Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  “I remember that pound cake—so moist, but so dense!” Livingston says. “Eating her food for the first time—it wasn’t processed food. My palate was developing really early. You see, it all started here.” The conversation with Aunt Alice has never really stopped. They’re still talking about flavor, still figuring out what tastes good together. Take sweet potato pie. It’s perfect. But can it become something even better than perfect?

  “I don’t want to change the flavors of sweet potato pie, because there’s nothing wrong with it,” Livingston muses. That said, what if you were to pair it with tamarind?

  “How about throw some corn flakes in there…,” Aunt Alice chimes in.

  “That’s a dessert right there,” Livingston says. “Corn flakes, sweet potato, and tamarind.” Autobiographical, too, simultaneously touching on the Caribbean, the American South, and a bodega in the Bronx.

  Without his family’s passion for food, Livingston might never have found his way into some of the top kitchens in New York. His mother came from Barbados and had that connection to “fresh fruits, island fruits.” At home there was chicken with jerk spices and, during the holidays, the Caribbean thirst quencher called sorrel. (Anise, grapefruit, hibiscus, Campari—years later, Livingston would figure out how to tweak sorrel, and tap into those volatile compounds, in coming up with a dessert that he made at wd-50.) His mother would roast a chicken, give it a good sear, then pair it with coconut rice and peas. “She’ll do this coleslaw—man, I’m telling you,” he remembers. “Plantains—we always had plantains.” Meanwhile his father was a raw vegan. This was a family who took food seriously, so how could Malcolm Livingston II do anything less?

  There were blind spots, of course. “I didn’t grow up eating foie gras and sturgeon caviar,” he remembers. “We didn’t go out to eat a lot, and if we did, we didn’t get dessert. When I went to France I had a strawberry and I thought it was fake. I thought they had sprayed something on it.” Imagine it’s four in the morning and you’ve got to get to the kitchen at Per Se, Thomas Keller’s stately sanctuary in the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle in Manhattan. You’ve got to rush, you’ve got to switch from the Bx12 bus to the D train, and the D train takes forever. Imagine how it feels when your talent for flavor—your innate understanding of volatile compounds—helps to open the door to Le Cirque and Per Se and eventually wd-50. Well, at wd-50, Livingston had sort of slipped in the door on his own. On Sundays, his days off uptown, he would head downtown to hover and observe as wd-50’s pastry visionaries (including Rosio Sánchez, his future predecessor at Noma) gave him lessons in the practice of mind expansion through sugar. He interned there and, as he puts it, “I stayed and kind of never left.”

  Do you want to move to Copenhagen and become the pastry chef at Noma? Imagine growing up in different neighborhoods of the Bronx and working your way to such an opportunity. The kitchen at Noma was full of stars that Redzepi had somehow identified around the world. Now it would be Livingston’s time to imagine—to come up with flavor combinations involving ingredients that he has never heard of, let alone tasted. “Skyr—I’ve never had skyr,” he says. “I’m really excited about the insects. All the different mushrooms. The herbs. The flowers. I’ve got to see what type of produce is out there. Maybe there is some banana flavoring in insects. Maybe there is some banana flavoring in herbs, in flowers. It just spurs so much creativity. You know what I would not want to make a dessert out of? Beef.” But then he rethinks that. Maybe it would work after all. You can almost see the volatile compounds shifting positions in his mind. “I could do a bone marrow ice cream. Bone marrow cake. Bone marrow caramels. Bone marrow and tofu.”

  On his right hand Livingston has, in tattoo form, words from a famous utterance by another Malcolm: “By Any Means.” (On his left hand: “Necessary.”) On his ring finger the tattoo carries a chunk of his own surname: “Living.” He’s not going to lie—Copenhagen seems pretty far away, especially now that Livingston and his wife, Meeka Kameoka, are thinking about starting a family. “I’ve heard it gets really depressing—the fall weather. I’ve heard it gets really dark. I’m going to try to bring that New York style to Copenhagen—bring the Bronx to Copenhagen,” he says. “My whole family is religious. But I do believe in a higher power. I’m not really religious, but I felt like God is sending me here for a reason. It was ordained. It was supposed to happen.”

  “Now where you going?” Aunt Alice asks him, as he continues gazing out the window of her apartment, studying the horizon.

