Hungry
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“What’s next?” Redzepi asked. Next was a young cook from Ireland; she had devised a twist on Irish coffee, with a whiskey-spritzed crème anglaise and an edible soil that tasted like your morning brew. “Have you done this before?” he asked. She was a Saturday Night Projects initiate. “You’ve never done this before? This is the first time you’ve ever created a dish? Wow. That’s pretty impressive.” Redzepi looked to the crowd as they dug in with their spoons. “Have you ever tasted this before? No. That’s how I feel, too. I can’t say that I’ve ever had this flavor in my mouth before. And that’s always puzzling.” He looked back at the cook. He had concerns about the temperature and the texture. “It’s too cold,” he said. “Like, cold. Like, hurt-your-teeth cold.” I couldn’t tell whether Redzepi actually liked the dish; nevertheless he found a way to leave its creator with a frisson of achievement. “You today have taught us something new about flavor,” he told her. “You have a gift that’s very rare.”
When the Saturday Night Projects ended, it seemed as though no one in the kitchen was tired anymore—including me. This came as a surprise. The task of piling extra work on top of a week’s worth of work appeared, paradoxically, to energize the room. It may have been more punishing in the early days of Noma, when Saturday Night Projects was not some isolated exercise. “We used to do this every night,” Redzepi said. “Every night. And every person.” As he recalled in Journal, his diary-like 2013 book recounting a year in the life of Noma:
Seven or eight years ago, on a cold winter day, I told the entire kitchen staff, much to their disbelief, that every night after service each person had to prepare something to share. It could be something simple, not necessarily a complete dish; even a better way of peeling carrots could be enough. At the time I was trying to create a team of bright chefs who were fully present and adept, but what I had for the most part were robots: human machines who’d been trained to follow a recipe as though it were some sort of absolute truth, forgetting the impulses and reactions that are necessary when working with something that’s alive. After all, it’s the chef cooking the food who makes the magic, not the recipe; a drop of acidity here or there, even when not called for in the recipe, can make all the difference….Recipes should be strong guidelines, not fixed scripture.
Even when Saturday Night Projects was over, the week’s work wasn’t. “Let’s do what we do, which is to clean up,” Redzepi barked. “And then go change and you guys can have your beers.” Music—mostly hip-hop and heavy metal—would flood the room and the cooks would apply themselves to soaping and scrubbing every last millimeter of the kitchen.
Giusti told me that Saturday Night Projects seemed, on the surface, like a natural source of anxiety, especially for those participants who spent a full week fretting over it. “It’s always super-stressful,” he said. “When they sauce the plates their hands are shaking.” But its purpose was to restore the troops, not to drain or dispirit them. “We try to keep it as constructive as possible,” he said. “It’s not a very good exercise if people are afraid. If it’s a negative experience, it’s a disaster.” Rarely did any of the Saturday Night Projects experiments end up as part of the Noma repertoire. (That would be sort of like the equivalent of a homemade iPhone video winning a top prize at the Sundance Film Festival.) But the exercise helped the cooks understand more about themselves and their chosen profession. And from a leadership perspective, it helped Redzepi learn more about who was working for him—their strengths, their weaknesses.
“Are you going to explain to us what’s happening?” he asked a taciturn Finnish cook once at Saturday Night Projects. The dish that the Finn presented involved a fermented potato bread topped with tender tongue that had simmered for something like fifty-five hours. “That’s a long time,” Redzepi said. He dug in. “Taste this, guys. This is fucking amazing. How many of you love very tender tongue? Let’s say you had this dish at a restaurant. Would you be happy? That’s really fucking good. To me you could even just serve this bread like this and pour a sauce over it. It’s amazing. I don’t need those chestnuts. Four slices of bland chestnuts. What was the point of that? Why do you put something on that’s not good? Just fuck it. Leave it off.” The fullness of Redzepi’s praise managed to vaporize any residual sting regarding those chestnuts. Fuck it. Leave it off. Yes, Chef.
