Hungry

by Jeff Gordinier

  I always disliked the word “escapist,” but maybe that’s because it nestled a little too close to my skin. The truth is that for years I managed to turn escapism into a source of income. Real escapism must be left to the professionals, and I am honored to count myself among them. It’s not impossible that I was drawn to journalism in the first place because I cottoned to the idea of having subsidized adventures. (The notion of doing something meaningful came later, which is undoubtedly an ass-backward approach, but I feel compelled to be candid here.)

  For an escape junkie such as myself, meeting Redzepi was like introducing an alcoholic to the world’s most telepathic bartender. How else to explain the thousands of dollars that would spiral down a drain as I started to say yes to one escapist punch bowl after another? Dinner in Sydney? Why not? Fishing in Norway in winter? Oh, absolutely. A graduate-level immersion course in the art of Mexican mole, just outside of Oaxaca? Yes yes yes, where’s the plane, get me out of here. I could find and book a cheap flight in a matter of minutes.

  But with Redzepi, the superficial thrills of a great escape would, over time, yield to deeper resonances. When I met him, he was on the cusp of blowing up his secure foundations in a campaign to reinvent himself and his restaurant. So was I—in, albeit, a far more haphazard fashion. But by the time I went to Australia, I had snapped out of the walking trance and my life had begun to take on some semblance of forward progress. This time, on the flight to Sydney, I had someone in the seat next to me who wasn’t trying to knock my elbow off the armrest. I had known Lauren for years, on a professional basis, because I wrote about chefs and Lauren worked for a company that did publicity for chefs, and for this stark reason (not to mention the fact that we were for years both in relationships with other people) we maintained a safe professional distance. Steering clear of her, though, proved to be difficult, because we moved in the same circles in New York City and because I found her to be breathtakingly beautiful. (Distance itself would play a role in our eventual courtship. By the year of our flight together to Sydney, Lauren was living in Los Angeles. We corresponded like two global nomads from the 1920s, sending each other a constant flurry of postcards.)

  Over the years I got to know Lauren, through conversation and emails, and I became captivated by her sophistication and composure. I had mentally filed away this crush as one of life’s many impossibilities, but during this time in my life I was coming to learn that impossibilities weren’t always as impossible as they seemed. One night in the summer of 2015 when I was watching TV with my daughter, a random texting exchange with Lauren took an unexpected turn. She was at Fish & Game, a restaurant up in Hudson, New York. I recommended the roast chicken. It was revealed that both of us happened to be single. It was suggested (I believe by her) that we should go out to dinner sometime. I agreed.

  “Tomorrow?” Lauren said.

  Bold immediacy—I liked this approach very much. We met the next night for a feast at Via Carota, in the West Village, after which we learned that our chemistry was more uproariously real than we’d imagined it. Somehow we soon became inseparable, even though I lived on the East Coast and she was moving (a week after our first date) to Los Angeles to open her company’s West Coast bureau. Another perceived impossibility. We flew to Sydney from Los Angeles, in fact—when I told her that I had a table at Noma Australia, she wasted no time in suggesting that we spend a week in Sydney together—and I soon realized that the hopeless escapist in me had found a partner in crime. Lauren was all about saying yes to adventure, obstacles be damned. We landed in Sydney on Valentine’s Day. The first text I saw, when I turned on my phone, was a “welcome to Australia” one from Redzepi. He wanted to know where we intended to eat. I told him I had no idea; I figured that it would be impossible to score a table anywhere decent on Valentine’s Day, so we’d probably just get room service in the hotel. About five minutes later, an email appeared on my screen confirming that Lauren and I had a table at Bennelong, a restaurant tucked inside the famous Sydney Opera House, with a view of the harbor. Redzepi had contacted Bennelong on our behalf. But if I thought this trip was going to be all about luxurious moonlit dinners, I was mistaken.

  * * *

  —

  The call came late in the afternoon.