  “I’m going to Copenhagen, in Denmark,” he tells her. “I’m going to this restaurant called Noma. Which is basically the best restaurant in the world.”

  “Wow,” she says. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna do good.”

  what

  destruction am I

  blessed by?

  —A. R. AMMONS, “Moment”

  “Welcome to the new Noma,” Redzepi tells me.

  The place is a pit. We’re on the edge of Christiania, the lawless, carless precinct of Copenhagen known for its cheap hash. Thanks to a government edict in 1973, Christiania exists as a social experiment wedged into the middle of the city, a haven for slackers and squatters—locals call them the slumstormerene. Technically speaking, Redzepi has taken me to a patch of land that does not belong to Christiania, but the border is mere yards away, and from the looks of the scene in the late summer of 2015, this is where the collective wastebasket of Christiania tends to tip over and spill out.

  The ground is clotted with broken bottles and dank slabs of asphalt. There is a small lake, and beyond it, an outline of smokestacks that call to mind a Pink Floyd album cover or Pittsburgh in February. Dominating the plot of land is a long empty warehouse, the sort of habitation in which you might imagine characters from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road roasting a suspicious dinner over a campfire amid the toxic vapor trails of a global apocalypse. Everything about the place says “last gasp” instead of “new dawn.” Graffiti has been expectorated on every square inch of visible surface area. Local skate punks are taking their desultory turns with a plywood ramp in the middle of the bunker. We listen to the wheels of their skateboards clomping up and down on their wobbly boards until the kids are finally shooed away like feral dogs. “People smoke a lot of weed here,” he says. “People have raves here, too.”

  So, wait, what’s going on?

  Redzepi has brought me here, to this lump of sketchy real estate, to tell me that he has a plan. It’s the same plan that he alluded to when we were hanging out in Mexico. It’s a big plan, in true Redzepi fashion, and you might say it’s an insane plan. He wants to close Noma, at least the Noma many have come to know and love—to dismantle the most influential restaurant of his time—and move it here, to the visual equivalent of an abandoned waste facility in Chernobyl. “What you have to imagine is that this will be a farm in the city,” he says. “This here. What you’re standing in, right here, will be the future greenhouse. There will be one big herb garden going all the way down. We’ll build a raft and we’ll put a huge field on the raft. When this came up, it was, like, perfect. The perfect scenario.” Maybe they’ll have livestock. Maybe there will be chickens nibbling and clucking around the property.

  By now it has sunk into my head that René Redzepi is a man capable of bringing impossible schemes to fruition, but this seems nuts. Also, why? Why undo everything that has taken years to build, and why undertake it in the midst of a planned Noma pop-up about ten thousand miles away in Sydney, Australia? As he stands on the grim tarpaper roof of the bunker and surveys the scraggly landscape, I feel a mix of awe and pity. What we are looking at, he tells me, is a farm. I see a befouled parking lot next to the sort of swamp you see along the New Jersey Turnpike. Redzepi sees a farm. If Noma aspires to the heights of locavore gastronomy, it will have to begin controlling production—growing its own vegetables. He envisions the glass-strewn, tar-warted acreag
e being replaced, over time, by rich and loamy soil. He imagines pontoons—actual rafts, as he says—extending outward across the surface of the lake and acting as waterborne organic gardens. Redzepi is Moses and this blasted death strip before my eyes will, by his hand, blossom into a New Nordic land of milk and honey.

  Or maybe he’s the Klaus Kinski character in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, possessed by a mad dream of erecting an opera house in the humid, buggy tangle of a South American jungle. With Redzepi, you never can tell.

  But the question that will gnaw at me for a while is, again: Why does he have to do this? Yes, we occupy a time in history in which themes of disruption and reinvention are revered. We live in a period that makes the pace of instant gratification look slow. You can make a splash, these days, and be forgotten six months later—the culture, horse-whipped by social media, loses interest if you don’t keep blowing up the story. All of that said, couldn’t the guy just coast for a while? Redzepi had raised Noma from obscurity through years of obsessive labor. Many times, while foraging, he had felt his throat going scratchy because he had plucked a toxic leaf that was not meant to be ingested. He had weathered nights when the dining room was nearly empty, had pushed his team through tortured passages of innovation, and had broken through to the moment where Noma was recognized as the peak of international cooking. One night he glimpsed at the waiting list and saw ten thousand names on it— ten thousand people on deck for dinner. Still, he had almost lost it all in 2013, when the norovirus outbreak among Noma’s customers had threatened to detonate the status he had worked so hard to shore up. Why not just stand still for a year or two, breathing in the fresh air and savoring the landscape?

