, only getting angrier if you tried to swat them away. “We’re getting a lot of criticism. A lot. So I need to know what you guys think. How stupid does it make us look?”

  “I think if people know why it costs that much, they will understand,” Søberg said.

  “I will be honest about it, of course,” Redzepi said. But had the damage been done? “I guess what I need you to answer is, Did we fuck up?”

  * * *

  —

  The thing about Redzepi and his cult was that everything locked into place, everything hummed in harmonic convergence, whenever they blocked out the noise and got back to the food. The aha moments constituted more than menu items that customers would enjoy. They were points of contact, portals of cognitive breakthrough. And so it was that Redzepi began to regain his equilibrium in Mérida at approximately the same moment that Rosio Sánchez had the epiphany of the two sauces. This was the cosmic mole insight that would confirm to everyone who tasted it that a fuckup could be averted—and in fact converted into something new and old and weird and beautiful. In the kitchen at Nectar, hours before the dinner, Sánchez took the mole negro that she had been brewing the day before and mixed it up with dollops of the funky caramel-hued scallop fudge that they’d brought along from the Noma mothership in Copenhagen.

  The result was a revelation, causing a click of delight on the palate.

  Redzepi tasted it on a spatula and stopped in his tracks. “Now I think that’s amazing,” he said. “This is incredible. Oh man oh man oh man. This is the perfect mix of the two places. Maybe here we have a dish for Noma Mexico.” He high-fived Sánchez and Frebel. It was hard to tell whether the ambient spiciness in the air from the chiles had made his eyes watery. “This mole is a masterpiece.”

  The food helped. Being in the kitchen helped. Being surrounded by his talented associates helped. “I’m more calm today about this experience,” Redzepi said. “If we don’t sell this one out, then we don’t sell it out. We’ll come up with a different plan. That’s how we do things. But I do think we’ll sell out.” The fog of sniping and stinging on Twitter—it eventually evaporates if you wait long enough. “Honestly, it’s making me think these people are dumb,” he said. “The press is a horrible beast. The press is like an angry head chef.”

  Watching from the margins the whole time was Roberto Solís, whose laid-back stoicism seemed to make Redzepi relax and bristle in equal measure. It was a symptom of Redzepi’s Danish conditioning that he wanted everything to fall neatly into place; it was a truth at the core of Solís’s understanding of the world—of Mexico, in particular—that he knew such a thing was impossible. The Twitter storm about the price?

  “I knew that something like that was going to happen,” Solís said with priestly resignation. Why?

  “Because Mexico is a poor country,” he said. Teaching a Scandinavian to adapt to Mexico’s go-with-the-flow rhythms? Well, that could take a while. It was a process. It was hard to tell whether Redzepi was attempting to impose order on Mexico or whether it was the other way around. The day before, Redzepi had berated his old friend over the phone about not having enough plates on hand for the dinner at Nectar.

  “This is kind of what Mexico is,” Solís said. You need plates. You wait for plates. The plates come or they don’t. You have a plan A and a plan B but also plans C, D, and E. A plan Z wouldn’t hurt, as backup.

  “Once you understand this, you can laugh at it,” Solís said. “But you have to suffer first.”

  * * *

  —

  In the afterglow of the dinner at Nectar—a jubilant occasion that had ended with mariachis serenading the guests and a cart stationed outside serving up a “dessert” of al pastor tacos for anyone who wanted to punctuate the night with the postparty snack of the gods—I had not expected to encounter the Branding Man.

  I saw him when I wandered over to the Noma team’s inn in the morning. The Branding Man was cooler than you’d expect, which is to say he was conscious of his role as an ambassador of corporate lucre and so he carried himself in such a way that any underlying douchiness would be imperceptible. From the way he was dressed—Coachella casual, with an unbuttoned shirt and a tasteful menagerie of tattoos—I might’ve taken him for a rival journalist or a young Mexican chef whose membership in the cult of René Redzepi had remained heretofore unknown to me. When I heard him talking, though, I realized that the Branding Man, whose first name was Alfonso, did not cook or write. He had a different agenda. “If we can agree on that, we can sell it to brands very, very easily,” he was saying. I could not tell what he wanted the Noma crew to agree on, but I could tell by the look on Redzepi’s face that it pained him to contemplate such a concordance.

