“The prevailing sentiment in Europe right now has been to avoid traveling to the U.S., but I don’t think we should do that,” Rene Redzepi tells my table of three Americans, two Germans, and one Mexican at Noma, right before dropping perhaps the biggest restaurant scoop of the century.
We were all practically in tears after being personally greeted by all the cooks in the kitchen and disarmed emotionally after walking down the restaurant’s scenic pathway flanked by neon-colored wildflowers, a functioning apiary, and the salty breezes from the Øresund strait that surrounds the artificial island where Noma’s current “culinary village” sits.
The entire scene is reminiscent of a deleted scene from “Midsommar,” particularly the restaurant’s front door: a slanted wooden structure with a sleek black frame that cuts a sharp silhouette against the overcast sky amid the eerie, pastoral beauty of the flower-covered facade and a couple of white stones splatter-painted an indigo blue. The entire first portion of the Noma experience, before the meal even begins, has a ritualistic, pagan vibe. Having an unsettling blend of nature and cultish mystery, as if the restaurant were a hidden sanctuary awaiting a strange, floral ceremony.