Noma Australia: Rene Redzepi popup dines out on indigenous ingredients
Chicken stock ‘skin’ napped with crocodile fat, on raw molluscs? Coming right up, sir. Welcome to Noma Australia.
Chicken stock “skin” napped with crocodile fat, on raw molluscs? Raw marron with magpie goose ragu, in a barbecued milk skin “dumpling”? Crab … amazing snow crab, from southern Western Australia, with a “sauce” of egg yolk cured in kangaroo broth? And abalone schnitz served with bunya nuts, finger lime, sea grape and mat rush?
Coming right up, sir, and that’ll be a whisker short of $500, please. Per head.
In most chefs’ hands, Rene Redzepi’s zeal to shine a light on indigenous Australian ingredients used in new ways at his Sydney Noma pop-up would be nothing short of commercial suicide. Certainly for any Australian chef. Just ask Orana’s Jock Zonfrillo whether he struggles at his groundbreaking Adelaide fine diner where indigenous ingredients are the heroes. But, of course, Redzepi is neither most chefs nor Australian.
And if there is any irony in a Dane being the one to focus Australian minds on our own indigenous ingredients, there’s a spoonful more to come. For only the world’s most famous working chef — harnessing all the cultural cringe Australia can put on a plate — could sell this stuff to an Aussie audience at $485 a head, plus drinks, charge them in advance, and book every seat online within a matter, legend has it, of four minutes.
Yes, Redzepi is very famous. Noma, too, for many years rated the world’s best by at least one of the now numerous lists doing the rounds. And it takes the kind of fiscal security that fame brings, and the sponsorship of Tourism Australia, to use your southern hemisphere pop-up as a kind of intellectual test bed.
For, it is said, before coming to Australia on this mission, Redzepi asked himself a profound question: what if the Europeans and the indigenous people of this land had lived in complete harmony from the very beginning? What would a restaurant look like today?
This is the key to “getting” Noma. And Noma Australia — better described as an event or information exchange than as a meal — is about as close as we’ll ever get to an answer. A partnership between the restaurant, Tourism Australia and Barangaroo developers Lendlease, Noma showcases some of Australia’s “best and most interesting produce with a strong focus on coastal ingredients”. Or so goes the spin.
The key word is “interesting”. Plenty of restaurants — I’m thinking Sepia, Rockpool, Attica or Bennelong, to name just a few — could equally lay claim to the “best produce” mantle.
But then, you don’t get raw macadamia, lantana flowers, or dehydrated King Island scallop powder, caramelised and mixed with beeswax in a seaweed pastry “pie”, at any of them. No, when Tourism Australia backs you, the fieldwork and far-flung research in many rarely visited corners of the land can clearly be hugely illuminating.
Besides, it only needs to last 10 weeks; it’s not like this is a sustainable proposition (already it is being said supplies of finger lime and magpie goose are short around the nation: the “Noma effect”).
So here’s the thing: my eyes are pure. My expectations are fully formed, but preconceived ideas? No, I haven’t been to Noma Copenhagen. Perhaps I should.
It’s Wednesday and we have a noon reservation for two. We’ve paid $970 months in advance, which means the restaurant has collected something in the order of $2,667,500 before buying a single kilo of crocodile fat. This is an outstanding business model.
I’m in for the most expensive meal of my life: by Australian standards, Noma is blisteringly pricey. And we will spend more when we get there, mostly on wacky “soft” drinks and juices and some rather interesting Australian wines.
Take the paired-wine route — an extra $215 per head — and you’ll go predictably off piste with rare Australians ranging from a riesling-based Tasmanian field blend named Brian to the achingly hip Lucy Margaux’s Domaine Lucci chardonnay from the Adelaide Hills. The juice pairing is possibly more fascinating: bergamot kombucha with native mint, for example, or green tomato juice with lemon myrtle. In either case, it’s expect the unexpected.
Try asking a Hong Kong-born taxi driver to take you to Barangaroo. Hard to say, even harder to find. “Too much development in Sydney,” he says as I show him on my phone. But we get there, eventually. We get there hungry. And at 11.34, Redzepi himself is out on the restaurant’s glorious sun-drenched terrace, doing what all chefs should be doing before service. Signing books. Did I mention he’s famous?
At noon, we are ushered to a table — it’s a modest space, to be honest, but a wonderful waterfront location — past a vast team of linen-aproned waiters who welcome us like old mates. It is the afternoon’s leitmotiv.
While the 10-course, set-menu, Noma-curated journey through Australia’s bush and coasts must surely be the most blogged, Instagrammed and blow-by-blow detailed meal in history — and one with almost unanimous praise, with which I can only concur — nothing prepares you for the sheer delight of the little Dane’s team.
Informed, humble, enthusiastic, charming and professional, they (at least three of them Australians, now resident in Copenhagen) take us through lunch like sprightly tour guides on the first gig of the season. From a restaurant of such iconic status, with so much smoke blown you know where over the past 10 years, I expected less.
“I get more attitude in New Farm,” says my Brisbane colleague Trent Dalton. They are out to prove absolutely nothing, and it’s so refreshing.
So, having stripped both the personnel and, it must be said, every other aspect of the restaurant of pretension, what do you get? You get a trip, Alice-like, down a rabbit hole to a whole new world of flavours and textures. Noma is not about technique. It’s not about illusion or gimmick either.
Noma is about Redzepi’s curiosity, on a plate. And years of cooking have given him an instinct for dodging bullets to find true harmony in putting overlooked things together. I’d go so far as to say true genius.
The mango ice-cream sandwich scattered with citric explosions of green ant. Unforgettable. That snow crabmeat — the best crabmeat I’ve eaten — with the cured egg. Who thinks of curing a yolk in kangaroo broth? Ditto the idea of enriching the crisp gelatinous “skin” of chicken broth with fat rendered from a croc, itself fed a diet of chicken before dispatch and on to a new life with the bag men at Louis Vuitton (true), and then draping this translucent mask over raw shellfish? That “fruit salad” of muntries, lilly pilly, desert lime and rye berries in seaweed oil with a gritty powder of dehydrated Kakadu plum?
Or, for that matter, making a ragu of magpie goose, native herbs and tomatoes, serving it with the meat of a marron that died minutes ago — in a barbecued shell of milk skin?
You want blow-by-blow? Jump online. The Noma menu has been dissected in words and images by plenty of respected observers (and many others, too).
To me, it was a powerfully compelling combination of narrative and satisfaction. Like hearing the music of a genius for the first time: it opened a door.
Dalton calls it a “Miles Davis moment”. And I can’t help thinking the “Noma effect” will represent an important milestone in Australia’s self-discovery as a food nation. As if Noma itself hadn’t been the most influential restaurant in the world for the past 10 years.
There will be culinary crimes committed but there will be true development, too, as a result of this venture. And it took a Dane to make it happen.
I’d go back, and spend my own cash, today.