The World's Best Restaurant is: NOMA!

 NOMA, a restaurant located in Bryggen, the North-Atlantic culture center in Copenhagen, was just chosen the world's best restaurant. The British magazine "Restaurants" chooses every year World's 50 Best Restaurants and today, the list for the year 2010 was made public. Restaurant number 1, the World's Best restaurant is NOMA.

NOMA stands for "NOrdisk MAd" or Nordic Food and specializes in Nordic food heritage, using mainly ingredients from Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands, but also from the other Nordic countries. NOMA has been a rising star building a great reputation far beyond the borders of Denmark and was recently awarded two MIchelin stars.

Food didn't use to be so good in the North. I remember when my next door neighbour in Copenhagen, who was from Chile, came to me one day. Her sister ran a restaurant specializing in bacalao - salted cod. "Bacalao comes from Iceland" she said "you must know some exciting bacalao recipes from Iceland". Well, I had to disappoint her. "We only boil it in Iceland" I said. But food culture has been developing fast as chefs and cooks have been realizing the value they have in the ingredients. The freshness of the wild and unpolluted is hard to beat, the herbs growing very slowly putting all their energy into developing more value rather than volume, the animals running around the widest and purest natural environment you can find and the temperature of a perfect cooler, the raw materials for your cooking are like no other. When you take all this into consideration, and mix those excellent materials with knowledge and experience from more southern cuisines, it's maybe no wonder Nordic cooking has been gaining such an excellent reputation in the last few years. 

"Our intention at noma is to create and to prepare a distinctly advanced kind of cuisine, while nonetheless conjoining our patently Nordic approach with a manner of purity and simplicity in the approach. We are also busy infusing our new Nordic cuisine with a markedly curative potential. These values are all reflected in our menus’ ultimate articulation and manifest themselves both in the construction and presentation of the individual courses and in the means of preparation and ingredients upon which they are based" (noma.dk)

 

NOMA is in an old renovated warehouse by the waters in Copenhagen and is highly recommended for a taste of the world's best. We congratulate René Redzepis, the chef, and his team for their great accomplishment.

You can visit the website of the world's greatest restaurant or if you read Danish, check out these articles and interviews about the awards and the chef that created it.

Hjörtur
@hjortur