Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  For anyone who has ever imagined a different way, an alternative mode of occupying the earth in which every action was the fruit of some higher purpose, a few days spent in the company of Team Noma could feel positively ambrosial. Surely there was no shortage of problems. Every day delivered a fresh batch of snafus along with the foraged berries and edible insects. But the glow of some ultimate goal gave everything that sense of meaning that felt so comparatively elusive in the crushing grind of trying to stay afloat and serene in twenty-first-century America. To watch the Noma crew at work was to come to understand why otherwise intelligent people join religious cults. It’s not for the free love and cathartic dancing, although those early enticements have their appeal. It’s because a cult tells you: We have the answer. Without an answer, even a manufactured one, life is a slog. With an answer, there is a unity of purpose that can focus the mind and energize the body.

  The purpose, now, was pulling off Noma Mexico. Years of planning and dreaming had gone into it. Making it happen had almost driven Redzepi mad. But there was no turning away. This had to work. One false move and the whole thing could capsize.

  René is never happy with where he is at.

  —MATT ORLANDO, chef, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2014

  “Let’s go see some turtles,” Redzepi announces.

  He’s sitting at a long table with friends and family members at El Pez, the hotel in Tulum where he has camped out for the duration of Noma Mexico. Laid out on the table is a spread of local fruit—papayas and watermelons, mangos and mameys—as well as sunny-side-up eggs and tortillas and spicy green salsa and slices of avocado. Today is a day off, and he has packed the schedule with activities that should ostensibly be stress-relieving. We convene for yoga under a thatched roof in a hut that’s raised up on stilts; a breeze coming off the Caribbean cools us down. Then we pile into a van to go to a beach at Akumal to float among the ancient chelonians.

  The van has a screen at the front, behind the driver, and Nadine switches on Finding Dory for the three Redzepi daughters. Nemo’s dad appears on screen, voiced by Albert Brooks, representing in all his neurotic anxiety the very antithesis of Nadine and René when it comes to parenting styles. “The only reason to travel in the first place is so you don’t have to travel ever again,” the father fish warbles. It’s safe to say the Redzepi family sees things differently.

  On the drive out, Redzepi is uncharacteristically silent. At this point I have traveled to Mexico with him numerous times, and I’m used to his hopped-up pontifications—the electric current that seems to race through his system whenever he encounters an unfamiliar ingredient or custom. But now he is strangely muted. The van arrives at the turtle beach and Redzepi becomes every beleaguered suburban dad in history, hovering impatiently on the curb waiting for everyone to get equipped with towels and sandals and beach chairs. The slow crawl of the children disembarking from the van seems to drive him to distraction. “It’s your day off and you spend half of it waiting around for people to get their shit together,” he mutters. Pretty soon it’s like a Chevy Chase movie. Everyone’s kitted out in masks and snorkels and bulky life vests whose straps scrape against your skin. Wading into the water is the opposite of the cold shock of the ocean that many of us are accustomed to. The water is hot. Not merely warm, but heated up in a way that makes you worry about everything from flesh-eating microbes to catastrophic climate change. We bob around in the Mexican bathwater and come to the realization that the turtles are farther out than we are—out where the water gets deeper. The turtles are, in fact, a few yards beyond a line of rope. You can see their shapes in motion, their heads surfacing now and then, but anyone who swims under the rope gets snapped at by megaphone-wielding officials who are monitoring the beach.

  Redzepi will have none of it. The frustration that has clouded him all day seems ready to burst into thunder. Someone mumbles something about it being against the law to venture beyond the rope. “Fuck this shit,” Redzepi says finally. “Let’s just do it.” And with that call to arms he leads us. One by one we slide under the rope and head en masse for the open water where the turtles cavort in a slow aquatic ballet.

