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Within the close -knit world of global gastronomy, Red Zeppi is a figure whose influence might be compared to that of David Bowie's in music in the 1970s, or Steve Jobs in technology in the 1980s, or Beyonce's now.
He is the chef behind Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen that has, for those who follow and chronicle these things, changed the way people think about food.
Writers have a habit of referring to Noma as the best restaurant on earth.
that may or may not make Red Zeppi, by hyperbolic extension, the greatest chef alive.
Red Zeppi was expected to fall in line with his mentors and cook French classics, and for a while he did.
Soon though, Red Zeppi had the epiphany that his food should not only be made with but entirely shaped by what he found in the forest, on the beach, and in the hands of local farmers.
In practice, this meant that berries ripe for a mere two weeks a year and plucked by a Swedish farmer uninterested in selling them were more luxurious than imported caviar.
He served them in a bowl with minimal adornment.
He made terroir. The soil, the climate, and the the land that shaped the flavor of the plant and animal that eats it more than jargon.
He made it the entire point of his cuisine.
That was an excerpt from the book Hungry, eating, road tripping and risking it all with the greatest chef in the world.
It was written by my friend, author and Esquire food and drink editor, Jeff Gordoneer.
Jeff is one of my favorite food writers.
He's really smart, and he's a really engaged listener.
In other words, he's a great writer because he's a great observer.
So when he decided to turn his attention to Rene Redzepi, I knew it would be a worthwhile read.
We started today's episode with that excerpt to provide some context about Redzepi and the so -called Nordic food movement.
If you're a food person, almost certainly you're aware of his influence, but if you're not, understanding the movement that he helped create will contextualize a style of food from aesthetic to ethos that has permeated fine dining kitchens, the minds of impressionable chefs, and also their Instagram feeds for more than a decade.
And now on the other side of the acclaim and influence, Noma's alumni are a distinguished brigade unto themselves, a gaggle of successful independent restaurateurs and food professionals who were born of this movement and in some cases, as with David Zilber, gone on to lead his own siloed movement, or in the case of Matt Orlando, gone on to open an acclaimed restaurant of their own.
We'll hear from both of these gentlemen today.
day. But whether or not the conversation of New Nordic is a belabored one isn't really a question.
Really, the question is, what do we call the movement that spawned from the New Nordic food movement?
Today, on Point of Origin, it's the New New Nordic.
but before we we talk about this moniker of new nordic i want to back up and give some context to people who might not know what it is that we're talking about so can you just tell people at the onset of the so -called new nordic cuisine what it is and why it was characterized that way Well, New Nordic Cuisine, when it was first kind of conceptualized, was a kind of a mantra or a manifesto that a bunch of chefs from Scandinavia came up with, basically saying that they were going to stop looking south for inspiration and they were going to start looking inwards, basically what was around them.
And while that concept in itself is not new in the cooking world, at that moment in time, the idea of actually cooking from the ingredients that exist in Scandinavia was very foreign, even to most of the chefs cooking in Scandinavia at the time.
You might hear the word manifesto tossed around.
It's less weighty than it sounds, but basically it was a living document conceived in 2004 when 12 Nordic chefs got together and signed a sort of declaration of independence for regional food.
I'm not going to go through all the tenets, but it basically covers stuff like purity, regionality and seasonality.
I mean, when I first moved to Denmark in 2005, every fine dining restaurant was an Italian or French restaurant.
And all inspiration was coming from Italy, France and Spain.
And so the idea of having a restaurant that was only using ingredients from Scandinavia, people thought we were crazy.
That's Matt Orlando.
He is a prominent chef and owner of Amass Restaurant in Copenhagen and also Broaden and Build, a brewery which is just a few steps away from the restaurant.
Orlando started at Noma in 2005, just a year after it opened, so in other words, before it was Noma.
Here he is describing the experimental vibe of the early days.
We were crazy. I mean, I started at Noma about a year after they opened.
So it was very new, very experimental, not only in the way we were cooking, but just the ideology of in the direction we were trying to go.
It was a very exciting time.
