Rene Redzepi

Entering the mold-eating cult of the world’s leading culinary demigod.

- Adam Platt

GROWING UP in bicycle-mad Copenhagen, the most famous chef in the world never, ever learned to drive a car. “I’ve never even tried,” René Redzepi is saying in his merry, emphatic, charmingly offhand way, as if cars weren’t something one needed to bother with in order to lead a productive, civilized life and, besides, who has the time for that kind of thing anyway? He’s wearing kitchen clogs and a camogreen zip-up on this bright summer’s afternoon, and we’re on a walk through his own little Faulknerian corner of Copenhagen. Our tour begins at the original location of his four-time “world’s greatest restaurant,” Noma; continues aboard the refurbished langoustine boat he co-owns with a gregarious gentleman named Nils; and concludes as he and Noma’s genial fermentation specialist, David Zilber, walk their bikes to the newly rebooted Noma 2.0, which Redzepi opened outside the city’s prominent hippie community, Christiania Freetown, in 2018.

As we bob along the canals, he and Zilber discourse on the perils of burnout (“Are we exhausted? Yes! Are we burnt out? No!”); the difficulty of planning the restaurant’s new high-wire vegetarian menu, which includes ingredients like crisped unborn bee larvae and several dishes laced like wheels of cheese with delicate scrims of freshly grown mold (“Can you imagine growing enough mold for 80 covers a night!”); and the vagaries of “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list, on which the new Noma will debut in a couple of days at No. 2. “If people say ‘I don’t give a shit’ about the ‘50 Best’ list,” Redzepi says, “they’re lying—of course I care. We all care.”