  You could hear a note of panic on the other end of the line. Someone from the kitchen in Sydney had run out of watercress. They needed the watercress as part of a wild green bouquet that accompanied a plate of abalone schnitzel. The first dinner seating would come together in a matter of hours, with guests who had flown in from all over the world to experience René Redzepi’s sorcery with the ingredients of the Antipodes, and an arrow in the quiver could not be found.

  “I’ll be back around five or five thirty,” E.J. Holland said. “Nobody all day has told me. The only thing anybody asked for was sticks. If they need something important, they need to say it.”

  “I can never get through to you,” the voice from the kitchen barked.

  “My phone’s a piece of shit, bro,” Holland replied. He agreed to turn around and hunt for some watercress. He hung up. He looked at the cars filling the roads as rush hour approached. “Traffic,” he muttered. “This is not a good sign.”

  Time was running out. This wasn’t just a matter of stuffing a box full of random wild clumps. The kitchen had high standards. Usually a more persnickety culling would take place in the kitchen, but tonight no one would have the bandwidth for that. “I’ll just look very carefully at the quality when I’m picking it,” Michael Larsen said.

  Larsen and Holland were the leaders of Noma’s foraging unit in Sydney and around the rest of Australia, and they made an unusual duo. Larsen, gentle and wry and connected to Noma from early on, came across as the walking embodiment of a Wendell Berry poem. He seemed so plugged into the rhythms of the plant realm that the close proximity to photosynthesis had given him a deep core of calm. Merely chatting with him felt nourishing. Holland, on the other hand, acted like the trigger-happy young turk in a Hollywood buddy comedy—the brash sidekick in foraging, hyper-voluble and slightly unhinged. He did not say “I will bring you your fucking watercress, but there’d better be a bottle of tequila waiting for me when I get there,” but if he had, it would not have been out of character.

  The Australia pop-up was the second of three residencies that would change the way Redzepi cooked—and thought about cooking. The first had happened in Japan and after it, he said, Noma would never be the same. “The impact from Japan? It keeps going. I think it influences us for sure. The meaning of everything in Japan. Everything has a purpose. Everything you eat has a reason for being on the plate. It’s as if everything they eat is at the right moment. It gives such value to even the simplest of things. Mostly I went to Japan to be inspired for innovation. How does innovation move in such a place where tradition is so deep? How come here in Denmark so many of the traditions have become old and stale?”

  Australia was a different game entirely, though. In Australia the Noma team wasn’t coming up against centuries of culinary tradition as much as it was attempting to wring deliciousness out of a slate of antipodean foodstuffs that might as well have been tubers and seeds from Venus and Mars. In Japan, Redzepi told writer Tienlon Ho, “I wanted to show locals the foods they didn’t even know were part of their own place.” In Australia, he was doubling down on that gamble and venturing into the realm of mangrove snails and konkleberries, yabbies and mulga. “The test kitchen proceeded with more projects—a miso-marinated banana, tongue-numbing mountain pepper berries steeping in various vinegars, fermented eggplant, ice creams of gum tree and myrtle, crispy crocodile skin, and muttonbird wrapped in saltbush and grilled,” Ho wrote of the process of perfecting the meal that Noma eventually wanted to serve. “Redzepi knows his ingredients can sound off-putting.”

  The trick was to transform that repulsion into attraction. The Noma Australia menu achieved this in part by servi
ng dishes that had a touch of lowbrow fun to them: a slice of cake, a slab of schnitzel, a popsicle. The popsicle, from Malcolm Livingston’s pastry sector, was called the Baytime, an allusion to a popular Aussie Good Humor–style street treat called the Golden Gaytime, only this one had peanut milk in place of vanilla-and-toffee ice cream, and a buttery glaze of toasted freekeh instead of a chocolate coating.