It was we were in uncharted waters constantly.
And at that moment in time, when I got there, people were still kind of making fun of what was happening at Noma at that time.
I mean, to put it in context, when I moved to Denmark in 2005, at the very beginning of this whole kind of movement, I mean, I felt like I stepped into a wonderland of ingredients, stuff I had never worked with before, stuff that now is quite commonplace, because this whole movement has really put a lot of ingredients that people had overlooked or thought as not really interesting into the limelight.
and now they're quite sought after.
I had come from the background where manipulating ingredients into something was kind of always the goal, whereas there was so much respect for the ingredients that we were using at the time at Doma.
And it was this really natural way of cooking, kind of letting the ingredients guide you as opposed to taking an ingredient and manipulating.
It was just a really big thought to be in Scandinavia in those first few years.
One of the things that stuck with me from my talk with Matt is how the movement transformed not just fine dining, but also the entire food system in Denmark.
And so when I put a mask, I started approaching a lot of our farmers saying, hey, why can't we grow this?
Why can't we grow this?
And over the last six years, we have been able to start growing things in the capacity that we can use them at the restaurant.
We have developed vegetables.
An eggplant that's grown in Scandinavia is going to taste way different than an eggplant grown in Italy.
You can't grow the same species of eggplant that you can in Italy.
You have to find one that's a bit more adapted to the cold, can handle temperature swings.
So over the last years, we've been finding the particular species of different vegetables that will thrive in this environment.
of it and we're growing with our farmers amazing cucumbers tomatoes eggplants all this stuff and now that's catching on and now that's becoming part of nordic cuisine which before if you ever put a tomato on the menu you would have been strung up and it was crazy and just just ridiculed by people so it's evolved a lot in that sense in what ingredients are acceptable within the cuisine enough.
The chefs that contributed to this manifesto really made a commitment to not only finding these ingredients and using them, but more importantly, really supporting the farmers and helping them to get these ingredients to the restaurants.
And, you know, when I look back on it now and I look at all the, there's so many farms around Copenhagen that that up until this massive restaurant movement and the spotlight of Copenhagen, up until then, these farms, they were selling to big co -ops and grocery stores, and they were producing amazing vegetables, but they were producing them on a bigger scale, and the people that were consuming them didn't really have a whole lot of respect for what these farms were doing.
If you look at the majority of those farms now, they only produce for restaurants.
And that's how big of a switch it's been.
They only produce for restaurants and they only produce for restaurants that really respect the ingredients that they're producing.
So I think it was a massive commitment from this group of chefs in the beginning to really embrace this.
I mean, this was not the easy way to go about cooking at all.
At what point at Noma in your tenure there, did you realize this restaurant that people were making fun of in the early days was actually at the cross section of the most important international food movement that was happening?
I realized it the day I stepped in the door there.
my world was flipped upside down and I just became completely obsessed with the process of cooking and the science behind it and to a molecular level and somewhere along the line obviously what's new is destined to become old and now we find ourselves as you said 14 years down the line and yet we're still talking about new Nordic cuisine and other chefs and alumni like yourself have gone on to make their own names and really deep impressions in the global restaurant culture as well so how are you grappling with the nomenclature of new Nordic cuisine in light of the fact that we're moving on to
our almost second decade of this if you look at the the religious background of this part of the world, it's primarily Protestant.
And in the Protestant religion, food is not something to be enjoyed.
Food is a thing of substance.
So there has never been this deep history of food, because food has never been a priority in this region of the world in regards to enjoyment, like it is in France and Spain and Italy and stuff like that.
So this way of thinking in this region of the world is new.
And so that new part of the title has had a place at a certain moment in time.
And I get asked often, like, why, how do you think Nordic cuisine has been able to retain its time at the top of influential cuisines in the world?
And the answer is simple, is that unlike other cuisines, because we don't have this really rich food history here, we don't have rules that we have to follow culturally.
