Notes from the summer
As the days get shorter and nights long, turn a few thoughts to new Nordic Cuisine
For some absurd unknown reason I’ve always thought the so-called new Nordic cuisine is a genre heavily influenced by Japanese and to a lesser extent Chinese. Perhaps since Nordic countries came to the fore of the world’s food scene so late yet so abrupt, I just automatically thought it must have been standing on the shoulders of other giants.
I was quite wrong though. Despite of its common ancient techniques of pickling, curing and open fire cooking, after our tour de force trip in Copenhagen from Amass to Relae to Geranium to 108 this summer, I concluded that new Nordic cuisine has been more about forward-looking than reference to other food cultures or the past. It actually creates a cuisine whose starting point is to provide answers to today’s big question through food, then/at the same time comes the taste, rarely the other way around.
In a way, it’s got be lucky to have not such a past, no history, no baggage, inventing instead of re-inventing, unlike Italian or French or Chinese or Japanese. Tradition is a double-edged blade. Try to reinvent Vitello Tonnato or ossobuco alla milanese? Dude, you are looking for trouble or at least comments. If the chef is lucky and your diners rejoiced in the reinvention, you then realise whatever you have changed, replaced, reversed and transformed, you are still inside the original box called Vitello Tonnato. Evolution is most of time not as ground-breaking as revolution. Not in the case of new Nordic cuisine! Check out some of some unheard combinations during our summer visits:
Raspberry & lobster (108)
Hiphop music &graffiti & fine-dining restaurant (Amass)
Kombucha mother as a dessert??!! (Amass)
Cream cheese & Snail egg (Geranium)
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Draw-backs of ‘blue ocean’ cuisine like the new Nordic cuisine? Food tradition, rituals and classic combinations, however limiting, are often there for a reason. Trial and error through the palates and stomachs of generations have produced near perfect answers. New Nordic cuisine will inevitably produce some non-sense dishes along the way. One must experiment with speed and care to find the new combinations that will endure the trial of both instant gratification and long-term yearning and at the same time still providing answers to reducing our food-related footprint.
Rather lazily, I wanted to conclude this article, not about any single restaurant, but about a group of restaurants, from my Instagram post ‘…such imagination, boldness, a cuisine with little reference to the past, yet with plenty implication of the future. At times they please our eyes and palate but not necessarily our stomach; but most times they open our horizon and challenge the way we taste and think.’