Covid downtime inspires Copenhagen restaurateur

Copenhagen – A six-month Covid-19 closure has been tough for Noma, one of the world’s top restaurants, but also a chance to reinvent its cuisine to better suit Danish tastes.

Despite regularly ranking among the top 10 on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, including No2 in 2019 and No1 for three years running from 2010, Noma was not spared by the pandemic.

A dinner menu costs 2 800 Danish kroner (about R6 300), with another 1 800 kroner for a wine pairing, but the place doesn’t make money if patrons don’t come.

As it reopened this month, the restaurant that has been hailed as reinventing Nordic cuisine, reworked its menu, in part to take into account the lack of foreign tourists.

“I’m really excited. I need this. I need to have guests again. I need to feel like I’m here and I’m doing something, you know, I really, really desperately need it,” Rene Redzepi, who has been running the Copenhagen establishment since 2003, said.

The restaurant closed on 9 December and for its first dinner service since then, he chose to offer an exclusive menu to “heroes” of the pandemic: doctors, teachers or volunteers on the frontlines during the pandemic – with candidates selected by public vote.

The kitchens, bathed in sunlight, bustled with activity accompanied by pop music, and the staff was busy arranging flower bouquets, washing strawberries and chopping ingredients.

As they worked in harmony and with astonishing fluidity, Redzepi says that creating a new menu was very straightforward.

“This time around things are more fluid, it seems a little more effortless. We didn’t struggle as much to get to this point,” he said.

In fact, the two-Michelin-star chef thinks the break might have been beneficial.

“Maybe it’s because we had six months where we could actually rest and our minds could be curious again,” he says.

Opened in 2003, Noma has helped make Copenhagen a destination for gourmands.

In 2019, an estimated 38% of foreign tourists visited Copenhagen because of its culinary offerings.

Getting a table at Noma is no longer quite as challenging now.

“We’re still full, but not like we used to be,” Redzepi says.

But the chef believes things will return to normal quickly.

He doesn’t plan to change his focus on an exclusive experience either – even though he turned the restaurant into a wine and burger bar for a month in mid 2020.