  * * *

  —

  Each morning the Noma Mexico kitchen sputters slowly to life. First the fires are lit—logs and sticks roaring into redness and spitting sparks from the ovens onto the stone floor. Cooks arrive in waves and, after spraying their ankles with mosquito repellent, get to work at their stations. Paulina Carreno and Mariel Nogueron, both from Guadalajara, are deep-frying masa in vats of oil. There are pans of fresh wet kelp from the Sea of Cortez, tubs of beach mustard and sea purslane and saltwort from the shoreline not far away. Fejsal Demiraj, a cook who grew up in Yonkers, New York, chops raw meat with a knife—or so it seems. Upon closer inspection you notice that what looks like “meat” is actually local tomatoes whose red pulp flirts with purple. He checks out a delivery of tomatoes in a box. They are already rotting, some of them moldy and glistening and collapsing. Demiraj knows he has to improvise—to use fewer tomatoes, only the intact ones. The good tomatoes—Indios grown in a local Mayan community—will have their seeds and skins removed before they are dried for a few hours in a dehydrator to concentrate the flavor and convert their texture into a pleasurable leatheriness. Then he will brush them with chile de arbol oil and chop them down to be tucked into salbutes.

  A few steps away Junichi Takahashi scrapes the seeds out of a heap of habanero chiles. Perhaps he has a gift for nimbleness that winds up burdening him with the most tedious of dishes. This one is both tedious and perilous. The seeds harbor invisible agony. Takahashi has to be careful about where his fingers go. He scratches an itch on his neck. “Oh, fuck, it burns!” he yelps.

  * * *

  —

  Eggs are boiling, tomatoes are charring directly on the coals, seaweed is shifting from rust-brown to flaming chartreuse in hot water. Transformations are happening in the heat. It’s a circus of funk and char and tang. Everyone’s wearing sandals and black shorts and gray aprons—the uniform lends the kitchen an air of military precision. But the dishes being assembled exemplify all meanings of the word “wild.” They are wild in their integration of the flavors and textures of the untamed—it’s a menu that highlights ant eggs and grasshoppers—while at the same time they are wildly inventive. (In one, you squirt a spritz of michelada directly into your mouth using a bulb of floating kelp as your shot glass.) The wildness is wired into the structure. “When it’s really windy, you can listen to this palm tree, the way it’s moving in the ceiling,” Frebel tells me, nodding toward a trunk that rises right from the center of the kitchen. “You can’t have that in Copenhagen—to be exposed to the forces of nature.” You might say that Noma Mexico is more Noma than Noma itself. “The first thing René told me is, ‘Thomas, we need a tree in our kitchen.’ ” Strung along the posts holding up the ceiling are the skulls of pigs.

  A laminated chart on the wall provides information for anyone who hasn’t internalized it yet. “Wild food from the jungle,” it says, above a splash of images of moringa, caimito, hoja santa, piñuela, grosella, flor de mayo, wild royal, wild lentils, maiz pibinal. A chart of herbs features sea purslane, sea lily, saltwort, beach mustard. When Santiago Lastra Rodriguez arrives, it usually means that some of these ingredients have arrived with him as their escort. He’s the fixer, the stocker of the supply larder, logging hours from 5 A.M. to 2 A.M. in a byzantine web of contacts with scores of producers and purveyors around Mexico. “I drove like five thousand kilometers in one week,” he tells me. “Monday I was feeling so weird because I had a few hours off. I got, like, freaked. I freaked out completely. I was just standing thinking, ‘What’s going on?’ ”

  Frebel picks up a jackfruit—it looks like a spiny football—that has arrived with the latest delivery. “It’s not ready yet,” he says. “Touch it. You want it softer. When it’s ripe it’
s like the best honey.” He grabs a machete and chops it open. The jungles surrounding Noma Mexico are full of such fruits, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to secure. “We always have some troubles,” Lastra Rodriguez says. “You never know, when you wake up, what is going to happen.” During the first week of Noma Mexico, he needed a supply of piñuelas for the opening bite of the meal—a fruity nub of bromeliad bud sheathed in tamarind paste and cilantro flowers. Lastra Rodriguez was contacted by the man growing them. “He sends me a selfie at like six in the morning: ‘The jungle is on fire.’ ” There was a brushfire. The farmer’s land was being incinerated. Lastra Rodriguez needed to find an alternative source. “So I had to drive around asking people in the community. You drive two hours and you ask for Juan. You go there and you ask, ‘Where is Juan?’ They say, ‘Juan is in church.’ ” The hunt goes on and somehow, after six hours of driving around looking for Juan, Lastra Rodriguez comes back to the Noma Mexico kitchen with a crate of piñuelas. “What took you so long?” someone asks him.

