'New Nordic' menu is top of the world

Spain has El Bulli. England has Fat Duck. And the United States has the French Laundry. For years, these temples of high cuisine have been attracting gastronomes for culinary experiences that require expert planning and patience.

But a 12-table restaurant in Copenhagen is now home to the food world's must-have meal. Noma, specializing in "new Nordic" cuisine, was selected as the world's best restaurant by Restaurant magazine, unseating El Bulli, which had held the honor four years running. The distinction made 32-year-old chef Rene Redzepi king of the food world by serving local, seasonal, and often foraged wild ingredients that are indigenous to Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Instead of foie gras and tuna tartare, Noma's diners are treated to musk ox, axelberry shoots, and pickled quail eggs.

It's a fascinating cuisine. So too is Redzepi's new cookbook, Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine (Phaidon, $49.95). While foodies will not be able to find some of the ingredients in Redzepi's astonishing recipes, they will be enthralled by the cookbook's visuals and recipes that call for bulrush, cloudberries, goosefoot, mead, quark, rose cress, sea buckthorn, spruce shoots, and topaz apples.

Noma (a contraction of the Danish words nordisk and mad, meaning "Nordic food") opened in 2004 in an unspoiled quarter of old Copenhagen. Chef Redzepi was charged with creating a menu that reflected Nordic, especially North Atlantic, cuisine, which represented an entirely different set of raw materials to work with. Even until the 1990s Danish food was thought of as boiled potatoes and gravy. There was no such thing as Nordic gastronomy.

Noma's first reviews weren't especially glowing, and Redzepi felt stymied. But soon came a creative breakthrough when he realized that he didn't have to follow what he learned working in the kitchens of El Bulli and the French Laundry. "I realized that I had gone about things the wrong way during Noma's first months. A gastronomic supermeal didn't necessarily have to involve the things I had brought with me from the top kitchens in other parts of the world," he writes in Noma. "I recognized that I didn't have the necessary mental freedom, and that was what I had to find. I wasn't listening to myself."

When he started listening, he stopped composing dishes as he had seen them done at restaurants where he worked. Instead, he decided to create a focal point on the plate and surround it with foodstuffs it lived among or on. Example: Wild boar was served with corn and berries.

Noma was transformed. This year, the two-Michelin-starred Noma was ranked No. 1 in Restaurant magazine. And now, Noma the cookbook.