After my meal without Grant Gold, I lingered in the Noma kitchen for a while, learning about the team’s most recent experiments with fermentation and gearing up to witness Saturday Night Projects for the first time. I would come to learn that there was always a strange sense of momentousness in the Noma kitchen. Everything seemed to matter. If a hungover cook at Noma ever felt like phoning it in some afternoon, he or she would have to be crafty about disguising his or her lethargy. There was always news as well. The news during that visit was that Rosio Sánchez, Noma’s pastry chef and a crucial member of the R&D pod, would soon be parting ways with Noma so that she could open a taco stand in Copenhagen. Who would replace her? I asked a few times and no one would tell me. So I decided to hazard a guess. My guess was correct, as Giusti confirmed to me with a nod: Noma was about to bring in a new pastry chef, an American, who had grown up in the unlikely training ground of the Bronx.
Also known as the Republic of North Macedonia, not to be confused with the region of Greece also called Macedonia
A pot of beans, simmering on a stove.
The recipe is simple. Soak the beans overnight to tenderize them. Heat them in chicken broth and just leave them there on a low flame for a couple of hours. You should have about four times more broth than beans. Throw in a few peeled cloves of garlic. Some sweet tomatoes. “So here comes the secret part,” as Nadine Levy Redzepi can tell you. About twenty minutes before the beans are finished, drop in three bags of chamomile tea. Yes, you’re infusing the beans with the flavor of dried flowers. Leave the tea bags there for five minutes but don’t let them disintegrate. You don’t want herbal flotsam swilling around.
Season the beans with salt, ladle them into a bowl, crown them with fresh chopped herbs and a lizard’s tail of red chili oil. Oh—and don’t forget to fish out the tomato skins, at least if you happen to be making this dish for René Redzepi. Or maybe you take the extra step, in advance, of cooking the tomatoes way down. “You have to simmer the tomato sauce for a day to liquefy the skins,” he’d advise you. “When I was a child, my father would do that. My mother wouldn’t. For some reason the skins gross me out as a texture in a sauce.”
A pot of beans simmering on a stove: as the years passed, Redzepi would find himself hungering for this, both as sustenance and as memory. Redzepi’s father had eaten this dish almost every day. It had been his ritual, his consistent repast. A pot of beans. Redzepi didn’t serve anything like it at Noma, but he ate it at home, this echo of life back in Macedonia—peppers and herbs and olive oil, tomatoes and garlic and the floral scent of a summer field, far away from the liver paste and pickled fish of Denmark. Redzepi would find himself returning to this dish more often as his father’s body raged with cancer.
All the press about the New Nordic movement obscured a central fact: Redzepi’s connection to anything Nordic was tenuous at best. He portrayed himself as more of an interloper than a native, and even though his mother came from Denmark’s Protestant majority, Redzepi poked fun at Protestants any chance he got, scornful of their squeamishness, their tame palates, their historical compulsion to crush and pave over wildness. His first real gambit as a cook had arisen from his memories of Macedonia. Redzepi, at fifteen, had been more or less nudged out of high school by teachers who saw him as a dunce, and he stumbled into culinary training mostly because a friend of his was enrolling in cooking school and Redzepi figured he’d go along. The first dish he cooked there? A plate of spicy chicken and rice, with a cashew sauce, that happened to be his father’s specialty from back home. After cooking school, during the decade between 1993 and 2003 (when he opened Noma), Redzepi’s a
ccidental career had become suffused with ambition. He had gathered insights along the way, working and watching in the kitchens of Le Jardin des Sens in France, El Bulli in Spain, The French Laundry in California, and Kong Hans Kælder in Copenhagen. In each place he came across as a hungry student. Whether the cuisine being served was traditional or experimental, he wanted to know everything about how it was put together. It was as though he needed to make up for lost time. In his youth he had had no exposure to deconstructed fare like that being served at chef Ferran Adrià’s paradigm-shifting, smoke-foamed El Bulli. After one dinner there, Redzepi made a beeline for the kitchen and begged for a job.
