When he opened Noma, chef René Redzepi gave it ten years before he moved on. That was in 2003. Now, as the Copenhagen restaurant—named the world’s “best” multiple times and credited with revolutionising Nordic food—approaches its 20th birthday, with a new book to boot, the 44-year-old has no plans to walk away.
“I’ve often asked myself why I was so adamant in saying ten years,” he tells me over Zoom from the Noma test kitchen (which, from where I’m sitting, looks like a glass Portakabin being buffeted by the Danish winter weather). “My feeling was that after ten years you had to tear down the fortress you’d built. But I’m very happy right now. Twenty years in, we’re in the best place we’ve ever been— without a doubt. Including myself.”
Many chefs go through what in cringeworthy modern parlance might be called a “journey”, and Redzepi is no exception. It has been a decade since he first spoke about his temper in the kitchen, calling himself a “beast”. In 2015 he wrote an article in which he admitted: “I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career.”
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