Article About Menu

Mette Fraende – Tue Apr 19, 6:37 am ET

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark's Noma won one of the restaurant world's highest accolades for the second consecutive year on Monday with a menu that remains deeply committed to an innovative Nordic cuisine.

Noma's 33-year-old chef Rene Redzepi, whose restaurant topped the S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list released late on Monday, has created a menu that includes sea urchin and dill, potatoes and milk skin, beef cheek and pear.

Redzepi, an ambassador for the New Nordic Food program set up by the Nordic Council of Ministers, has headed the restaurant since its 2003 opening.

The Noma approach to cooking is concentrated on obtaining the best raw materials from the Nordic region such as Icelandic skyr curd, halibut, Greenland musk ox and berries.

"Noma is not about olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives. On the contrary, we've been busy exploring the Nordic regions discovering outstanding foods and bringing them back to Denmark," Noma said on its website.

"This goes for very costly ingredients but also for more disregarded, modest ingredients such as grains and pulses, which you'll taste here in new and unexpected contexts," it said.

"VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY"

The two Michelin star restaurant does its own smoking, salting, pickling, drying, grilling, and baking, prepares its own vinegars and concocts its own distilled spirits such as its own eaux de vies.

Noma makes systematic use of beers and ales, fruit juices and fruit-based vinegars for its sauces and soups rather than wine, and allows vegetables, herbs, spices and wild plants in season to play a prominent role in its cooking.

"We feel that the cooking at Noma is fairly ambitious but then again, Nordic cuisine must possess a certain purity," Noma said.

Located on the ground floor of a renovated listed 18th Century warehouse in the old Christianshavn district of Copenhagen, the restaurant's fittings and furnishings also embrace the Nordic...