  The schnitzel didn’t broadcast this fact, but it was a fine example of Noma’s latest journeys along the countless tributaries of fermentation. Coaxed into tenderness with a braise in rice koji oil, the schnitzel had a funky crust in which bread crumbs joined forces with rice koji flour. (Koji, hailing originally from Japan, “refers to rice or barley that has been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae, a species of fungus—a sporulating mold, to be exact—that grows on cooked grains in warm and humid environments,” according to The Noma Guide to Fermentation.) To me it resembled a Seder plate from one of Saturn’s moons, the crispy-battered half-disk of abalone surrounded by a green orbit of native delights, a few of which were obscure enough that most Australians would never consider eating them. Lauren and I ate Neptune’s necklace, a seaweed whose briny pods pop in your mouth, and finger lime, whose minuscule capsules offer a contrasting squirt of tart citrus. We ate mat-rush, which grows along the coast and looks like a leek, and a bunya nut, which may have once been a dinosaur snack, and a morsel from a tree called the Atherton oak.

  The person responsible for tracking down a lot of those goodies was this man driving the car, Elijah “E.J.” Holland. Of all the Noma cultists that I met in my trips around the world, Holland struck me as the wildest of the true believers. He burned with the zealotry of youth—he was still only twenty-three—and he carried himself with percolating, Red Bulled bravado. Months earlier, when Holland had heard from a friend that Redzepi was coming to Sydney and needed to recruit a local forager, Holland had introduced himself to the chef by bringing along two hundred and fifty samples of wild edibles from Sydney and the countryside. “I went kind of nuts,” he told me. “I think my head nearly exploded.” The next day, Redzepi had dropped into Holland’s restaurant, the Powder Keg, and had noticed “heaps and heaps of wild lemon aspen, like a jackpot.” Normally lemon aspen comes to a kitchen frozen, but Holland had managed to locate bushels of it growing wild.

  Redzepi saw the tart, tiny fruits and said, “I want that.” He asked Holland to preserve it all for a to-be-determined role on the Noma Australia menu.

  What had impressed Holland more than anything was Redzepi’s approachability. “He talks to me as if I’m a mate, which is really cool,” Holland said. “I’ve had his books for ages.” And now Holland had been sent forth to scour the land, to harvest deliciousness from the beach cliffs and suburban shrubs of Sydney. He did so while carrying a long, serrated blade and forsaking the constriction of a shirt, meaning that more than a few urban dwellers, during the weeks of Noma’s residency in Australia, might have spied a barefoot, muscular, tattooed man hopping through their backyard bushes with a knife.

  A call could come at any time. Could you find us six of those wild figs that we tried the other day? Holland could. I accompanied him as he bounded into a small public park fringed by the hum of a suburban neighborhood. There he pointed out sandpaper figs, which sprouted directly out of the trunk of a tree. He sliced them loose with his knife and dropped them into a bag. Those figs—utterly negligible to the people who lived yards away from them—would be incorporated into a dish at the best restaurant in the world. But figs and watercress constituted the more conventional side of Holland’s foraging portfolio. Much of what he and Larsen went hunting for would be thoroughly alien to an American diner—or even to an Australian one. In his vehicle Holland had a copy of a book by Jennifer Isaacs titled Bush Food: Aboriginal Food and Herbal Medicine, a guide to indigenous ingredients that had sustained people for centuries but that, at this postcolonial stage in Australia’s history, remained invisible to the untrained eye and the westernized palate, even with chefs like Kylie Kwong and Ben Shewry bringing more attention to them. Holland wanted to learn as much as he could about what the continent’s original inhabitants had relied on to stay alive.

  He noticed these nourishments everywhere. Driving along the highway, with Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” playing on the car radio, he saw food tucked away and tufting out of curbs and on-ramps. “Every single person walks by them every day,” he said. “Those are peppercorn trees—they’re covered in pink peppercorns.” Holland had been foraging for much of his life, eating wild fennel and fallen apples as a kid, prone to chewing on the stems of waterlilies during camp hikes in the Blue Mountains. His mother would make aloe vera poultices at home; theirs was a home in which feverfew was used to cure migraines and dandelion roots were brewed into a tea to relieve nausea. His engagement with the world could be viewed as a version of synesthesia: instead of seeing colors when he heard music, he tasted flavors when he saw colors. “There’s loads of wild garlic flowers coming in,” he said. “Wait till you see some of the spots we’re going to today. Mushroom season has just started. Saffron milkcap mushrooms—they’re absolutely gorgeous.” He knew of places in the Blue Mountains where “there are so many mushrooms I have to be careful where I’m walking.”

