Top Chef

The man who runs the best restaurant in the world cannot afford his own home. He lives in an airy and light rented apartment in the old part of Copenhagen and cycles to work, pedaling through the streets with his 4-year-old daughter tucked cozily in his bike cart as he tries to get her to school on time. After dropping her off, he stops at a nearby coffee bar to down an espresso and a yogurt that will be his sole meal until his restaurant’s staff dinner.

By now René Redzepi, the chef at Noma, could have TV deals and restaurants opening up in the world’s major cities — and certainly a house in his own name — but that is not the kind of ambition that drives the 34-year-old Dane. Where many leading chefs seek to build empires, Redzepi wants only to dig deeper into his immediate surroundings. This helps explain why he is standing in his restaurant kitchen offering a skeptical patron not some truffle-covered delicacy from France or a pricey bit of sea urchin from Japan but a plate of scuttling Danish ants. “They’re delicious,” he says, “and they’re Danish.”

Weird things that happen to be both Danish and delicious: Redzepi has built his entire reputation on that. When he opened Noma in 2003, Nordic cuisine barely existed, at least beyond pickled herring and smorrebrod. But eight years later, a menu that includes the likes of foraged sea buckthorn and cured bear meat has helped elevate Noma to the top spot on the world’s 50 best restaurants list published annually by Restaurant magazine. And through hard work, dazzling talent and the insatiable demands of the celebrity machine, its chef has likewise risen to the pinnacle of gastronomy. When the patron finds the courage to swallow the ant that Redzepi is offering her, she no doubt does so at least in part because the man handing it to her is now leading the world of cuisine. He’s just not sure if he wants to be.

There have been influential chefs for as long as there have been restaurants, but the idea of a sole cook standing at the head of the culinary universe is a recent invention born of two not unconnected phenomena: the unprecedented influence of Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, whose culinary revolution freed many young chefs to follow their own visions, and the newfound power of the 50 best list, which dares to rank something so ineffable as dinner. In 2010, when Adri announced that he was closing his restaurant, El Bulli, and Noma achieved the top spot on the list, Redzepi found himself ascending to the role of literal Top Chef. The fact that this role had not existed prior to Adrià hardly mattered. The king is dead; long live the king.

The signs of coronation are obvious. Noma’s tables are fully booked three months in advance. Critics adore the restaurant. “The explosion of flavours and textures that ensued was simultaneously so subtle and so startling that nothing in a lifetime of tasting had prepared me for it,” wrote a reviewer for the Financial Times in 2009.

Redzepi is a notorious perfectionist (he briefly scandalized his constitutionally placid countrymen after a television documentary exposed some of his more colorful kitchen outbursts), but he wasn’t always so exacting. Born to a Danish mother who worked as a cafeteria cashier and a Macedonian father who emigrated to Copenhagen and worked as a taxi driver, Redzepi flunked out of high school. He chose to attend cooking school only because a buddy had done the same. Once enrolled, he did well enough — he took second place in a school contest for a dish based on the chicken in cashew sauce that his dad used to prepare in a wood-fired oven — but it hardly felt like fate.

The eureka moment would come later. After completing apprenticeships in France, Spain and the U.S., Redzepi was approached by Danish television chef Claus Meyer. About to open a restaurant in an old whaling warehouse, Meyer planned to serve truly Danish food, banning the foie gras and truffles — the imported French ingredients, in other words — that passed for haute cuisine in Denmark. And although Redzepi was cooking at a Copenhagen restaurant whose menu wouldn’t seem out of place in Paris, Meyer saw something in Redzepi that convinced him he was the man for the job. “René had the most humble and curious attitude,” recalls Meyer. “He was ready to give up his past ideas and education and go into new territory without any prejudices.”

As a showplace for their new Nordic cuisine, Noma served only foods produced within the region. Initially, Redzepi focused on finding local substitutes — vinegar for citrus; musk ox for beef — for the pillars of French cuisine. “We would make crème brûlée with good Danish cream and wild Danish berries,” he recalls. “But it was still crème brûlée.” It wasn’t until a burly forager showed up at Noma’s back door with a handful of wild plants in 2004 that Redzepi’s sense of possibilities expanded. The chef began leading his cooks on foraging trips. And as seaweed and birch sap made their way onto Noma’s menu, Redzepi’s philosophy became more refined. “I wanted to learn how to integrate these ingredients so that we were cooking a part of our culture,” he says. “I wanted you to taste the soil.”

