By Jens Martin Skibsted and Bo Lindegaard
A new culinary movement has arrived to the world’s top kitchens. Originating from Copenhagen, the style of cooking is called “New Nordic,” as coined by René Redzepi, chef and owner of the “Best Restaurant in the World,” Noma.
Last year global food stars like David Chang, Andoni Aduriz, Jordan Kahn and Michel Bras travelled to René Redzepi’s MAD FoodCamp in Copenhagen, a public food festival and professional symposium.
The success of New Nordic cuisine in kitchens around the world is evidence in a list of fashionable ingredients like Icelandic skyr (a yogurt-like cultured milk product), truffles from Gotland, radish leaves, turnip tails, crispy cod skin, musk ox from Greenland, pickled elderberries and nasturtium. New Nordic explores the region’s relatively overlooked fish, game and produce—from the Arctic tundra to the Norwegian fjords—as well as utilizing more contemporary approaches to cooking.
It is said that Nordic food culture is old, but the restaurant culture is new—dinner used to be home cooked. This is only partly true; there never was a Nordic food, but plenty of Nordic foods. These vernacular home cooking traditions are very different from the extravagant New Nordic movement and a part of Nordic cuisine actually has a fairly old restaurant culture.
Because New Nordic style did not exist before this movement, its food is as such designed.
The idea of food as a design product is not new. Pasta is an example of a designed food, manufactured in countless shapes, each one designed to interact with the sauce and ingredients differently. Philippe Starck and Giorgetto Giugiaro both designed new pasta shapes in the ’80s.
We don’t necessarily think of food as design, but we love it when celebrity chefs like Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal treat it as design. Food is curiously under-designed; it is an essentially conservative medium. Future food shortages are likely to push designers to rethink what we eat. For example, insects and in vitro meat might become commercially viable and will have to be designed into our kitchens.
Strangely New Nordic rarely revisits the tradition of “smørrebrød” and “smorgasbord.” These open-faced sandwiches might be the main Scandinavian contribution to culinary excellence and has its roots in restaurants—not home cooking. Marcus Samuelsson, chef at President Obama’s inaugural dinner, and more recently Adam Aamann-Christensen have been introducing these sandwiches to New Yorkers.
We believe the truly exportable part of Nordic cuisine lies in this tradition. It is a tradition that is surprisingly similar to that of sushi: It consists of a small square-ish carbohydrate base with raw fish and other meat and highly decorative toppings including horseradish. They are served in a multitude of versions and often in a sparse setting. Beer and aquavit (not Sake) is served with smørrebrød. Like with sushi chefs the smørrebrødsjomfruer are specialized and not ordinary chefs. It took most by surprise that Japanese raw fish could be a global export. It shouldn’t be a surprise that smørrebrød could do the same.
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For a few years the two of us—a designer and a chef—have worked together to redesign smørrebrød. Our initial approach was to deconstruct the design to its base elements: Carbohydrates + meat + garnish = mouthful. Keywords were modular, aesthetic, innovative, fast and healthy.
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This is an example of how a piece can look:
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