And so the cuisine itself keeps evolving.
evolving and if i look at how people were cooking here in 2005 and then look at how the next generation chefs are cooking now in scandinavia i mean it's a different thing completely and there are things that were important then that aren't important now and there were rules set out by this manifesto that have become obsolete and this whole next generation of chefs coming through have really challenged what Nordic cuisine is because you have so many foreigners coming to this region of the world to cook and the majority of the people running the restaurants in Copenhagen are not from here.
the global influence of the Nordic food movement can't be overstated because so many chefs themselves are the ones that are constantly reinforcing its importance in their own lives and in their own careers in point of origin episode two we heard Geasley Grimson from from Saltvark in Iceland saying this very thing.
Yes, so basically the new Nordic food scene, which is brought to the world by many people in Scandinavia, but most notably probably Renner and Zappi and the team at Noma, it kind of opened the eyes of many Icelandic chefs to be proud of what is surrounding us.
So, I mean, I can say I started working working in the restaurant industry about like ten or eleven years ago.
And then people wouldn't be using seaweed that is growing around.
They wouldn't be kind of really, they would be more proud to use kind of black truffles from Italy or these kind of like Italian parmesan or this like prosciutto cut ham and all that because nobody kind of was super proud of Icelandic food traditions.
And in episode 11, we heard Chef Michael Eligdebe talking about how it was the power of the story that Redzepi and Noma were able to help craft that made it so influential.
In other words, not just amplifying the influence of the food itself, but also even how we talk about the food.
And what I've learned from a lot of the chefs are the stories they tell.
they get to tell the story of their cuisine, of their food, of their people through the art that they have and through the art that they exhibit.
Even chefs that I didn't work with, like Rene Rezepi and Alex Atala and Masimos Batura, how their approach towards their cuisine have changed the world's perception.
For Rene, no one looked at Scandinavian food as anything more than potatoes and carrots.
And now the Nordic cuisine is being revered.
And it's because of that representation and the stories that are told behind the food, the people, and the tradition.
That was Matt Orlando, chef and owner at Amass and Broaden and Build Brewery in Copenhagen.
so what happened at chappaquiddick well it really depends on who you talk to there are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young ted kennedy drove a car into a pond And left a woman behind to drown.
There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News.
It's Teddy Escapes, Blonde Drowns.
And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you.
The story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes.
Will Ted become president?
Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.
And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.
The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it.
So is there a curse?
Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.
Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
the day I am human.
And that's why I'm sharing my ups and downs with you guys.
Hi guys. I was sitting here, uh, recording episodes of Dear Cheekies and Cheekies and Chill, and I just had to take a time out and purge my thoughts and feelings here on Sincerely Janae because I've been so emotional lately, you guys.
Whether I'm in my feels, I've just had a breakthrough with my therapist, or I've just had a really deep conversation with my siblings, or I'm in glam I'm getting ready for an award show, I'm sharing my most intimate thoughts with you on the podcast. You guys know I always keep it real with you guys, but this time I'm taking it to the next level.
Listen to Cheeky's and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Radhida Vluchia, and I'm the host of A Really Good Cry podcast, and I have the opportunity to talk to Vivian too.
She is someone who is definitely changing the way we talk about She is a former Wall Street trader, turned personal finance educator, content creator, and now the author of a New York Times bestselling book, Rich AF.
Whether you're trying to get out of debt, build wealth, negotiate like a boss, or just finally understand how to do money right, Vivian is the person to ask.
I think that is terrifying because not understanding your own money and not understanding finances is one of the easiest ways to get in a situation where you don't have options and there is risk for financial abuse.
Yeah. You don't have the money to leave. You cannot make choices that take money out of the equation because you don't have it.
And that is why every single woman needs to be good with money.
Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back to Point of Origin.
today our special guest is chef david zilber who is the fermentation guru at Noma or more formally known as the director of fermentation at Noma he is also the author of the essential book on fermentation called the notebook guide to fermentation and we are pleased to have him join us today David thank Thank you so much for joining us on Point of Origin.
Thank you for having me.
Of course. Pleasure to be here.
Of course, of course.
I ended up in Copenhagen because I was fascinated, like I think many people are in the world of food, about Restaurant Normandy.