By now, years later, people in the press couldn’t help but focus on the “Nordic” part of the New Nordic formulation, but that word was something of a red herring, so to speak. The important word was “new.” The menu at Noma represented an attempt to refashion the very concept of Scandinavian cuisine, and what that meant had as much (if not more) to do with Macedonia than with the realm of smørrebrød and flødeboller. Redzepi’s approach was a way of hitting the reset button and asking, What if we were to see this land with new eyes? What if we were to revise it, reconsider it? What if the framework wasn’t the Protestant civilization that’d been laid down like a frigid veneer but the indigenous riches that had existed before that—and that still existed all over the place, if anyone took the time to notice them? That way of thinking could be traced back to childhood idylls that Redzepi and his twin brother, Kenneth, had spent in Macedonia, holidays that had embedded in him the same things he would later seek out and bring to the table in Japan and Mexico and Australia: wild nature and warm sunshine.
“For so long, many chefs in this part of the world have regarded ingredients from southern Europe as superior,” Redzepi once wrote in his Journal. “Now we realize that our own diverse produce has value. We’ve come to learn that the difference isn’t in the quality of the produce, but the cultural history of appreciating cuisine, something I call the Babette’s Feast Syndrome. Babette’s Feast is a lovely story where a female French master chef escapes war and finds herself deep in the Protestant north of Denmark. Here she encounters a people who only experience life through the written word of the Bible, who block out ungodly pleasures such as delicious food. What the fuck is a godly pleasure anyway? The bounties of the seasons and welcoming delicious flavours should be a part of your life, a part of your culture.”
In Macedonia, that bounty was ever-present, at least in Redzepi’s memory. “I never saw it as anything valuable that would shape the future me,” he told me, “but it really does.” When he talked about Yugoslavia in the years preceding the bloodshed of the Balkan Wars, it sounded like Eden—no locks on the doors, kids freely darting around in the fields, fresh vegetables eaten moments after they had been harvested. His father, a man of Albanian ancestry, had grown up among farmers, around animals. You’d ride a horse to get somewhere. You’d eat dinner and then your whole family would clear space in the dining room and lay blankets on the floor to sleep. If you got thirsty, you had a drink made with rosewater. You went off looking for chestnuts when they were in season. There was no refrigeration in the house and everything was cooked over an open fire. Young René churned butter and milked cows. From this time in his life, the long slow summer weeks that he spent in Macedonia, Redzepi would internalize his passion for foraging, and he would also take home his father’s recipe for beans simmered with tomatoes and garlic.
“Balkan dog”—that’s what people would call Redzepi back in Denmark. For those who happen to notice that his kitchen at Noma was staffed with and powered by immigrants, it’s useful to remember that Redzepi always viewed himself as one. He was drawn to those cooks who seemed to come from a place outside of the establishment. He knew how that felt. He knew what it was like trying to find an apartment and getting the cold shoulder because of your foreign-sounding name. When he was eleven years old, Redzepi worked as a paperboy, delivering the news on five different routes around the city. “This was about helping my mother and father pay the rent, and also about sending money back to our family in Macedonia,” he would tell the Wall Street Journal. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America who crossed the border into the United States, looking for low-wage jobs so that they could wire cash back to their struggling families—he knew about that. And these were the things he was reminded of when his wife, a woman with a Jewish surname who had been born to street musicians in Portugal, cooked a pot of beans the way his father, a Muslim from Macedonia, used to do it. Beans were always a cheap source of protein. Meat was expensive. Meat was a luxury.
All of which is to say that the chief architect of the New Nordic movement had a complicated relationship with what would stereotypically be seen as Nordic. When he was profiled in The New Yorker by Jane Kramer, she brought this up with the chef. “When I told Redzepi about a blog I’d read, calling him a Nordic supremacist, he laughed and said, ‘Look at my family. My father’s a Muslim immigrant. My wife, Nadine, is Jewish. She was born in Portugal and has family in France and England. She studied languages. If the supremacists took over, we’d be out of here.’ ”
Imagine the Bronx in the 1980s. Imagine the sidewalks. Imagine the sneakers. Imagine the music. In the Bronx at the red dawn of the Reagan years you’ve got the genesis of a way of being—a way of expressing oneself—that will, within a few years, gather momentum and become ubiquitous around the world: hip-hop. Block parties in the South Bronx have led to new milestones in the ongoing story of black excellence. Microphones and turntables—songs derailed and deconstructed to allow for the free flow of message. DJs and MCs—everybody has something to say and mouths are open, ears are open, it’s time to say it.