  Redzepi and his band were huddled around the Branding Man at the breakfast table. The visitor represented a new way forward—a solution, you might say, to the pesky problem of having an investor rescind a sizable percentage of Noma Mexico’s proposed operating budget. Noma Mexico couldn’t happen in a vacuum. It wasn’t just going to materialize. Like an art installation or a touring band, it needed an infusion of capital in order to come together. As the emissary from a massive international spirits conglomerate, the Branding Man could ostensibly make that money (and more!) reappear with the snap of his fingers—if only, that is, Noma Mexico might be open to a few inventive accommodations.

  “We want to make some special products for the brand,” the visitor said. There was an inviting vagueness, a dip-your-toe-in-the-pool conversational warmth. What would a win-win scenario look like? Well, let’s say a signature cocktail at the Noma Mexico bar—using one of the conglomerate’s popular tequilas. (Mads Kleppe, the beverage guru at Noma, had been scouring the country for months looking for the rarest, weirdest, most obscurely artisanal mezcals. I could only imagine the look in his eyes, the basset-hound droop of his jowls, if he were instructed to whip up a strawberry margarita as a way to appease some corporate sponsors.) Let yourself dream. How about a sponsored video?

  Grabbing a seat at the table, I silently imagined a corporate logo burned with an actual branding iron into one of Noma Mexico’s young coconuts. But no, the Branding Man was not an idiot. He knew not to overreach. He clearly had a sense of where Redzepi’s priorities lay. An idea had surfaced—maybe the conglomerate could help subsidize a school. “We’ll have many things happening around the project,” he said. This is what made it tempting. You could solve your financial problems in one stroke while also doing some good for the local community. Win-win-win.

  And yet all of this represented alien territory for Redzepi.

  “I’ll be very honest with you,” he said. His voice was measured and calm. “I’m not a big fan of working with brands.” For thirteen years or so, Noma had managed to avoid any corporate ties. Once Coca-Cola had offered Noma $500,000 just to put up a couple of recipes on the Noma site—recipes that would somehow involve soda, an ingredient as far removed from the ethos of Noma as Manhattan is from Manitoba. Redzepi turned that down—at a moment when Noma was, frankly, desperate for cash flow.

  “We have to charge six hundred dollars because we have no sponsors,” Redzepi went on. “Who the fuck knows what could happen—and something will happen. If there’s a happy medium, it would be amazing. This thing with the schools is fucking sick.”

  The Branding Man detected receptivity. “Making things happen,” he said with enticing open-endedness. “Without the brands we can’t do the schools. With the brands we can do ten schools. Brands—they have the money. And they are going to continue existing in the world whether we like it or not. My head is spinning right now.” He smiled and left the possibilities floating in the air like dust motes.

  * * *

  —

  Redzepi’s head was spinning, too—for different reasons. The night at Nectar had gotten a little wild as it unraveled. Multiple mezcal shots had marked the crossing of the finish line, and the fiesta had
left toxic vapor trails in Redzepi’s skull. (This was rare. Most of the times I was around him, Redzepi politely hovered at the rim of a wineglass without imbibing much. Beyond a sip here and there, he did not seem to delight in it. Although it’s not difficult to surmise that displeasure arose from the risk of surrendering control.)

  “Today my workout was getting out of bed,” Santiago Lastra Rodriguez said.

  “To have such a night—when will we recuperate from this?” Redzepi said as they boarded a van to take them into the jungle. “I really feel like shit, I have to say. Does anybody have some aspirin?” Being René Redzepi, he pointed out that real aspirin came from the bark of a tree. “It’s foraging.”

  The van went silent. Fingertips squeezed temples. There was a lot of thinking to do. There were questions about the purpose of the mission and the problems that come with forging alliances with organizations whose aims are not the same as yours. There were the challenges of trying to mount something that would be greeted as a tribute to the people and cultures of Mexico as opposed to some craven neocolonialist sleight of hand. There were the issues of intention that could be encapsulated in works such as Teju Cole’s piercing essay “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” in which he had written about Africa but could also have been writing about Mexico and the whole Caribbean region:

  One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied. Many have done it under the banner of “making a difference.”