There was the desire to do the right thing, to make a difference, yes, but in the political climate of 2016 and 2017 there were ever-evolving definitions of what doing the right thing looked like. There was perhaps a need to reconnect with something essential—a need to remember what this whole Noma Mexico enterprise was supposed to accomplish and celebrate in the first place—and so it was fortuitous that Redzepi and his comrades were riding out toward what he would later describe as one of the three best meals of his life. (The other two were prepared by his father and his wife, respectively, in ascending order of closeness to his heart.) We were rolling to Yaxunah, a village down a dirt road. We were, less precisely, taking a trip to a hole in the ground.
Of course, Redzepi’s madeleine moment with Mexican food had happened years earlier in the form of tacos al pastor, courtesy of that late-night, streetside initiation provided by Roberto Solís. If al pastor qualified as the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a snort of carnal abandon compressed into a bite or three, cochinita pibil delivered something deeper and heavier—cochinita pibil was the subterranean operatic sweep of Exile on Main St. Like that Rolling Stones epic, cochinita pibil gave off the odor of dirt. That’s not a metaphor. After all, how could you get closer to the abundance of the earth than a wild pig cooked in the earth—its meat buried in a hole, fragrantly entombed in a steam chamber of banana leaves, perfumed with sour orange that had sprouted out of the same soil? “Pib is the Mayan word for the traditional oven, or pit barbecue, of the Yucatán Peninsula and it is still used in the villages today,” Diana Kennedy writes in her 2000 book, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.
It is prepared by digging a rectangular pit about 2 feet deep. The bottom is lined with large stones that are heated with a wood fire. When the embers have died down and the stones are considered hot enough (only the experts know this by instinct) the meats to be cooked—pig, turkey, or meat pies like Muk-bil Pollo—are wrapped in several layers of banana leaves, set in a metal container, and covered with sacking and earth. The cooking takes several hours. Meats cooked this way have a very special flavor and succulence.
We wouldn’t have to wait for the succulence. The drive out to the village was long enough that it coincided with the slow collapse into deliciousness of the meat. “They say the cochinita is ready,” Santiago announced as our van got close to Yaxunah, where the habitations had thatched roofs and lizards posed frozen on windowsills (until darting away) and wild turkeys strutted around the yard. “In a lot of these Mayan villages—alcohol is forbidden. Because it drives them crazy,” Redzepi said, perhaps himself susceptible to a similar line of thinking after a morning of squinting agony.
There may be no more effective hangover cure than an excursion to Yaxunah. The men wore straw cowboy hats and outfits of white; the women had red flowers woven into their hair and embroidered ones on their dresses. The women sat on the ground pounding masa into tortillas; the men stood around and astride a smoking pit.
“Where’s the pig?” Redzepi asked.
“The pig is here,” Solís said, motioning toward the smoke drifting upward from a covered area that looked like a pile of leaves. “Don’t walk here.”
Surrounding us were trees. “Can you ask what kind of citrus this is?” Redzepi said. “Those leaves are amazing.” The full circle of cochinita pibil rose around us: sour orange and achiote trees—ingredients directly at hand.
“They’re gonna open it,” Redzepi said. He sounded like he was talking about rolling back the stone that blocked the entrance to Christ’s tomb. Maybe he wasn’t far off. The men began to go at the pit with shovels. They removed dirt, blankets, fronds, and sticks. Then, carefully, they hoisted out a big metal pot that had been at rest on red embers. The men opened the pot. An aroma as seductive and complex as that of a cassoulet or a doenjang jjigae flooded the air. It was the scent of melted fat and meat that had broken down slowly, tenderly, like a rock split by ice crystals. “Oh, it smells amazing,” Redzepi said. “Ask them about the banana leaf—does it add flavor?”
The meat was escorted with care to a table near the women, who had by now shifted into tortilla-crisping mode. Tasks in many Mayan villages, and throughout Mexico, tend to be segregated according to gender. Men here were prohibited from touching the masa as it made its progression toward tortillaness. Women were the experts, and were rightly revered for this. Redzepi stood by the comal as the women laid the dough on it. He studied the process as the tortillas formed—in their ideal manifestation they would puff up, the development that still seemed to elude the greatest chef on the planet. “There we go,” he said as a tortilla inflated as if taking in the breath of a hungry ghost. “This is Yoda-level tortilla making. Oh, I’m so ready to eat.”