So I shot off a letter to Denmark and they snatched me up.
That was in 2014 in the spring.
Yeah, I worked in the main kitchen for about a year and that was very much a shock coming from my little provincial country of Canada to the big leagues of European Michelin star, 50 best -list restaurants.
But I stuck with it and kept my head down and tried to work hard. And about a year into my tenure, Rene and Dan Juicy, the old head chef, sat me down and said they have plans for me and they wanted me to start working in the fermentation lab.
That's kind of where I've seen a position.
When David Zilber reached out to Noma in 2014, team, Noma was already very much a thing.
Part of its enduring influence then and even now has been the team's ability to attract and retain talent.
Like Matt Orlando said, most of the folks in Noma's kitchen aren't from Denmark.
That can be credited in part to Red Zeppi's investment in R &D.
After a year and a half at Noma, Silber was promoted and now holds the position of Director of Fermentation, which is one of the most distinguished in the field.
I've always been a really nerdy guy.
You know, like, I never went to university.
I barely scraped through high school.
But in my own private life, you know, I've always had this thirst for knowledge.
I spent, you know, way too much time on Wikipedia or, you know, just picking up science nonfiction books on my own.
And that was, for a long time, kind of my form of relaxation outside of the kitchen and my form of entertainment.
And by the time I got to know him at the age of 27 or 28 there'd been enough under my belt by that point in terms of my own private reading that I just had the capacity to explain a lot of things that maybe other cooks in the kitchen might have taken for granted.
One kind of token example, one day the bone marrow wasn't doing so well and then I had to explain, oh well So, you know, the fat inside marrow is an interlinked layer of cells that contain water.
So if you dehydrate it slightly before service, you remove that surface water and trap sugar molecules, which will help it caramelize better.
Yeah, within a year, you know, I was being told that I'd start doing something else.
I'd never expected that.
That's not why I arrived at Noma.
But it was kind of like one of these life -changing moments where you're like, oh, this could lead to some really amazing opportunities for me.
me but i'd also like to say that you know like me ending up in the fermentation that doesn't necessarily lie into the top of this restaurant like there's a lot of people that make this place work and you know there's amazing cooks like meta and june in the test kitchen that have a creative talent that i feel i lack in some ways in terms of their decisiveness or the need to explore flavors in this world and their creativity is just you know they're they're kind of like which is leading forces in that kitchen.
Maybe conceptually I'm better suited to tinkering with fermentation and coming up with ingredients or building blocks.
But in this restaurant, you know, there's no one cook at the top of the mountain.
It's like between our head chef and our ingredient manager and the sous chef, it takes a village.
Noma has expanded its influence by attracting talents from outside of the food world like anthropologists, molecular chemists, and agricultural scientists scientists who work in its Nordic food lab.
So when you hear David Zilber talk about the environment at Noma from his perch as the now director of the fermentation lab, it was a really big deal for him to get that promotion.
Do you think Noma, do you think of it as a restaurant?
It is a restaurant.
I mean, that's how I had to define it.
I would say that it is, but it's very rare that I walk into a restaurant and also call it an institution.
you know and and that's kind of also how i think about it when you moved into a role that was focused on fermentation this is happening i mean you say maybe four or five years ago concurrently with a moment nationally or globally rather where fermentation was coming not really back back into fashion but was being centered on restaurant menus.
Can you say or can you theorize maybe why over the last couple years it seems like the focus on fermentation has really been centered in restaurants all over the world?
But I really do think it's less of a trend and more of an understanding.
Like there is a deep comprehension that these things aren't out of reach for people.
And as they explore them for themselves, they realize that it's powerful.
and I don't think you can ever take that power away that's not something you get bored of once you make it you have it on hand you're cooking with it forever more so yeah it's once you can focus on what's within your boundaries you can then be free to kind of look outside them and say okay now I can take inspiration other faces but then translate that to where I am and make it make sense for me and that's exactly what we've done with the fermentation program from the get -go from most first investigations on the household that but with the Nordic Food Lab.