  On the way over to the future location, Redzepi had provided some reasons. Everyone in Copenhagen rides a bicycle. Go for a stroll in the city and it is not uncommon to watch hundreds of two-wheelers as they spin through the city en masse—many of the riders so beautiful that, here, a Viggo Mortensen or an Alicia Vikander would probably just blend in with the crowd. Even babies are ferried around in this way, usually in square wooden boxes that are affixed to the front of the bikes like grocery baskets, and it is into one of these mobile tubs that Redzepi has placed me for my tour of the city. I scrunch my way into the box and he chauffeurs me around town as if I am a street urchin. Along the way he tells me about how everything is changing. A bridge is being built from Nyhavn—the most tourist-Instagrammed strip of the harbor—to the quiet pocket of Christianshavn where Noma has bloomed in relative isolation for years. The foot traffic over that bridge will stir up the tranquil currents of the Noma oxbow. Meanwhile now when he walks into the Noma kitchen all he sees are limitations. The space was never meant to house an international beacon of cuisine, let alone the headquarters of a revolution, and the Noma team has outgrown it.

  But the bridge is an ancillary concern. What is really going on with Redzepi has to do with the way he’s wired. I can see it in his eyes. For some people, the need to keep moving and changing is so all-encompassing that it becomes an itch that can’t be scratched away. Merely having a great restaurant isn’t enough. He needs Noma to be even better than it has been—“Even though it’s been successful, even though it’s had media attention and all that, we’re just finding our way,” he tells me—but more than that, he needs to leave something behind. While Redzepi and I stand on the perimeter of the ragged lot, he picks up a pebble and uses it to scribble the number 12 in the dirt. Then he puts a zero in front of the 12. I can’t figure out what this means at first. He’s referring to the number of years Noma has been open, but he’s employing it as a way of seeing. “It’s hard to believe that twelve years ago”—when Noma opened—“there was no Twitter. No Facebook. No Instagram. Who knows what happens in twenty years? In thirty years?” He doesn’t think of a twelve-year-old restaurant as an older establishment. He thinks of it as a young restaurant, its brain and limbs still developing. Pretend you’re looking at an odometer or a digital scale. You have to add the zero in order to let yourself think in terms of centuries instead of decades. “I feel that we are infants in our life span,” he says. “If you put a zero in front, you foster that kind of long-term thinking. We should make decisions that make this evolution last for 912 years.”

  We could theorize as to why the son of a Macedonian Muslim immigrant—a man whose father senses the glare of discrimination whenever he boards a city bus—would want to leave a millennium-long imprint on a metropolis dominated by the blond descendants of Vikings. Right along the side of the bunker that will house Noma 2.0 there runs a dense mound of soil crowned with vegetation. This is a remnant of an ancient fortress “set up to protect Denmark from invaders,” Redzepi tells me, and the symbolism is hard to resist. It may’ve taken centuries, but one of those “invaders” has done an end run around the walls and the moats, giving this Scandinavian stronghold a dose of the innovation that only an outsider can deliver.

  He knows he could coast. But he’s allergic to coasting. “I could take it easy at Noma,” he says. “Do another menu so there’s a little more choice. That would relax a lot of people.” Noma would eventually fade into the past, become a legend in the world of food, like El Bulli or Lutèce. Or he can aim for something more ineffable and impossible—a restaurant that achieves a sort of cultural permanence. “For that you need to be daring,” he says. “All the time. It really, really, really, really makes me nervous. I’m not afraid. But it does make me nervous. I think the last six months of the old Noma will be very popular reservations.”

  And after that? Everyone jumps off a cliff. First Noma will decamp to Sydney, Australia, for a pop-up using indigenous ingredients, then the old Noma will careen toward its finale, and then…tabula rasa. How often does anyone get to start over?