Malcolm Livingston II was born in the Bronx on August 13, 1986. It’s all too easy for people who don’t know the Bronx to dismiss Livingston’s place of birth as a “war zone,” as the usual media cliché would have it. Livingston will always know otherwise. To him and his friends, the Bronx hums with cultural vitality—the energy of family and community, brotherhood and beats.
That said, for a kid with a talent for identifying and transmuting flavor, it is an unusual place to grow up. Fine dining doesn’t prevail here in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood, one of the various areas that formed him. Fast food dominates. Choices usually come down to which corporate franchise you want to patronize on any given day—Popeyes or KFC, Burger King or McDonald’s or White Castle. Sure, Jamaican beef patties and Dominican plantains and Guyanese roti scent the doorways on certain blocks, but in comparison to the innovation and sheer plenitude of culinary options a subway ride away in Manhattan, the boogie-down borough is, well, kind of a wasteland. Sometimes you couldn’t even find fresh fruit in the bodegas. Here you have Malcolm Livingston’s dilemma—and, paradoxically, the source of his drive. He’s not an MC, but he’s gifted nonetheless. Livingston was born in the Bronx with a genius-level palate.
“It’s really hard to describe how I come up with dishes,” Livingston says. “I know what tastes good.” He is getting ready to move to Copenhagen to become the new pastry chef at Noma, and he’s prepared for whatever thought experiment Redzepi might throw his way. “If he said ‘Make a dessert out of fish bones,’ that might be a little hard. You’re not going to make an ice cream out of it. If he says ‘Do something with onion,’ onions are so sweet. Apples and onion. Apples and shallots. Apples and shallots and beer. I could go on for days with just flavors. All of that came from working at wd-50. I’ve got to give credit to Wylie. I’ll never think of food the same way after working with him.” Wylie is Wylie Dufresne. Before getting the job offer from Noma, Livingston spent some time as the pastry chef at Dufresne’s wd-50 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where cooking felt a lot like chemistry class at an especially psychedelic college. “You ever heard of volatile compounds?” Livingston says. At some point he got a book about volatile compounds from the New York University department of f
ood science—a book that helps explain why, say, honeydew melon and jasmine and cucumber might play well together. “That’s how I’m able to break down unusual flavor combinations,” he says. “That’s kind of how I break down food.”
Another way to think about it: sampling. Dropping one track into the middle of another track, making sure they’re in the same key, hearing them merge. Bringing the innovations of the Bronx to the arena of world cuisine. “I correlate hip-hop to cooking,” Livingston says. “You gotta know how to mix, chop, and make a beat.” He can freestyle and figure out what to pair with anything. Connections and cross-pollinations—he could do this in his head, in the air, without even a spoon or a stovetop. But he was doing that long before he owned a book about volatile compounds. It began—his awareness of it—years ago, when he was still a kid.
Imagine a kitchen in an apartment high enough to give him views of the surrounding blocks. That’s where Livingston had the famous banana pudding—in the home of his octogenarian aunt, Alice Pulley, a churchgoing lady with roots in Virginia. She’d grown up on a farm with peanuts, tobacco, cotton, cucumbers, watermelon, apples, and peaches, and when she moved to New York in the 1950s, she brought that knowledge—that connection with fresh produce—to her cubicle of a kitchen.
“Anything you see in a garden, we had it,” she’ll tell you. Outside there may have been crack vials scattered around in the parking lot, remnants of the worst part of the crisis a few years earlier, but up here in Aunt Alice’s apartment young Malcolm and his crew found an array of cakes and pies that would rival a pâtisserie in Paris. “They would come over. ‘Auntie, where are the goodies?’ ” she recalls. “Whatever they asked for, I would try to fix it for ’em.” For a kid with a future as an international pastry chef, studying at Alice’s elbow was as good as a master class at the Cordon Bleu.