René Redzepi's Culinary Language

Directed by Pierre Deschamps, Noma, My Perfect Storm follows chef René Redzepi and his Copenhagen restaurant Noma, which was ranked best restaurant in the world by the British magazine Restaurant from 2010–2012. Deschamps was granted candid access to Redzepi during 2013, a turbulent year during which Noma was briefly unseated from its reign at the top of the chart, before regaining the title in 2014. “Do I believe that there is a ‘best restaurant in the world’?” Redzepi asks during the film. “No, of course not. It’s fucking ridiculous. But it changed this restaurant forever.”

The film is a kind of sequel to Deschamps’s 2009 documentary Looking North For A Gastronomic Revolution, which documented a storied invitational, in which Redzepi invited acclaimed chefs from across the globe to work with Nordic ingredients. The lunch and dinner they prepared for international food writers and select privileged diners became a legend that framed the future of Noma. Redzepi’s increasing attention to foraging and his use of often little-known local ingredients developed into the central philosophy of the restaurant, where he became known for his schematic development of flavors (like a mad scientist, transforming raw materials through precisely detailed programs of aging, smoking, and other flavor-enhancing methods). Redzepi characterizes this approach as the production of the building blocks for his new cuisine: “As a cook, you’re creating a language. We need an alphabet to create sentences, and the more letters we have, the more beautiful the prose.”