These days, tasting the soil at Noma can be a near literal experience: dinner often starts with a flowerpot stuffed with tiny carrots and radishes “growing” in a stratum of charred ground hazelnuts. But most of Redzepi’s other dishes convey that sense of terroir more metaphorically. As hay-smoked quail eggs give way to sweet, translucent laminates of dried scallop, the flavors — earthy, acidic, briny — seem a map to a marvelous new world. For those accustomed to the vocabulary of European and American fine dining, a first meal at Noma is a revelation. “All the flavors were so new and exciting,” recalls Barcelona chef Jordi Artal. “I called my sister from the dining room and said, ‘You have got to come here right away.’ “

Provoking that excitement is exactly what drives Redzepi. “For so long, we Danes didn’t have a cuisine,” he says. “We’re Protestants, so food was just about sustenance, never pleasure. You’d eat your meat and potatoes in silence and go back to work.” The extent to which he’s succeeded in enlivening Danish culture is evident all over Copenhagen, with its burgeoning cadres of exciting young chefs. “When he started, we were all thinking, Is there really anything to eat here?” says Culture Minister Uffe Elbaek. “But Ren has helped elevate food to the same level as fashion, and it’s affected our whole identity. He’s telling a new story about what it means to be Danish.”

It’s not only Danes who have felt the Redzepi effect. Foraging is one of the biggest restaurant trends these days. More broadly, Redzepi has forged a path for chefs who want to innovate without necessarily indulging in the technological wizardry of molecular gastronomy. By trying to convey a sense of place in their cooking, chefs from Sweden to South Carolina have found that the limitations of geography can be a spur to creativity.

All this has been thrilling for Redzepi but stressful. Having reached the top in just a few years, he is under tremendous pressure to stay there, which is partly why he spends so much time creating new dishes. Two members of his staff devote themselves solely to developing recipes in Noma’s sleek test kitchen, and anchored on a renovated boat just outside the restaurant is the Nordic Food Lab, where research director Lars Williams experiments with new products under Redzepi’s supervision. One recent afternoon, Williams opened a jar of fermenting yellow peas — which he has inoculated with local microbes to create a Nordic miso — for Redzepi to taste. “We’ve gotten to the point where we’ve discovered most of the products in the woods and sea that we can use,” the chef said, nodding his approval to Williams. “There aren’t going to be that many new discoveries. So we have to come up with new ways of using the things we have.”

He learned the habit of constant innovation from his apprenticeship at Adrià’s El Bulli, and he maintains a friendly relationship with his former mentor. But all the world loves an oedipal story, and many in the food media have tried to cast Redzepi’s rise as a tale of the nature-loving, terroir-based son overthrowing the hydrocolloid-obsessed, mad-scientist father. Certainly the Spanish press, which not long ago was busy crowing about its usurpation of French cuisine, has reacted with skepticism and even outright hostility to the age of new Nordic. Recently, José Carlos Capel, chief restaurant critic for the newspaper El País, wrote a column in which he referred to Redzepi’s insistence on serving only regional products as “demagoguery” and asked, “Is Redzepi leading the extreme right of European cuisine, something akin to a gastronomic Tea Party?”

Capel took his cues from a Danish newspaper, Politiken, that had published its own scathing critique in 2011. Graduate student Ulla Holm charged Redzepi and Meyer with nothing short of culinary fascism, observing, “It is hardly coincidental that, when last I visited Noma, the waiters were dressed in brown shirts.” In conversation, Holm says she’s eaten at Noma several times and enjoys the food. But, she adds, “there are some disturbing similarities between fascist ideology and the new Nordic cuisine. There’s an emphasis on elements that have remained uncontaminated by outsiders. There’s an obsession with purity.”

For the record, Redzepi notes that he has nothing against olive oil and cooks with it at home. If he doesn’t use it at Noma, it’s not, he says, because “we’re trying to be a proud nation and exclude everyone else. It’s because we’re trying to use the restaurant to develop a cuisine where one didn’t exist. If I lived in Italy and were working only with local products, no one would think anything of it.”

Still, the jabs upset him. This is the flip side of all those reservation requests and invitations to speak at venues all over the world: being positioned at No. 1 also makes him the No. 1 target. In a world still uncomfortable with its fetishization of chefs, he is learning that he will be criticized for his ambition and for doing anything that isn’t “just” cooking.

So he is proceeding cautiously. Thus far he has turned down the inevitable offers to host television shows and open more restaurants. His efforts at influencing a broader public have been confined to writing a couple of op-eds in foreign newspapers and organizing an event called MAD Foodcamp (mad means food in Danish) that brings together chefs, scientists and policymakers to talk about the future of food. The attention is still new enough that he mostly enjoys it, but he knows it won’t be long before the culinary world demands its next big thing. “I think of fame as a loan,” he says. “Don’t get attached to it, because you have to give it back.”

He confesses to not having a plan — or even a role model — for what he’d like to be doing when he’s 40 or 50. So he focuses on the thing that brings him the most satisfaction. Whether scrambling over a hillside in search of wild ginger at a recent chefs’ gathering in Japan or trying to create the perfect blood sausage late at night in his test kitchen, he is visibly happiest when deepening the connection between nature, culture and the plate. Which is why, not incidentally, he is so pleased by those ants. “They have a completely exotic flavor, very floral,” he says, pausing to pop one into his mouth. “You’ll see. One day every fine-dining restaurant will be serving them.”