These were a bunch of very curious and passionate cooks that were just looking abroad for inspiration and trying to translate that to the terroir of their current locale.
And in doing so, you end up with a deep understanding.
You're not just learning by rote.
It takes a profound picking apart and understanding of the inner machinations to build something back up that is completely new.
So it's definitely exploded and expanded, and the amount of restaurants that would definitely fall under that cachet has grown many times over, but it's still there.
there and even though even at Noma you know we might cook with olive oil here or there get our seaweed from Japan and truffles from Australia and kind of trace our footsteps through our travel it doesn't feel like we're any less about celebrating the region that we're in or coming up with flavors that make for a distinct cuisine so I think it's as valid now as it ever was but it's also matured you know and it's grown beyond that kind of boyish naivete about making making your mark on the world that maybe got it to come about in the first place.
And I definitely think it's kind of aged into a really amazing place where you have all these amazing restaurants with Michelin stars producing, you know, whole generations of talent.
I'm curious how, you know, stories like yours of chefs coming from different parts of the world for the Noma experience and then, you know, in many cases, moving on to start their own restaurants or even in the cases where they stay how much has the worldliness of the staff over the years uh impacted the cuisine at noma um and in copenhagen as well the influence of of like a multinational kitchen has impacted on that incredibly profoundly i know offense to the danes but back in canada i mean we have first nations people we have aboriginals but this in In Denmark, you know, this is where white
people come from. And so it was a fairly homogenous society by its nature.
But as Norma kept growing, I mean, the amount of Danes that represented the kitchen kind of dwindled as it attracted world attention.
And it became an attractor for, you know, top chefs around the world kind of siphoning off the creme de la creme of that crop.
So what happened at Chappaquiddick?
Well, it really depends on who you talk to.
There are many versions of what happened in 1969 when a young Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond.
And left a woman behind to drown.
There's a famous headline, I think, in the New York Daily News.
It's, Teddy escapes, blonde drowns.
And in a strange way, right, that sort of tells you the story really became about Ted's political future, Ted's political hopes.
Will Ted become president?
Chappaquiddick is a story of a tragic death and how the Kennedy machine took control.
And he's not the only Kennedy to survive a scandal.
The Kennedys have lived through disgrace, affairs, violence, you name it.
So is there a curse?
Every week we go behind the headlines and beyond the drama of America's royal family.
Listen to United States of Kennedy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, everyone. It's Jenae, a .k .a.
Cheekies, from Cheekies and Chill Podcast. And I'm launching an all -new mini -podcast series called Sincerely Jenae.
Sure, I'm a singer, author, businesswoman, and podcaster, but at the end of the day, I am human.
And that's why I'm sharing my ups and downs with you guys.
Hi, guys. I was sitting here recording episodes of Dear Cheekies and Cheekies and Chill, and I just had to take a time out and purge my thoughts and feelings here on Sincerely Janaye, because I've been so emotional lately, you guys.
Whether I'm in my feels, I've just had a breakthrough with my therapist, or I've just had a really deep conversation with my siblings, or I'm in glam getting ready for an award show, I'm sharing my most intimate thoughts with you on the podcast. podcast you guys know I always keep it real with you guys but this time I'm taking it to the next level listen to cheekies and chill on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts hey I'm Radhida Vloukia and I'm the host of a really good cry podcast and I have the opportunity to talk to Vivian too she is someone who is definitely
changing the way we talk about money she is a former Wall Street trader turned personal finance educator content creator and and now the author of a New York Times best -selling book, Rich AF.
Whether you're trying to get out of debt, build wealth, negotiate like a boss, or just finally understand how to do money right, Vivian is the person to ask.
I think that is terrifying because not understanding your own money and not understanding finances is one of the easiest ways to get in a situation where you don't have options and there is risk for financial abuse.
You don't have the the money to leave. You cannot make choices that take money out of the equation because you don't have it.
And that is why every single woman needs to be good with money.
Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So when it comes to New Nordic food, we talk a lot about farms and ingredients and sourcing.
And even though conceptually we understand these things, it all feels and sounds kind of nebulous.
