Noma's taste of tomorrow: creating the future of food | Hacker News Reader

Noma's taste of tomorrow: creating the future of food

wired.co.uk

45 pointspmcpinto23 comments

The last few months I've noticed how many people at the top of their respective professions put artificial and somewhat arbitrary limitations on themselves which seems to help creativity flourish.

Rene Redzepi as seen here does a geographic restriction and also was only vegetarian, though I believe will be adding meat to the menu in the future.

Another chef is Magnus Nillson at Faviken, which is more geographically isolated and uses much more local items.

In a recent interview I learned that Steven Spielberg used to (maybe still does) try to artificially restrict the budgets of movies he directed so every possible thing was not at his disposal.

Noma was never vegetarian, but now appears to go in that direction: http://www.eater.com/2015/9/14/9324311/rene-redzepi-closes-n...

Only seasonally in the future though:

"At the new Noma Redzepi plans to eschew the "predictable progression" of a tasting menu in favor of a "reverent adherence to seasonality." In the fall, the menu will focus only on dishes made from wild game and "foraged autumnal ingredients." In the winter, Noma will transform into a seafood restaurant. And in the spring and summer where "the world turns green," Redzepi says that Noma will "become fully vegetarian," with most of the produce coming from the restaurant's farm."

Finishing up René's journal now, great read: http://www.amazon.com/Ren%C3%A9-Redzepi-A-Work-Progress/dp/0...

It's a puff piece about a restaurant. I'm not really seeing how it's different from other high-end restaurants doing unscalable things to stand out.

What is the basis for your assertion that standing out is their motivation, as opposed to wanting to offer their guests a fantastic culinary experience?

I'm not asserting that. Wired implicitly is with the "future of food" headline, and by running the story in a technology magazine. Also, whoever posted it here is implying that it's somehow interesting to hackers or as a startup. (Otherwise it would make more sense to post it to some other community devoted to gourmet dining.)

Quote: "I'm not really seeing how it's different from other high-end restaurants doing unscalable things to stand out." - my emphasis.

I did not post this, but from my perspective there are very interesting parallels between the hacker approach to problem solving and the way noma approaches cooking.

Redzepi is one of the best in the world at what he does, that alone should be sufficient to pique your interest!

Anthony Bordaine visits Noma in one of his shows on Netflix if you want to see more, it was alright.

Sometimes I wish that every article had a short tl;dr at the top.

This post looks great offering awesome pics and an interesting topic but I am too ADD to read it (and wondering if it's worth the time).

It's wrong to think that asking for a summary before you decide to read a lengthy article is low class, or ADD, or whatever. Most articles are garbage, and there's nothing impressive about wasting your time. In academia, the tl;dr at the top is called an abstract, and it's crucial for allowing readers to navigate the literature.

True. And abstracts actually seems like a really good filter for a search engine.

In my dreams, the major link aggregators like reddit, HN, and Facebook distill a crowd-sourced abstract for every article making the rounds on social networks (rather than just compiling loose comments). Then a browser plugin shows them alongside the article.

Isn't this basically how Slashdot works?

Not sure what you mean. In the sense that it features user-submitted summaries for links, yes. But there are lots of blogs where each post is a selected link with some sort of background info. (E.g., Marginal Revolution also has this format for many links.) My dream is to have this for all sufficiently popular links going around the internet on a given day, and to let the summary get progressively more refined.

TLDR: Award-winning Danish high-end restaurant specialises in locally sourced highly-seasonal food, including ingredients which are foraged rather than farmed; has attached "Food lab" to find and promote innovative ways to use Scandinavian ingredients, including tasks such as finding out why wood ants taste like lemongrass and perfecting fermentation techniques.

If reading about high end food preparation makes you salivate it's interesting enough (and really not that long), but certainly doesn't justify the ludicrously hyperbolic headline.

Edit: corrected country

Noma is Danish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)

"ludicrously hyperbolic" - talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Do you think the idea that the "future of food" revolves around high end restaurants putting arbitrary geographic restrictions on food sourcing isn't ludicrous or isn't hyperbolic? Why not?

Noma is much more than its geographic restriction. They experiment with insects, which are likely to be a important source of protein in the future and the novel application of preparation method, for instance fermentation. But the geographic restriction in itself is an important part of the future of food, in a world where climate change is a an existential threat and transporting bananas and rice 1000s of kms is not sustainable. Demonstrating to the world what can be done through local sourcing will be defining for the future of food.

Food prep without hats or hairnets? yum.

Those dishes undergo scrutiny far beyond what would allow a hair to slip in. They literally inspect every leaf. If a hair falls unnoticed into the food they are completely failing at their job.

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