FROM NOMA TO NIPPON

Chef Thomas Frebel spent more than a decade at Noma before Japan captured his heart and mind. He tells ALEXANDRA CARLTON what drew him to Tokyo, where his restaurant Inua is breaking boundaries.

- ALEXANDRA CARLTON

When ex-Noma chef Thomas Frebel bites into an ingredient pulled straight from the earth – perhaps it’s the wild mountain vegetable amadokoro, with its asparagus-like stems, or the Japanese wild kiwi, which he says tastes like a mix of cultivated kiwi, lychee, mangosteen and even the fruit of the monstera plant – he’s hit by two sensations almost simultaneously. “First you’re enjoying the flavour and that moment of discovery,” he says. “And then you come to the quick realisation that our guests will never experience this unless we bring them here.”

It’s an inescapable fact that the moment you take an ingredient from its natural environment, you are holding it at its fragile peak. Deterioration is the only possible next step. “That razor clam you pull from the water or the berry in the forest, or that tomato that’s been sitting in the sun for five days – it’s juicy and acidic and you can feel the temperature and texture of the skin as you bite,” he says. “That is likely to be the best tomato you will ever eat. But all you can do is remember it as the example of what a tomato should taste like at its best. From there, its quality goes down. What we do as chefs when we have a tomato in our kitchen is try to bring it back up again, as close as possible to that moment you pick it. That’s pretty much our job.”