  “We’re not looking to change the very spirit of who we are,” Redzepi says. “We’re amplifying it. From day one we’re not going to be perfect. It’s probably not going to be as good as the old Noma was at the end. But give it time and we will be better. Much, much better. An even better restaurant. A more profound experience. An even deeper understanding of ingredients.” Broken down into three distinct seasons (seafood in the winter and early spring, the plant kingdom in the summer, wild game in the fall), the Noma menu that Redzepi is dreaming about won’t repeat a single dish or idea from the previous playbook. He’s been thinking about time—he’s inspired by the Long Now Foundation, the San Francisco–based institution devoted to shifting human thinking so that people consider, and plan for, the farther-out ripples produced by a pebble dropped into a pond. He wants more than what’s merely immediate. “Of course we could just continue as is,” he says. “Just stay put and do what we do there. But I genuinely think we won’t progress.” Maybe his children will inherit Noma. Maybe it will flourish under his great-grandchildren. Redzepi is playing a long game.

  “It’s going to be a complex of innovation and exploration,” he tells me as he surveys his pockmarked little wasteland. And the way he says it, you believe him—hell, you want to grab a shovel and start digging. “It makes sense to do it here. It makes sense to have your own farm, as a restaurant of this caliber.” On the surface it makes no sense, of course, but Redzepi doesn’t see what you see. He looks at a field of flowers and weeds or a dune tufted up with beach grass and he sees the produce aisle at your local supermarket—an edible display. It’s the same here. He envisions a world-class restaurant where you see a ruin. “As long as I can remember, it has been a derelict building,” he says. “But imagine that this, here, is the kitchen.” And imagine this, he says—stop talking, close your eyes, and imagine the wildlife that surrounds you, hiding in plain sight. “Just be quiet,” he says. “You’re in the fucking city, my friend.” Ducks quack. Birds tweet. Insects hum. Leaves rustle. And he says, “It’s like a little sacred haven.”

  Redzepi goes around back, by the ancient mound, and climbs up onto the tarpaper roof of the bunker. He walks up to the very
edge of the roof. For a moment I worry that the greatest chef in the world is going to go tumbling over the side, onto the pavement. “That’s how it feels,” he says. “You’re right on the edge, looking down. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks this is a stupid thing.” In Zen Buddhism, teachers talk about the wisdom of seeing the world, when you can, from the perspective of a “beginner’s mind.” Even if you’ve seen it countless times before, you hit reset and see it anew. Up there on the roof, Redzepi is trying to see the future through just such a lens—at least until his impatience gets the better of him.

  “Let’s walk,” he finally says to me. “I can’t stand still like this.”

  To get used to this life you have to get used to airports. Instagram overflows with images of the destinations that have been reached—the hotel beds as inviting as layer cakes, the mountain vistas, the cobblestoned alleyways—but to savor these delights you must pass through a series of terminals. How you feel about airports, and airplanes, might determine how suited you are to such an existence. Do you like to remove your shoes and your laptop after inching through the serpentine spirit-killer that is the security line? Do you like trying to figure out where to place your carry-on bag when you need to use the airport restroom but the floor is speckled with schmutz of dubious provenance and you can’t find a hook because all the hooks seem to have been snapped off? Do you like to occupy a seat the size of a birdcage for, say, eleven hours at a stretch? These are minor inconveniences in the sweeping tragedy that is life on earth, I know. They accumulate in the mind, though, and they come to counteract the intoxicant rush of getting away.

  And travel is an intoxicant, particularly for those of us who loathe the sedimentary layers of undone to-dos that pile up at home like domestic fossils. Insure the jewelry. Call the plumber. Shred the documents. Send the check. Reschedule the orthodontist. Install the virus scanner. Investigate the possibility of identity theft. Call the cable company about the weird overcharges. Seek out marriage counseling. Find the right divorce mediator. Solve custody issues. Split up the 401(k). Join a gym. Or, better yet, don’t. Postpone it—all of it. Get on a plane and wake up somewhere else. Italy. South Korea. Portugal. Patagonia. Newfoundland. New Orleans. An editor proposes an idea and you say yes without preemptively untangling the logistics—hell, the logistics will untangle themselves, just like the marriage and the money. The lure of travel will take you far away from the realm of clogged toilets and Con Ed bills. That’s awfully irresponsible, you say? You’re right. I daresay that’s the point.