  To ride shotgun with E.J. Holland was like hearing fragments of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland recited aloud by the leader of a boy band. “These are lillypilly,” he’d say, revealing a palm full of sour red berries and nudging you to sample one. “This is rambling dock. This’ll smack you in the face….See this? All these leaves? That is beautiful wild ginger….This is Neptune’s necklace and that is Norfolk Island hibiscus….Bladderwrack—this is really, really lovely pickled….This is known as sea rocket or beach mustard. Imagine that on a steak or a nice fatty piece of fish. And it’s on every Australian beach!…This is called slender celery. It’s wild celery. I want you to have a taste.”

  He stopped the car along the side of the road to gather herbs and he drove to the shoreline to wade into the surf and gather seaweed. On a beach at low tide he carefully stepped farther out into the ocean to check the crab traps, brandishing a spear that he hoped to hurl at passing stingrays. He did not seem held back by the usual laws of gravity or the amygdala and its regulation of fear. If given the directive to harvest bunya nuts, he would shimmy up the trunk of a tree to get them. Foraging with Holland felt less like a stroll through the fields than a televised scavenger hunt.

  In all of these ways Holland lived up to the ideals of the Noma cult. The enterprise known as Noma Australia was never meant to be easy. It wasn’t easy to organize, it wasn’t easy to get into (thirty thousand names were huddled together on the waiting list), and it wasn’t necessarily easy to eat. Even for someone familiar with the Noma ethos, some of the dishes on the menu were almost willfully strange. A pie, of sorts, made of dried scallops with lantana flowers scattered on top. Clams, served at room temperature instead of being chilled, underneath a crispy amber scrim of dried crocodile fat. Porridge of wattleseed with saltbush. The wattleseeds, out in the wild, could only be pried open by a brushfire: heat and smoke unlocked them so that the meat inside could be eaten. Having no brushfire at their fingertips in downtown Sydney, the Noma team had turned to dropping the wattleseeds into boiling water that had been infused with smoke and letting them bob around for hours until they relented. It seemed like a lot of work for a porridge.

  Perhaps the weirdest ingredient in the Noma Australia larder was a rare fruit that could only be secured through Holland’s reconnaissance. Monstera deliciosa, it was called. Delicious monster. Make of that name what you will. It looked like a large scaly phallus (why beat around the flowering bush?) and, when plucked unripe, it contained enough poison to kill you. It grew beneath low-lying palm fronds around Sydney, although it had originated far away in Mexico, and to reach a point of being both succulent and survivable, it had to be aged, in a sense, like cheese. Hollan
d and Larsen would stack the delicious monsters in a box and bring them back to the Noma kitchen at Barangaroo Wharf. There the shafts would be individually wrapped in loose pages of newspaper and left to ripen on a shelf. Along the way the scales on the fruit would protrude and then begin to fall off. Ripening required two to three weeks. “René told me it’s the most exotic-tasting fruit he’s ever had in his life,” Holland said. “I don’t think anyone has ever put it on a menu in Australia.”

  Saturday Night Projects back in Copenhagen should have served as a clue. Redzepi viewed creativity as the by-product of constant pushing and pressure. It wasn’t enough to fly your entire team to Australia and raise the funds to subsidize their housing for weeks. It wasn’t enough to transplant Noma’s signature dishes to Sydney and give them a few locavore tweaks. Radical wholesale reinvention—nothing else would suffice. The objective was to start with nothing, to explode all preconceptions, and to conjure a multitude of courses from there. If Saturday Night Projects resembled Shark Tank crossed with Chopped, this was an altogether different kind of game show, one in which the easy route automatically qualified as failure.