So we wanted to talk to a chef who was influenced by the New Nordic food movement, not necessarily from having worked in the kitchens at Noma or like restaurants in Copenhagen, but having having observed the style of cooking from afar and let it infuse their own.
So we talked to Chef Jeremy Charles, who is considered to be one of the very best chefs in Canada.
And we're talking to Chef Charles about a cod.
And I think in the way that we discuss the utilization of the fish, you will hear with a lot more specificity the philosophical and gastronomical role of New Nordic food in his own.
So while obviously Noma did not invent utilizing local fish in its entirety, there is something about the surrounding ideology presented by Chef Charles through this Michelin star lens, which I think will help people understand how the new Nordic style has really rippled outward. So here is Chef Jeremy Charles.
Charles. We're here at Rifflin Hitch Lodge, uh, an incredible fishing lodge and a state in Labrador on the Eagle River, which I think you can hear in the background.
And, uh, I'm here with one of Canada's most renowned and celebrated chefs, Jeremy Charles today.
Hey, how's it going?
own thanks for hanging out oh thanks for having me i mean what a beautiful spot to be i grew up in saint john's which is the capital of newfoundland and labrador i spent a lot of my summers uh in a small fishing village with my grandmother and grandfather yeah it was a place where they lived off the land you know they grew their gardens they ate from the land and sea picked berries and uh you know as a kid i spent a lot of time down on on the wharf cutting out cod tongues and really being exposed to the traditional ways and roots of Newfoundland you know and i spent a lot of time in the kitchen
with my grandparents cooking a lot of traditional meals you know we'd go out picking berries and come back and make a beautiful pie and and again going down to the wharf and you know bringing up two codfish and splitting them with my grandfather and on a rock in front of the house and using all the parts of the codfish you You know, it wasn't just the boneless, skinless loins.
It was, you know, busting down the cod's head and taking out the cod tongues and the napes and just using the whole fish and celebrating the whole animal.
You know, all the remains went back into the garden to help fertilize the gardens.
There was nothing that went to waste.
And, you know, they were eating organically before the word organic really meant anything to people.
You know, that generation of people.
my grandmother's 92 right now and she's still making bread and buns and it's uh it's so inspiring and and uh it was that was just the way of life that's how people lived in newfoundland can you tell us a bit about what napes are for the listeners who might not be familiar yeah the cod napes well it's our way of saying the uh the fins the collar of the codfish and we cut those out and they're almost like the uh the chicken wing of the codfish they're so beautiful and and so much gelatin and they're just something you pick up in your hands and you get tucked into it you know it's uh it's uh yeah
it's it's probably the best way to describe it and i understand it's one of your favorite parts of the cod too yeah i mean a lot of people again at market and stuff are just buying boneless skinless cod and you see people bone out fish and you know they take off the loins and the whole fish goes over the side or in the bin it's just like my god you know there's so much to a codfish more than just the just the uh the loin so uh when we're breaking down cod we're yeah you use the nape and the tongues and the cheeks the heads and we use the sounds which are the the sound ballast of the fish and um
yeah it's uh you know for for newfoundland that's the whole reason why people came to newfoundland was for the codfish you know when when you say the word fish people just assume you're talking about codfish and cod is king and always will be you Yeah.
Can you talk a little bit about the role that cod played over the last few centuries here and up until the 1990s when the industry began to decline here?
Cod fish was everything to Newfoundland and most a lot of parts of Labrador.
I mean, the island was full of fishing communities all across the island and it sustained generations of people.
and you know we traded salt cod for molasses and rum and salt and you know we ship cod all around the world spain portugal you know down the islands jamaica and it was such an important resource and such an important part of our obviously culture and it's kind of ingrained in who we are and the whole idea is to celebrate again all the wild beautiful ingredients from land and see we're so fortunate here in Newfoundland we're able to serve wild game moose and rabbits and partridge and grouse and some of the most beautiful seafood in the world scallops and sea urchin and obviously codfish and snow
crab lobster uh whelks razor clams uh you know the list goes on but uh you know for many years a lot of those products were just like frozen or just shipped out of the province to japan new york boston you know china and russia and you know sea urchin or welks or razor clams you know those are things i didn't see at my grandmother's table you know and people really didn't acknowledge those ingredients and i was like my god you know living in these big cities and seeing how prized these ingredients were to so many people it was It's like, God, we have all this beautiful, beautiful things back home
that are not being celebrated or put on plates.