Suddenly Redzepi had an idea. “We should ask them what they’re doing in April and May.” He meant the women who were placing one perfect tortilla after another in baskets. What if…?
Redzepi filled a tortilla with cochinita pibil, which had been shredded off the bones of the pig and was marinating like a stew in its own juices. He placed pink pickled onions on top. He took a bite. He closed his eyes. The meat was juicy and shot through with layers of spice and citrus and fat. The tortilla was thick, chewy, redolent of corn—as with a good bagel, a good tortilla expressed its character through its density and depth of flavor instead of coming across like some gummy, generic conduit for supermarket flour.
Redzepi looked me in the eyes. “Have you ever had a better tortilla than this?” he asked me.
I had not. He nodded slowly. He was coming to a decision.
“We made an arrangement to get all the corn from this community for the pop-up,” he went on. But it was clear that he now felt as though he had to take things a step further. “Roberto?” he said. “Can you ask them what they’re doing in April and May?”
A few months later the result of his decision was on full display in between the dining room and the kitchen at the pop-up in Tulum. Redzepi had bid the Branding Man farewell, but he had invited the women of Yaxunah to join the team at Noma Mexico.
* * *
—
Redzepi had that Ken Kesey–ish sense of the pilgrimage. He understood the fuel that comes from theatrical gestures. He knew how to inspire his team. And so it was that the communion with the cochinita pibil was followed by a trip deeper into the past. Our van was headed for the ruins of Chichen Itza, where Mayan and Toltec cultures had collided and merged and built grand, mystical structures more than a thousand years ago. He wanted everyone to see the pyramid—the Temple of Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo.
But our arrival at this temple of antiquity gave us a shock at first. Clustered thickly around the perimeter of the site was a whistling, chattering bazaar of souvenir stands—tables where local people sold T-shirts and toys. Mayan tchotchke hawkers seemed to be holding bongs up to their lips, but it turned out the bongs were something that a Foley artist might use in a movie: they were toys that, when blown into, would emit tropical bird whoops and jaguar roars. These sounds surrounded us as we walked toward the pyramid. Once we’d passed through the commercial scrum, though, we came upon the ruins rising from a grassy expanse. “Understand the enormity of the town that this was,” Redzepi intoned, echoing Shelley’s “Ozymandias” as he had us pause and gaze upon what had once been glories. “Look how amazing this is. They used the cosmos as their guiding compass. There are so many layers to how they built it and why they built it.” The pyramid had been designed so that twice a year, during the spring equinox and its equivalent in the fall, the setting sun would create playing serpentine shadows that made it look like a snake slithered down the steps of the edifice.
We wandered into a stadium. It was more than five hundred feet long and had once been the site of Mayan ball games. “See the rings?” Redzepi said, relishing the role of tour guide. “Those were the goals for the Mayan games.” The acoustics of the stadium were said to be so sophistic
ated that you could shout into the temple stationed at one end of the ball court—known, aptly, as the Temple of the Bearded Man—and the sound would carry across the field to be heard with perfect clarity at the other end, bounced like a rubber ball from one stone wall to another. “So they could communicate with one another like that,” Redzepi said. We decided to test it. Rosio Sánchez aimed her voice at the Temple of the Bearded Man and shouted.
“Hola!”
The echo boomeranged to the other side of the playing field as if it were being broadcast on stereo speakers, and it was, at that moment, possible to imagine a conversation between the creative dreamers of the present moment and their counterparts centuries earlier.
* * *
—
We spent the night in the magic city of Valladolíd. No joke, that was its official designation. It had been deemed, by the government, one of dozens of Pueblos Mágicos, chosen for their innate delightfulness. What it lacked in culinary dynamism it made up for in charm. The streets were so quiet at night that as you strolled down them you could overhear conversations through the windows, and the twin steeples of the Iglesia de San Servacio glowed with golden light.
