Noma: The Most Expensive Lunch We'll Ever Eat
November 14-15, 2015
It’s REALLY hard to get a reservation at Noma. They only open up reservations once a month for seatings three months ahead of time. At 10am on that day, everyone who is waiting on their website is thrown into a random queue. Since Noma was awarded “Best Restaurant in the World” in 2012, 2013, 2014, and the #3 restaurant in 2015, needless to say there are quite a few people trying to get a table every month. The brilliance of the random queue though is that is doesn’t matter how much money or clout you have, you’ve got the same chance of getting a table as anyone else. The first few months we tried to get reservations we pulled numbers in line anywhere from the hundreds to the thousands. Then on one fateful August morning Mazz’s alarm sounded reminding her that Noma reservations were about to go up, and the two of us got on our laptops to give it another try. Mazz pulled #1165. Kirb pulled #88. We were going to Copenhagen.
Based on which times were still available with our spot in line, we chose a Saturday lunch serving instead of weekday dinner serving so we wouldn’t have to take time off work. We got cheap flights for around €100 round trip, and booked a hostel for the weekend. The novelty of staying in a hostel while dining in the best restaurant in the world was not lost on us. Priorities, man.
The service was 20-ish courses, with the option for wine pairings added without hesitation. If you’re going to do the damn thing, do it right.
Fermented plums and wild beach roses
Beet root tartare, with ants for acidity
Øland wheat and virgin butter
Cabbage leaves and white currants
Green shoots of the season with scallop marinade
Grilled onion with fermented oregano
Sea urchin and walnuts
Sliced raw squid and kelp
200 year old mahogany clam
Shaved, frozen monkfish liver on a fire roasted herb crisp
Pumpkin, beechnuts, and fermented barley and butter sauce
Egg yolk, potatoes, and nasturtium
Vegetable flower
Roasted wild duck breast
Excellent Spanish wine
Aebelskiver with fermented grasshopper soya
Berries and greens soaked in vinegar for one year
The rest of the roast duck, with plum sauce
Roasted kelp ice cream and lemon thyme
Egg liqueur
Chocolate covered moss and mushroom
Buckshot Mazz found in her duck
It was amazing to see people sitting near us in complete silence, eating their food quickly and then leaving, as if they had something better to do than dine at one of the finest restaurants of a generation. We've noticed this at several of the elite restaurants we've been lucky enough to eat at - people who take their good fortune completely for granted and have become so accustomed to the nicer things in life that they can't enjoy them properly anymore. We will never be those people.
Though we wouldn't say that any one thing we ate at Noma was the single best piece of food we'd ever eaten, the experience of eating at Noma was far and away the most amazing single dining experience. Though the majority of the dishes were extraordinary, a highlight was the pumpkin and beech nuts in barley and butter sauce, which took seemingly simple ingredients and combined into something utterly perfect. Conversely, the raw squid and kelp in a milk sauce didn't taste particularly great and had a uniformly soft and squishy texture, so Mazz didn't even finish hers. The vegetable flower was basically a fruit roll-up made out of black garlic and fermented flowers, and tasted like a potpourri we had only ever smelled before. There were so many elements to each dish the server would generally only tell us a couple of them for the sake of brevity. Something was always pickled, fermented, or bedazzled in some crazy way, and as a result much of the food was unlike anything we'd ever tasted before. But just when you thought they might be getting too weird for their own good, they'd hand you a simple, perfectly cooked duck and remind you that not everything has to be fancy to be excellent.
Equal to the quality of the food, the service was singularly amazing. From the entire staff greeting us warmly in unison as we entered the restaurant, to the chefs responsible for constructing each dish coming out individually to tell us about the food and answer any questions we might have, we have never been treated as warmly or attended to as diligently as we were at Noma. If you even thought about getting up to go to the bathroom someone was pulling out your chair before you could scooch its legs against the ground. We savored every second of our time in the restaurant, and it was clear to the servers that we were having fun. As a result they did things like leave wine bottles at our table instead of simply refilling our glasses. This was a kind gesture, but we never opted to take advantage of it, as an incredible new wine was introduced and poured generously every three dishes or so. By the end of the 4-hour meal we had a proper day-buzz on. After we finished with the meal, they offered to give us a guided tour (with fresh glasses of wine) of Noma's kitchens and test-kitchens. This added bonus was most likely awarded to us because we were clearly having the best time of anyone in the restaurant.
There was absolutely no rush to get us out the door - if anything the opposite was true. We were encouraged to take breaks to stretch our legs outside, and after our tour we were brought to a comfy lounge with leather chairs and served nordic digestifs. They gave us a copy of a gorgeous hand-drawn map of Copenhagen with all of their favorite eateries in town marked on it to check out during the rest of our stay. Though we paid a hefty pile of cash for it, eating at Noma was a truly exceptional dining experience worth the price tag.
After perusing the open-air market in the nearby Christiania anarchist commune and briefly fleeing to a cafe to escape a remarkable torrent of rain, we headed back into the city center to try and figure out what to do with the rest of our evening. Before we could settle on a plan, a stranger walking down the street called out Mazz by her name. Somehow the one person we knew in all of Denmark (whom we actually thought was living in another country) randomly found and recognized us on the street even though he had not seen Mazz for 8 years. In perfect serendipity, Bjarni also had no plans for his Saturday evening, and graciously agreed to show us around.
Copenhagen is a fancy place, so it was excellent luck running into a local who could take us to blue-collar dive bars we would have never found on our own. After adding to the substantial wine buzz we had been amassing since noon, the gorgeous map and menus from our meal at Noma were woefully left on the table at the first bar we visited, and had already been thrown away when we returned to retrieve them. We got some beers to go from a market and headed to Bjarni's house to watch the World Cup qualifying match between lifelong rivals Denmark and Sweden, then he guided us to more local dives. By midnight the 20-course lunch had diminished and we desperately needed food to dilute the 12 hours of steady drinking. Our meal at the best restaurant in the world was followed by drunkenly devouring an entire sub-par large pizza in a corner store. Stoked but exhausted from a perfect day in Copenhagen, we stumbled onto a train back to Nørrebro, and crawled contentedly into our inexpensive hostel beds.