So I was really excited when I did return home to start to showcase these ingredients that were really kind of, yeah, not part of the culture, not part of the diet, you know.
And, yeah, that was really, really exciting for sure.
You know, you're only as good as your products.
And when you have beautiful products, you just try to keep it simple and showcase those things.
But those relationships are a big part of it.
and it's not just ordering off an order sheet and you know cooking it's all about what goes into sourcing these ingredients and things we are able to tell you a story actually where the food is actually coming from you know and how it's been harvested and and what neck of the woods is coming from and almost down to the individual yeah and that's all comes back to creating a sense of place and and uh for many years i don't think new fan really had a food identity shall we say we kind of got lost in space.
I don't know, we're an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, way out on the end of Canada.
For many years, we were forgotten about.
And even when people talked about Newfoundland, they talked about fish and chips and deep -fried food.
Everybody here didn't want any traditional foods.
They wanted everything else outside of the province.
And so I think it was about 10, 15 years ago, maybe things started to change you know i think you know myself and jeremy and a few other people were a big part of that of bringing back being proud of the ingredients around us and proud of the food and and really again going back to our roots you know and back to our root cellars and growing things in our gardens and showing people that it's okay to to live off the land it's okay to celebrate the things around you it doesn't have to come from outside the province you know For many years, people always wanted stuff from outside and it was like nobody
focused on all the beautiful things we had.
And I think that comes back to education too, especially with all the wild edibles here, all the beautiful chanterelles and all the wonderful things that are in the woods that are just at our fingertips that people had no idea about.
Not many anyhow. you know but uh yeah it's been it's been a great time to to be part of a definite food movement you know it's a wonderful culture here and it's a special place and i'm super proud to be to be home and to be able to come to places like this and spend time with friends and to fish and hunt and again live off the land and be with family our last guest today chef bo beck is one of the trailblazers of the copenhagen food scene he first made his name at restaurant palstian where he won a michelin star and in 2011 he he opened up his restaurant Geist, where he's still the executive chef
today. We're picking up with him speculating on how Danish culture might have been the key to understanding the formation of the Nordic food movement.
Here's Chef Bobeck.
If you're born in Italy or Spain or France, which is the big countries in our part of the world, our continent, I bet that they're under the spell of the mama culture.
That your mama would look at them and say, my boy, don't you change a thing.
You're beautiful, you're strong, you have the right genes.
I bet it's the same here in America.
But when you're born in Denmark, your mother looks at you with straight, honest eyes, very clear.
She says, if you want to be anything, you've got to learn.
You've got to learn language.
Because you live in a country that only has 6 million people.
No one understands your tongue.
So if you want to accomplish anything, you got to open up your eyes.
That's what you're being taught.
Long story short, I think what happened was we were a group of maybe 20 chefs around that time.
And this is because there is a group of chefs who are able to work across Europe without being paid and then eventually bring those skills from, in some cases, three Michelin star restaurants back to Copenhagen.
And so now you have kind of the makings of a new food culture because you have a group of highly skilled and trained chefs who have just arrived back to Copenhagen in the early 2000s.
Is that right? It might sound ridiculous, no pay, but it was very simple.
Otherwise, you don't get inside the door.
So how did you survive?
You work at a cafe next there.
You do some shifts.
You do a job as a dishwasher.
You get enough to rent.
The ironic positive side of it is you're working six days a week.
You don't need clothes.
I mean one set of clothes lasts a week.
You don't need food because you're eating at the restaurant.
You talk about Nordic and the creation and the birth of it.
the romantic story that I try and and the way I try and explain it is it's a little bit like a cat that gets lured up in the tree it's not concerned about how it's going to get down again it's just going for it there's something that's more interesting up in that tree and that's why it goes up there then there's no doubt about it that Renee who everyone knows at Noma was simply just a better translator of everything.