The next morning we were back in the van, where reality and magic were yet again at war. If Redzepi simply left his phone off, he could keep the hounds of reality at bay. He could marinate in the sleepy analog reality of a morning in Valladolíd. But a few movements of his fingers activated the device and instantly he saw an email from Ryan Sutton, a critic at Eater, the influential food blog, asking some hard questions about the proposed price of the meal in Tulum. (In media circles, Sutton was known as the grumpy uncle of American food criticism, such was his sensible but ultimately buzzkillish fixation on How Much Everything Costs, Damn It.) This was why Redzepi had known he could never have his first Noma pop-up take place in Mexico, even though Mexico, more than Japan or Australia, was the country that fired up his imagination. He knew the optics were a problem. He had to plant seeds first.
“Oh, man, I could have a pile of those tortillas from yesterday,” Redzepi murmured in the van as he contemplated how to respond to the Eater query. “And that broth—oh, please take me back there, take me back.” I could never be entirely sure, while riding shotgun in the Noma express, what was in store for any given day. Redzepi, like a military general, planned everything down to the last tank advancement, but he often declined (or just forgot) to disclose the plans to me until the definitive moment was at hand. What I knew was that we were simultaneously going forward and back—back, this time, to the place where I’d found myself sprawled on the beach before dawn, flashlight rays in my squinting eyes and sand in my teeth. We were going back to Tulum. We seemed to be doing so with hellhounds on our trail. There was the negative media attention being trained on the cost of a meal at Noma Mexico. “You can’t make expensive tacos,” Redzepi mused, still gnawing on the conundrum of the price. “So how do you do that? The bottom line of all this is that our expenses are so big. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s an impossible thing.” Meanwhile he had his eye on the hellhound of death. Toggling among emails and texts and links on his phone, he learned that his close friend the British writer A. A. Gill had been diagnosed with cancer. Actually “an embarrassment of cancer,” as Gill would write in the U.K.’s Sunday Times. “There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.” (Gill died about three weeks later. It was the first of several deaths that shook Redzepi in the years to come.) All of this tumult was putting Redzepi in a philosophical frame of mind. He sat in the van and stared out the window at the acres and acres of jungle thickets. “I’m much more relaxed about it now,” he finally said of the pop-up. “It’s gonna be what it’s gonna be.”
What it won’t be is like the pop-up Noma in Tokyo. “We’re not going to put ourselves in a situation like that in Japan ever again,” Redzepi said. “Never again.” In Japan, the Noma team had needed extra labor, but the labor force kept getting chipped away by mandatory quarantines at the Mandarin Oriental hotel where the pop-up took place. If anyone in the kitchen tested positive for the norovirus, that person—and that person’s roommate—had to stay out of the kitchen for three days, which created a round-robin cycle of absences. One challenge after another made the Tokyo residency too arduous, too much of a grind, whereas the Sydney pop-up had been, for someone of Redzepi’s temperament, almost too easy. “At the end I couldn’t wait to get out of Australia,” Redzepi said. (This could be viewed as a bizarre assessment when you consider what the journalist Tienlon Ho had written about the crises and snags on the dock in Barangaroo: “There had been a few headaches. They had arrived to a restaurant half-built at an address that didn’t yet exist online. Sinks weren’t working. Neither was the oven. A box of expensive ingredients had disappeared, and storms ripping across Tasmania meant more orders wouldn’t get through. Two leafy nests of gulgulk [green ants] from the north arrived in one box, and it was evident from the carnage that boundary disputes had devolved to warfare; the formic acid behind the ants’ ferocity and tangy coriander-lemongrass-kaffir-lime flavor was completely spent.”)
Redzepi wanted the Tulum pop-up to land somewhere in between Tokyo and Sydney: to be difficult enough to push everyone without crushing their spirits. “This is a process of our becoming confident and finding ourselves,” he said.