  The octopus comes from Campeche, but Lastra Rodriguez cannot reveal precisely where. “There’re just a few people who know where to get this octopus,” he says. The fisherman told him, I need a boat, an engine, three days of work a week, and a dependable supply of mezcal. Deal. “No restaurant in the country can get fresh cacao fruits three times a week. It’s just impossible,” Lastra Rodriguez says. So how did Noma Mexico luck out? “We did a deal with a guy,” he says. The convoluted route of produce in Mexico often ends up robbing it of its ripeness. Picked in the peninsula, produce will sometimes pass through Cancún, get hauled all the way to Mexico City, then boomerang back around to the Yucatán. By then it’s dead. “You never know what you’re getting here,” Lastra Rodriguez says. His goal, then, is to procure the Best Ingredients directly from the people growing them. “We get this stuff fast,” he says.

  Sometimes they go even closer to the source—all the way to the seeds. Redzepi and his team wanted to use Indio tomatoes. “It is a tomato that is impossible to find,” Lastra Rodriguez says. So they found amateur farmers. “We gave them the seeds, they planted them, and they are growing them behind their houses.” Eventually the first crop of tomatoes arrived at the Noma kitchen. They were full of worms. Lastra Rodriguez had to go back to the growers to talk about the need for speed when it comes to picking tomatoes in a jungle climate. “You just work with them, work with them,” he says. “It’s not always simple for the community to understand the quality we want.” Still, now, some tomatoes arrive already rotten.

  The escamoles—ant eggs—come from Hidalgo. There the delicate eggs are harvested and frozen. “If they defrost, we are fucked,” Lastra Rodriguez says. One shipment of escamoles was due to land by plane in Cancún, but a storm kept the plane from touching down. The escamoles were diverted to Mérida, hours away, at 8 P.M. He could only contemplate what condition they’d be in.

  There is a doctor on call in case anyone conks out in the 100 percent humidity; the Scandinavians in the crew are not accustomed to it. “Last week we got a B-complex shot,” Frebel says. “Just to make sure everyone stays healthy.” My eyes must look glazed, because he interrupts a young cook who’s got his head down in prepping a dish: “Get Jeff a glass of coconut milk.” Chilled containers of coconut elixir—sweet, cold, nutrient-packed—are at hand all day long.

  Sour oranges, tiny bananas, calabazas, mamey seeds whose cores are pressed into oil. Everything needs to be converted rapidly into its gastronomic ideal. Decomposition lurks for anything left in limbo. “We would have saved them for Thomas Keller, but we’re serving them to you,” a cook tells me, gesturing toward the dwarf bananas.

  * * *

  —

  Redzepi arrives in the kitchen. “Any sandwiches left?” he asks.

  His voice is not the commanding bark of a martinet. He asserts his dominance more diplomatically than that these days. There is a liquidy ebb and flow to the way he talks that seems to bury a question in each sentence. He leads by suggestion. Today’s staff lunch is a pile of sandwiches stuffed with cochinita pibil. Redzepi is not one to stuff his face mindlessly, not even with a delectable torta. He picks up a sandwich and places it right on the hot grill to toast it up. He doesn’t appear to take much pleasure in this. The restlessness of the sea turtle expedition has only thickened like the quick-spreading mold on those jungle tomatoes. He has come to Mexico for years with an elusive objective: to relax and escape the oppressive gray dome of a Copenhagen winter. So why is it that here in the equatorial swelter of his beloved Tulum he has his mind fixated only on…Scandinavia?

  “By next week,” he tells me in a mumbled rush, “we’re going to start going into Copenhagen mode. We have to.” David Zilber, Noma’s director of fermentation, sits at a table a few feet away, conspicuously separate from the boiling and chopping of the kitchen. He has his laptop open and has trained his focus on the wild fermentations afloat back in Denmark. In fact, he’s writing a book about them, a collaboration with Redzepi that will arrive in 2018.