He by far was better man at setting up an organization around the whole thing and putting words to it and executing it and boy oh boy has he changed it and I couldn't be more proud of it and it's it's as simple as that.
You know there's this line I always use, how can you miss something if you don't know it exists.
René made it exist, so you would crave it.
Danish food, the Nordic style approach, has the same strength in architecture as well.
it's very clean lines very understandable almost naked and when you work in such a visual and flavorful clear vision it becomes much easier to understand the language and I think it has many similarities to Japanese Japanese lifestyle and cooking and maybe the world was just begging for someone to open their eyes and it happened to be him or us that group of people and but there always need to be a face on something and were you all talking to each other about a collective vision for for the food that you wanted to cook?
I think we talk about it, but not in the sense that you would hope that we would talk about it.
We are friends. But what you all have collectively done has been transformative in that people are thinking about cuisine as something that is closely related to identity entity and the amount of pride and resourcefulness that Renee was able to help articulate as a very visible and charismatic leader really inspired a lot of chefs around the world and in turn it brought a lot of people to Copenhagen and really has given Copenhagen this reputation and your Your restaurant is a big part of that as well.
And so I wonder now that this thing that we didn't know we wanted to exist, it existed.
It has thrived in such a way that now everyone is trying to create their own equivalent for their culture.
What do you think about this movement that you helped build?
And what do you think about its utility in the future, if at all, if it needs to have a future, given how far it's come in the last, let's say, 10 or 15 years?
Let me give an analogy of one of the big staples of America, American football.
New England Patriots.
Either people hate them or they love them.
They have a guy, a quarterback called Tom Brady.
And a genius also, Bill Belichick, you know, do your job.
But the thing is, when the team starts out, they have to figure out how to work, how to play, how to make this happen.
And then after that, all the other teams start studying them.
What are their moves?
What are their secrets?
So what keeps them in the game for so long is their self -reflection of acknowledging we need to move.
We need to be in a movement as well.
We can't be static.
We can't celebrate our successes.
And that's, I think, one of the keystones to the survival of any great cuisine is that it's in movement.
That it's constantly evolving.
when you live inside the forest you just see the trees you don't see the forest and you're just doing what you do you guys you see the forest because you're looking from a distance as long as we just keep doing what it is we're doing we will become relevant and if not so be it it's not important what's important is One of my life mantras is, it's easier to remember the truth than the lie.
And if you live a life like that, it's so easy.
Because you just got to do what you do.
You don't have to be concerned.
I think life gets complicated when you start doing what you think you should be doing because other people are telling you, you should be doing this.
So how should we regard the most influential international food movement of the last decade?
As something that happened or is happening?
What's unequivocally true is that Scandinavia is now very much on the map alongside France, Spain, and Italy as the most regarded cuisines in Europe and in fact among the very best in the world.
The new Nordic movement spawned a very real and very robust hospitality industry, gastro tourism sector, food artisans and innumerable small farmers.
The movement that we used to call New Nordic, now it's just Nordic and I think make more than anything, that pretty much says it all.
I'd like to thank our guests today, Matt Orlando of Amass and Broaden and Build, David Dilber, Fermentation Director at Noma, and Bo Beck of Geist, all in Copenhagen.
Thanks to Chef Jeremy Charles of Riemens and the Merchant Tavern in St. John's, Newfoundland.
Special thanks to Simon Lavender, who created the music featured in today's episode.
Special thanks to my business partner who makes all things possible at Whetstone, our co -founder, Melissa Shee.
Thanks, Mel. Thank you to Celine Glager, who is our lead producer.
To Kat Hong, our editor.
To Haben Obasalase and Quentin Lebeau.
our production interns.
To our friends at iHeartRadio for helping us bring you this podcast. To Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer, engineer J .J.
Palsway, and executive producer Christopher Haciotis.
I'm your host, the Origin Forager, Stephen Satterfield.
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