The scent of grapefruit filled the van. Junichi Takahashi sat toward the back, flipping through a Japanese/Spanish dictionary. Tapping away on his phone, Santiago Lastra Rodriguez stayed on the lookout for a cenote—one of the wild lakes that dot the Yucatán, formed when the asteroid crashed into the peninsula and pockmarked the landscape with pond-sized pellets. Redzepi wanted to visit a grand cenote, a true cenote, not one of the touristy ones. The cenote of his dreams was like the Mayan octopus of his dreams and the cochinita pibil of his dreams and the Faroe Island langoustines of his dreams and the Norwegian mahogany clams of his dreams. “If you had a machete,” he said in the van, “and you went a kilometer into the jungle, you might find one. One where you have more of that nature contact.”
* * *
—
We enter Tulum. We’re back.
“There he is!” Redzepi says.
The van slows down along the shady, sand-strewn road that parallels the beach. This road is like some matcha-ganja hipster fever dream. Sandals, seawater-tangled hair, yoga arms, towels wrapped sarong-like around slow-moving hips, a dazed parade of Savasana-stoned human beings drifting to wherever. “Many American people,” Takahashi observes. One of the drifters is familiar. The van stops and the door opens and James Spreadbury climbs in. “How the feck are ya?” he says. Our global unit now has a representative from Australia.
Spreadbury and his family have been encamped here for weeks, laying the organizational groundwork for the pop-up. The van moves forward slowly until we get to a modest clearing across the street from La Zebra. “Look to the right, guys, because you’re gonna be seeing our new restaurant,” Redzepi says.
The site amounts to little more than an abandoned back lot. As with the location of Noma 2.0 in Copenhagen, which was cratered with cement and masked with graffiti, this patch of real estate looks a long way from rehabilitation. The air smells like mango juice and cigarette smoke. There are random piles of white rocks. The floor is dirt. “This is the kitchen,” Redzepi says, gesturing toward some dumpsters. “Hard to imagine, huh?” You could say that. He pantomimes the act of expediting dishes. “Pick up! Table two!” There are no tables yet, though, and no roof, and no walls, and no stoves, and no sinks. “It’s very different than what we’ve done otherwise, guys,” he goes on. In Sydney and Tokyo, the pop-ups came together at established commercial properties; there was infrastructure in place. There were bathrooms. This—apparently the followers of Redzepi, like the followers of Joseph Smith in the desert scrub of Utah, were being instructed to build something
out of nothing in the wilderness. And like the early Mormons, the Nomatics weren’t troubled by the slightest twinge of hesitation. “What do you think, Thomas?” Redzepi asks.
“Amazing,” Frebel says, his eyes aglow.
“We’re keeping all the trees, right?” Mette Søberg asks.
“As many as possible,” Redzepi says.
“It’s so cool,” she says.
“It’s so cool,” he agrees. “What do you think, Jun?”
“Here we can do something special,” Takahashi replies.
Then Redzepi turns silently to the one who often seems like the hardest to impress.
“Everybody will be happy here,” Rosio Sánchez says.
* * *
—
There is the panic when you realize you’ve lost your wallet. The panic when you think someone is illegally buying things with your credit card. The panic of your phone conking out precisely when you are trying to locate one of your children in a busy, dicey part of town. The panic of learning that someone has hacked into your social media account and begun sending scurrilous messages to your friends and colleagues. In spite of—or because of—a torrent of technological advancements, our civilization seems to have multiplied the number of opportunities for things to break. There are days when our lives amount to a blur, a feverish hopscotching from one glitch to the next—trying to fix things in order to stay put as opposed to trying to create things to move forward. The more gadgets you have, the more often they crack or go dead; the more desperately you depend on them, the more desperately you freak out when they fail you. A sense of purpose erodes, replaced by a sense of being aboard a sinking ship that is always springing new leaks that you have to patch up. Meanwhile larger fissures and fractures develop. The euphoria and comfort of love are replaced by the tedium and tetchiness of putting out fires. Your marriage is falling apart. Your profession is falling apart. Your country is falling apart. Your government is hurtling toward fascism and your world is careening toward environmental doom and you’d love to pay more attention to that, really you would, but you just dropped your fucking phone into the garbage disposal.
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