Contemporan

At noma, we aim to offer a personal rendition of Nordic gourmet cuisine, where typical methods of cooking, fine Nordic produce and the legacy of our common food culture are all being subjected to an innovative gastronomic approach. Carrying this line of thinking further, we view it as a challenge to play a part in bringing forth a regeneration of Nordic culinary craft, in its capacity to encompass the North Atlantic region and to brighten the world with its distinctive tastiness and special regional character.

What you will find here at noma is not centered so much on olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and Mediterranean black olives. We’ve been busy traveling around in the Nordic regions and we have been finding a number of simply phenomenal ingredients that we have flown into town for our use: Horse mussels, deep-sea crabs and langoustines from the Faeroe Islands, which are living right up until the moment they are served to our visitors. Halibut, wild salmon, cod and seaweed and curds from Iceland. Lamb, musk ox, berries and the purest drinking water from Greenland. In much the same fashion, we are constantly scanning for new sources of inspiration in Denmark, especially, as well as the other Nordic regions, for purposes of securing reliable sources of top-quality raw produce. This pertains both to very costly ingredients and also to ingredients of a more everyday character that we feel have come to be overlooked in the formulation of a salient Nordic approach to cooking: cereals, hulled grains and legumes, which you will come to experience here in the context of surprising preparations.

We want to go into depth with the matters before us. We are paying careful attention to the qualities in our culinary legacy, but we also aim to generate something new and innovative. We are exploring the potential of milk and cream in today’s modern cuisine. We are developing new ways of preparing the well-known and other not so well known kinds of cereal grains. We are constantly on the lookout for berries and herbs in the natural environment, including certain varieties that other people do not generally feel like gathering. We are also interested in working with raw ingredients which have no part in any systems of formalized cultivation and which therefore cannot be obtained through the ordinary channels of distribution.

We are smoking, salting, pickling, drying, grilling and baking on slabs of basalt stone. We are also preparing our own vinegars and concocting our own distilled spirits. However, we are making use of the most up-to-date kitchen appliances and “cutting-edge” techniques, of course, because we are paying just as much attention to the food’s consistency as our colleagues are busy doing at today’s top international restaurants.

Whereas others are using wines in their sauces and soups, we are making a systematic use of beers and ales, fruit juices and fruit-based vinegars for imparting a lively freshness and “edge” to ours. Vegetables, herbs and spices and wild plants in season play a decidedly prominent role in our cooking. Consequently, they take up more room on the plate than what is generally served in traditional gourmet restaurants.

Our intention at noma is to create and to prepare a distinctly advanced kind of cuisine, while nonetheless conjoining our patently Nordic approach with a manner of purity and simplicity in the approach. We are also busy infusing our new Nordic cuisine with a markedly curative potential. These values are all reflected in our menus’ ultimate articulation and manifest themselves both in the construction and presentation of the individual courses and in the means of preparation and ingredients upon which they are based.