Last week, Noma 2.0 turned fully vegetarian as the first ever full vegetarian menu was served at the restaurant. Guests at the Copenhagen restaurant were served a full vegetarian menu from start to finish. Chef René Redzepi has said on his Instagram Stories feed that the vegetarian menu is without a shadow of doubt the biggest challenge of his entire career.
“We are very happy even though it was difficult because there is something that feels like you are cooking the future by choosing the plant kingdom,” Redzepi said.
“We will see,” he said.
Redzepi and his team have often worked with vegetables but this is the first time that they have no fish or meat at the end of the menu.The chef said that they had been working like mad people for three months for this menu.
Noma last week moved from the Ocean Menu to the Vegetable menu where they will be exploring the plant kingdom and everything that is edible, cooking with what they find underground, above ground, near the water and in the trees.
Redzepi’s team have been foraging for the freshest ingredients in every lake, river, stream, meadow and woodland, work closely everyday with our collaborators to harvest their best crops, and grow some produce of our own on our urban farm,”
The restaurant is in the Chistianshavn, a historic neighbourhood known outside the country for the Christiania anarchist enclave. The restaurant site was once a depot for naval mines beside an embankment and overlooking an artificial lake that welcomes thousands of birds. “It is amazing. Sometimes we are here and there are thousands of birds of all kinds,” René said.
The Danish chef has given a lot of attention to detail and particularly to light which he says is essential for him and his team. “We live in Copenhagen where the weather can be bad for 11 out of 12 months so we wanted to ensure that there is as much light coming into the restaurant and the work space as possible,” René Redzepi told Food and Wine Gazette.
The new building houses a small urban farm with green houses, a rooftop herb garden, a barbeque area, a fermentation lab, an ant farm and much more.
One of the features of the menu is the celeriac shawarma (see above) which is served towards the end of the vegetarian menu. The menu includes butterfly-shaped fruit leather crafted from sea buckthorn and blackcurrant, vegetarian ‘chorizo’ made from rosehip berries, a dolma that is made with boring cucumber and is presented with a herb mixture and a sandwich of crispy milk skins layered with smoked parsley and topped with preserved black truffles.
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