Noma: My Perfect Storm – A Chef’s Perspective

Note: After enjoying and appreciating her chef’s perspective on a review of the movie Burnt, about a fictional chef, we asked Chef Elizabeth Buckingham to view and weigh in on this movie, about an actual chef. We were interested to see what she had to say. We think you will be too. 

If, at the tender age of 32, you’ve achieved your industry’s highest honor, then what next? This question is at the heart of the new film Noma: My Perfect Storm, which follows Chef Rene Redzepi over a period of four years. His modern Danish restaurant, Noma, won the coveted accolade of World’s Best Restaurant an unprecedented four times between 2010 and 2014.

Chef biopics and documentaries are certainly something of a trend these days; from El Bulli’s Cooking in Progress (2010) to El Celler de Can Roca’s El Somni (2014), moviegoers are enthralled by the precision and artistry required to create breathtaking forty-plus course tasting menus at the world’s finest restaurants. Noma: My Perfect Storm focuses almost exclusively on Redzepi, a half-Macedonian immigrant who revolutionized Danish (and Scandinavian) cuisine without being either, and made Copenhagen a food destination to boot. This dichotomy – a stranger in a strange land who now happens to be one of Denmark’s most famous residents – provides interesting internal conflict in a film that is ultimately about the external quest for perfection.

Redzepi states that he wants his food “to indicate where in the world you are, and in what season,” and indeed, Noma introduced the world to hyper-local sourcing and foraging. Pine needles, sweet woodruff, samphire, and of course, live ants – not ingredients you find in your local Whole Foods, and not ingredients that most people are even familiar with. Ultimately, it’s painfully easy to make food like Redzepi’s appear too precious; not only is it only accessible to a few thousand people each year, but it also isn’t the type of food one craves. Rather than your nonna’s Sunday tomato sauce, have you ever craved crispy reindeer moss with spice and crème fraiche? Doubtful. That said, we now live in a world in which tomatoes in January are commonplace and accepted, even if it’s snowing outside. Redzepi’s food may be overly precious, but it also emphasizes that we collectively are critically detached from our food, its origins and the seasons.

The film delves a little more into Redzepi’s personal life than other similar films have done with their star chefs, and watching a scene where Redzepi and one of his daughters fry eggs, I found myself wondering how the chef eats regularly. Was the scene staged? Is his home fridge stocked with grilled roses and smoked quail eggs, or is Noma merely his “chef persona,” much like a movie star who only embodies roles for the length of shooting? Having only the barest knowledge of the pressure and intensity of the world’s best professional kitchens, I imagine that chefs like Redzepi are not particularly pleasant to live with. That genius and intensity translates to incredible plates, but rarely makes for a calm and delightful home life. How, then, does the chef balance the two? I wish the film had delved deeper into that delicate tightrope; instead we watch scene after scene of Redzepi quietly eviscerating his team, which I suspect might be mandatory in films about star chefs.

Noma won the World’s Best Restaurant Award four times, but has been denied that third elusive Michelin star; one wonders what might be next for Redzepi. Ferran Adria closed his world-famous El Bulli – where only eight thousand people per year could eat, despite a waiting list in the millions – to focus on education, conceptual development and his still-mysterious foundation. Redzepi has temporarily moved Noma to Sydney and closed the Copenhagen location, and reportedly plans to close permanently at the end of 2016. Chefs at this level constantly need the new, the untried, the controversial in order to stay interested, because rote, everyday cooking has long ago lost its luster. In these chefs, one can certainly see the shadows of tortured artistic greats like Van Gogh and Hemingway, who, some argue, simply became bored and uninterested in life when they were no longer challenged. Standard food no longer carries meaning or weight for these chefs, and I wonder if that quest for perfection and reinvention carries out of their restaurant lives and into their personal lives in a manageable way.

The argument, then, remains now as always – is cooking an art? Are chefs artists? Just like paintings, or music, or opera, food inspires deeply personal and divisive opinions. Unlike painting or music or opera, however, everyone has to eat. It’s truly the one thing that unites every single person on this planet, and the advent of globe-trotting “foodies,” cameras in hand, determined to eat at every major world restaurant, shows us that it can also definitively separate the haves from the have-nots. Noma’s food may be all yeast caramel and autumn leaves, but there is no question that it is more than simple nourishment – it defines both a time and a place.

Noma: My Perfect Storm is a technically beautiful film, a fairly easy feat in a land of blindingly white snow, clean Danish design and Noma’s impeccably gorgeous and confusing food. As a chef, I absolutely appreciate the backbreaking labor – tweezers figure prominently – and utter, true genius behind these plates, as well as the cast of hundreds supporting the star player. By the same token, I find this food clinical and cold (metaphorically, of course), because it doesn’t represent my belief in food as warmth and love and generosity. I believe there is a reason that no female chefs have made a name for themselves in the same arena as Adria, Achatz or Redzepi – because, as the old (albeit stereotypical) saying goes, “Men cook to impress. Women cook to feed.” By the end of Noma: My Perfect Storm, I’m certainly impressed, but I’m also still hungry.

Thank you to In Good Taste Denver for the opportunity to view a screening of Noma: My Perfect Storm!

Chef Elizabeth Buckingham is a Colorado native; she earned her culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu Paris. A spontaneous scuba diving trip to the Bahamas following her graduation led to the next eight years of her career: she cooked aboard dive boats and later progressed to head chef aboard private yachts worldwide. Elizabeth teaches public and private cooking classes in the Denver area and offers corporate recipe development and trade-show services to her clients. She thinks everyone should know how to cook at least a little bit. Find her on Twitter @chefbuckingham.