Chef and patron from NOMA restaurant

René Redzepi chef and patron from NOMA restaurant in Copenhagen will be honorary guest chef at the Reykjavik Food and Fun festival this year. NOMA is voted 3rd by the S.Pellegrino World´s 50 Best Restaurants. Those awards are considered the most prestige in the world today.

For anyone who has eaten there, Noma’s achievements won’t come as any huge surprise. Here is a restaurant whose eloquent vision is executed perfectly – offering a unique culinary journey across Scandinavia that is both originally modern yet unlocks collective memories of the more primitive, visceral eating habits of our ancestors. (The S.Pellegrino World’s 50 best restaurants 2009).

René Redzepi has been a long time friend of the Food and Fun Festival both as participant and a overall winner as the Food and Fun Chef of the year 2004 and a consultant of various aspects of the festival.

The chefs' top chef, Rene Redzepi, of Danish restaurant Noma, was voted best in the world by top chefs - now he is having a huge impact on the global culinary landscape

Imagine

Imagine sitting at a restaurant table, gazing out on to a channel of icy grey-blue water. A chef has just placed a large, smooth pebble in front of you. A single, seared langoustine lies on the hot grey stone. He advises you to dip the sweet-tasting langoustine into the powdery magenta scattering of ground Icelandic dulse (seaweed) and pretty blobs of oyster emulsion. It's like eating a rock pool. The next dish tastes of northern forests and summer. Gorgeous plump spears of white asparagus, sprigs of woodruff, romaine roots, hop and pine shoots tumble around a poached egg yolk and mix themselves into delicious verdant flavours as you munch.

Noma in Copenhagene

This is Noma in Copenhagen and you are tasting the food of chef Rene Redzepi. Eating his food is a revelation. Suddenly, it becomes clear how the current trends towards seasonality, sustainability and regionality can be fused into a new and utterly delicious cuisine. Redzepi won international acclaim earlier this year when Noma was voted third-best restaurant in the World in the S.Pellegrino's World's 50 Best Restaurants, with only the Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, and El Bulli in Catalonia, Spain, ahead of him. Even more significantly, the other 49 top chefs voted Noma as their favourite restaurant. Add to that two Michelin stars and it is clear that that there is something very special about his food. Although he is not yet widely known over here, Redzepi came to our TV screens ealier this year when Masterchef winner Mat Follas cooked at Noma in the final.

Describes his cooking as modern Nordic

Redzepi describes his cooking as modern Nordic, yet his background lies in a rigorous following of French cuisine, leavened with work at El Bulli and The French Laundry in California. His creation of this new cooking style only developed when gastronomic entrepreneur Claus Meyer offered him the chance to open his own restaurant in Denmark. The site was a derelict 1747 warehouse that had been used to store goods from the North Atlantic, such as salt, spelt and whale blubber. "I knew that this was the place, it had such a warmth about it with its wooden beams. I was sick of luxurious, palatial restaurants."

His manifesto was to use the best produce in the region to create an updated and modern Nordic cuisine. After spending two months travelling the region, a new world of possibilities began to open up as Redzepi began to source ingredients such as musk ox from Greenland, sea urchins from Norway and birch sap from Denmark. He distilled his philosophy into two fundamental questions. "The essence of dining should be about a sense of time and place," he says. "If you shut your eyes and just ate the food, would you know where you were in the world and what time of year it was?" The resulting food has a satisfying balance of cooked and raw, so that the diner feels intimately in touch with wilderness, landscape and seasonality. For instance, a plump, sweet North Sea shrimp is wrapped in bright green sea lettuce and bathed in raw sweet-sour rhubarb juice with little chunks of raw rhubarb and wild coastal herbs. It has a pared-back Scandinavian beauty and exquisite pure lavours, yet if I close my eyes, I can also taste something of the British coast in early summer. It all depends on your points of reference and raises the question, how might one interpret modern British cooking in such a way?

Heston Blumenthal has watched Redzepi's cooking with interest. "It would be fascinating to take what Rene is doing in Denmark and see how far you could go here with just using seasonal British produce," he says.

Redzepi, for example, uses his Scandinavian skills in pickling to ensure that he can serve such delicacies as wild sea roses (heavenly when pickled in vinegar) throughout winter. Over the last year, Blumenthal has increasingly used wild foods and local produce at the Fat Duck, which has subtly changed the feel of the food. "Many ingredients, such as red gooseberries, have a surprisingly short season, so it requires greater flexibility when you design a new dish," he says.

Foods that reflect our land

Miles Irving, a professional British forager who supplies many of Britain's top chefs including Mark Hix and Richard Corrigan, believes that we are ready to change our restaurant cooking by using foods that reflect our land and climate. "Many [British] chefs are starting to experiment with wild foods," he says. "It's a very exciting time as chefs are rediscovering forgotten ingredients like woodruff, as well a new ones such as hogweed seeds that we appear not to have cooked with, despite them being delicious."

Looking at the finer details of Redzepi's cooking, he uses minimal butter and cream and only local oils such as pumpkin seed. Rye, horseradish and dill are delicately added to many dishes to add a characteristic Scandinavian note. He doesn't shy away from using modern kitchen equipment, whether it's designed to produce instant soft ice-cream or slow-poached pork, but the preparation of each dish is surprisingly simple. A gorgeous pudding of walnut powder and ice-cream, for example, contains a beautiful heap of what tastes like essence of blackberry powder. It's frozen berries that have been whizzed to a powder just before they're plated.

Nnew Nordic diet

His cooking is already acting as a catalyst for change. In March this year, Professor Arne Astrup, head of human nutrition at Life, the faculty of life sciences at Copenhagen University, announced the development of a new Nordic diet to help reduce obesity and encourage healthy living, inspired by Redzepi's food. Life's aim is to create a healthy diet that is accessible and natural to a northern climate; delicious yet seasonal and sustainable. It is an infectious idea.

The impact of Redzepi's cooking, meanwhile, is rapidly transforming how many of his colleagues cook in Denmark. Claus Henriksen, an ex-Noma sous chef, for example, is creating his own unique and delicious food at Dragsholm Castle in North Zealand following the same principles. Given that the Noma kitchen has a liberal sprinkling of British chefs, it is only a matter of time before they return home and start to reinterpret their native food.

What the chefs say

"Rene Redzepi has managed to root his cooking in his region to create something really powerful." Heston Blumenthal, the Fat Duck

"It's fantastic that somebody who has worked at el Bulli has achieved such success. His recognition shows that the future of haute cuisine will be decided at international level." Ferran Adrià, El Bulli

"He has captured a sense of Copenhagen and put it into his kitchen. He's sourced superb local produce to create very fresh, crisp unfussy food that is well thought out." Marcus Wareing, Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley "He's a phenomenal chef. His cooking is incredibly modern: delicate and pristine yet feral and delicious." Philip Howard, The Square

"I love what Rene is doing. From the beginning he's created absolutely amazing dishes." Claude Bosi, Hibiscus (Sybil Kapoor, the Guardian 2009)