  In a kitchen overpopulated with deep thinkers, Zilber stands apart. Fortune favors the bold, et cetera: Zilber had for years worked as a relatively unknown cook in Vancouver, but he got hired by Team Noma out of the blue after emailing an impassioned essay to three restaurants that he viewed as representing the vanguard in global cooking: Saison in San Francisco, Alinea in Chicago, and Noma in Copenhagen. The first two never responded. “I always say, if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not pushing yourself,” Zilber later told the writer Nikita Richardson, more or less encapsulating the core truth of the Noma gospel. “So I sent out just a handful of résumés and a really long cover letter to my favorite restaurants.” Around the kitchen in Denmark he became known as the “walking Wikipedia.” Even a casual conversation with Zilber was likely to swerve its way into references to mathematics, history, quantum physics, biology, chemistry, and cinema. Redzepi had moved him from the kitchen to the fermentation lab, working alongside Arielle Johnson and Lars Williams, after Zilber had managed to turn an episode of Saturday Night Projects into a philosophical experiment. Instead of merely devising a new dish, Zilber came up with a series of boxes. The boxes, with their strategically placed blind partitions, would foster a conversation in which each diner at a table at Noma would experience a different version of a dish using the same ingredients: red mullet with beach herbs, black olive, and potato. (In one case the mullet would be a mousse, in another a fillet, in another a tartare, and in the last sashimi.) Zilber called this risky entry into the Saturday Night Projects spectacle “Ruminations on Solipsism Along a Mediterranean Coastline (De Gustibus Non Est Disputandem) Variations 1–4.” He accompanied the “dish” with an essay, from which here is a sample:

  One serious question many cognitive scientists ponder is that of the nature of experience itself. The ways in which light manifests itself to different individuals, your threshold for pleasure, your perception of taste. These are very real mysteries of the human brain. There’s a classic stoner’s conundrum. It goes by the name of the color incongruency test. It’s the idea that though we might both, you and I, recognise the color of an eggplant to be purple, that outside of our consensus on the matter, we can never really know if we’re both, indiscriminately, experiencing the SAME purple. For all I know, purple to you might be what I call green.

  Redzepi took notice.

  Now Zilber, like the avatar of one of his own metaphysical tracts, is physically present in Mexico but mentally elsewhere—in Copenhagen in the future. “I have to think a year in advance,” he says. Menus that will be mapped out for 2018 are already on his mind—and on Redzepi’s.

  * * *

  —

  Thomas Keller is flying into Noma Mexico for dinner on Saturday. Demand for extra tables is boiling over: The other day a rich woman was spied along the perimeter of the Noma Mexico tableau, tossing hundred-dollar bills through the gate and begging for a seat.
A Tom Sietsema piece in The Washington Post has come out; its headline refers to Noma Mexico as “the meal of the decade.” Redzepi doesn’t celebrate. He can’t seem to stand still. After all of the searching and labor and torment that he poured into turning Noma Mexico into a reality, he seems curiously unable to enjoy the way it has settled into success. And here’s the thing about food. You taste it and it’s gone. Whether or not Redzepi qualifies as an artist, his chosen medium is one in which the most impressive creations evaporate from view within seconds of being witnessed. You pick a mango. You suck the juice out of the mango. You finish off the sweet remnants of the mango. You’re left with the pit. You plant the pit. If you’re lucky, you get to watch the pit sprout into bloom and the cycle shudders back to its stations. Redzepi’s food is not simply a communion with nature. His very approach to the restaurant—the rhythms of create-and-destroy, bloom-and-decay—can be viewed as an ode to nature itself. In keeping with those rhythms, Redzepi isn’t comfortable with stasis; he’s allergic to inertia. If something isn’t in motion, in transit, he’s bored with it—or maybe in that situation he’s simply bored with himself. “René keeps saying ‘the beast is tamed, the beast is tamed,’ ” Frebel tells me. “The thing is, it’s going well here. Getting here was more challenging than the other ones”—in Japan and in Australia—“but in terms of execution, it’s by far the easiest one.”