Noma, the three-Michelin-star Danish restaurant that shocked foodies by announcing it would close at the end of 2024, is coming to London – for one day only – as it rolls out a series of spin-off ventures including its own seaweed farm on a remote fjord.
The Copenhagen restaurant, which charges 3,950 Danish kroner (£453) a person for a tasting menu of mostly foraged vegetables, will next month collaborate with a Mexican restaurant in Marylebone and a cocktail bar in Sea Containers House on the South Bank.
Thomas Frebel, the creative director of Noma Projects, an offshoot of the restaurant promising to deliver “Noma 3.0”, will lead a six-person team to London for the partnerships with Michelin-starred Mexican-British restaurant Kol and the Lyaness cocktail bar run by the famed bartender Ryan Chetiyawardana (better known as Mr Lyan).
Neither venture, however, will offer Noma fans a full meal and being able to sit down is not guaranteed.
At the partnership with Kol on 10 September, customers will be offered “a series of savoury bites followed by a dessert” together with a cocktail or non-alcoholic alternative for £95.
Frebel said he has yet to decide the menu, but it would celebrate Noma’s locavore ideals, which means primarily using produce that is grown, foraged or produced locally. There would, he said, definitely be some sort of local seafood ceviche, a dish made from British corn, which is likely to be at peak harvest during the collaboration, and the dessert will be Mexican chocolate ice-cream or sorbet paired with seaweed salt.
“It will kind of be a series of bites. The idea is to take our knowledge and understanding and try and be inspired by being in the UK and working with Santiago Lastra [the co-founder and co-owner of Kol],” Frebel said. “We will come up with something exciting and wonderful.” Tickets will go on sale on 20 August.
The Noma team are selling 60 tickets each for three 90-minute sittings, in which customers will be encouraged to chat to the chefs and try Noma Project’s new range of seven pantry products including smoked mushroom garum, a corn yuzu hot sauce and “forager’s vinaigrette”.
Prices for many of the pantry items have yet to be released, but 175ml of Vegan XO hot sauce costs £33, 100ml of Dashi RDX – “a powerful reduction of dashi made from kombu, katsuobushi, sake, and mushrooms” – is £24, and 250ml of smoked mushroom garum “made by hand by the Noma fermentation lab team” is £19.
Frebel said the London partnerships were the first of a series of projects that would accelerate after Noma – whose name comes from the Danish words nordisk (nordic) and mad (food) – closes its Copenhagen restaurant at the end of next year and transforms it into a research and development laboratory.
Other ideas include possibly creating its own “fermentation facilities inspired by local traditions” in different countries to “develop more flavours [and to] customise more flavour to the region”. Another plan could result in “our own seaweed farm in one of the fjords of Scandinavia”.
“With Noma Projects we want to share Noma’s innovation and flavour ideas with the world,” Frebel said as he prepared for evening service at the restaurant’s waterside location in the Christianshavn neighbourhood.
“We are looking into many more [partnerships] across Europe, maybe America,” he said. “The short-term plan is trying to work out what people want, what people resonate with.
“What would be incredible to figure out and to develop, [would be] ‘what is the iPhone of food?’; what people don’t even know, yet, that they want to use everyday to make very meal a little more delicious. We want to inspire them to cook more, to cook a little healthier, a lot more plant-based.”
Frebel said the range of sauces and fermented products would be expanded, and there “could even be could be little Noma stores around the world”.
When the restaurant closes at the end of 2024, ending an era that has seen it top the world’s 50 best restaurants list five times, Frebel said the team led by René Redzepi would “really allow ourselves to daydream”.
