CHEF SETS OUT TO REDEFINE NORDIC CUISINE. IT RAISES MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS...

It didn’t take very long for us to realise that this wasn’t going to happen. Cooking a goulash only from local ingredients didn’t make that hearty stew taste new or like it was truly from here. We stumbled forward slowly the first couple of years, and realised with each day that distilling our landscape onto plates of food was a very, very complex task. The answers wouldn’t be found in Nordic produce alone.

Besides that, we have been pretty confused about just about everything. For many years I was wrestling with the very definition of the word local. I mean, where do we even draw the borders of the Nordic region?...

At one point quite a while ago, in the midst of all the confusion, hard work, and doubt, we realised that we’d been organizing our menus and even methods of work in a stupid and somewhat impractical way. Here we are in a region where the seasons change dramatically from barren cold to warm abundance, yet our restaurant and the menu format more or less stay the same. We haven’t been able to transform as dramatically as the weather does; at least until now. We’ve made the decision to change the restaurant along with three very distinct seasons.

It took us a while to figure this all out. Like I said, we’ve been planning for the change for years. That’s why it’s great for me to announce that at the end of December 2016, we will run our last service at Noma.