Food & Spirits

ABC Nightline Interviews Best Chef in the World, René Redzepi

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ABC News “Nightline” illuminates how the young chef, René Redzepi, elevated Noma in Copenhagen to its standing as best restaurant in the world in the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants rankings. Also during the interview, he also discusses his new cuisine he calls, “New Nordic.” The chef spoke with “Nightline” recently about his cooking philosophy, his evolution as a chef and the advantage he sees at being an outsider.

 Here are a few highlights of Rene Redzepi’s interview:

What makes the New Nordic cuisine different?

Rene Redzepi: “I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something — high gastronomy can be something very present and doesn’t have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a restaurant,” said Redzepi. “You can actually, I mean a carrot has the same value as caviar if you know how to cook it and if you deal with it properly.”

What is the advantage of being an outsider to the Norwegian culture?

RR: “Our restaurant is known for doing a Nordic cuisine, a cuisine where we involve our natural products, our culinary heritage,” he said. “And we’ve stopped looking at our own products as something that doesn’t belong in the culinary top. But I think in order to do that, it’s been such a big advantage for me that I have a little outside upbringing, because if you are 100 percent native, I think sometimes you, things you grow up with, they’re just things you grow up with, you can never put them in another context.

Redzepi credits his Macedonian roots for giving him a fresh perspective on what was possible with Nordic cuisine.

RR: “I think it’s been to a big advantage that I grew up outside. Flat bread to a Scandinavian is a flat bread; something you have in your home and that’s it. You never do anything gastronomical with it and serve it as a restaurant.

Where did you grow up?

RR: “I’ve grown up partially in Macedonia. My father’s Muslim, my mother’s Danish,” said Redzepi. “So I’ve had a very different upbringing from most people in Denmark, because where we used to be in Macedonia, life was very different from Denmark. For instance, there were no refrigerators; there was only two cars in the city. And the whole family lived together in a house and everything was revolving around the meal.?

What did you learn from your family about food?

RR: “The whole day was planned around the meal. People were farmers, and if you had to have a chicken, you slaughtered the chicken. If you wanted to have a glass of milk you had to milk the cow. I never tasted Coca-Cola until I was 10 years old. If we wanted the drinks, my auntie, she took the old rose leaves and put sugar water over them to infuse, and so on and so on.”

What is one of your first food memories?

RR: “One of my first food memories is watermelon, for sure,” he said. “Because my family — they don’t do that now, they have cafes in Macedonia, but … back then they were farmers, and they lived on red peppers and watermelon. And still today, watermelon is something I love eating.

He continues, “And if it’s not that, there’s also, the [food memory] that’s very close is roasted chestnuts. In the season, freshly roasted chestnuts in the fire with cold milk on [it] as breakfast — that’s also a very, very big childhood memory. And then berries of all sorts, but that’s a Scandinavian meal.”

Do you consider yourself Danish or Macedonian?

RR: “I consider myself a Dane,” he said. “I have a Danish wife, my child is Danish and I am the Dane … with the not-so-Danish name, and some other ways of looking at things [that] perhaps a normal Dane wouldn’t.”

Do you eat pork?

RR: “I’m not a Muslim,” he said. “… I’ve always been told by my father, even though he’s a practicing Muslim, that we had to do what came naturally to us. And it’s impossible to escape pork in Denmark. I mean there’s 5 million people in Denmark and there’s 46 million pigs.”

So interning in France, you discovered El Bulli?

RR: “And I wanted to go to France and I did. It was [at] a three-star back then in Montpelier in ’97. I spent some time there and experienced how a three-star French cuisine is. And while I was there, I read some French paper about a restaurant in Spain, just across the border and it sounded very interesting. I went there and I booked a table two weeks in advance and I did — that was to be world-famous El Bulli restaurant. I ate there and there was also a big, clear mark in what has defined me. Because I was completely blown away back then, I remember. Here was something I hadn’t seen before. A chef that did his own thing. I was expecting to go to Spain to get French food. Not something so personal and something Spanish. It was a big inspiration. I applied for a job immediately, got a contract and I worked there the season after.”

How do you handle the pressure of cooking for guests who have such expectations now?

RR: “We have two types of guest in a restaurant. That’s at least how I see it. You have guests that believe that their opinion is the absolute truth, and then there’s guests that don’t believe that. I think that when you understand that and when you try–and when you know that there are people that believe that their opinion is the absolute truth, even when you have these 28 guys you have in the kitchen, who work and struggle to serve them, then if you accept that and realize that there’s nothing to do and focus on the others, then pressure is a relative thing, you know.”

So where is the next great cuisine coming from?

RR: “I don’t want to preach anything. But you can say that by doing it in Denmark, this cold spot in the north where people think nothing can grow, we’re also saying that it can be done anywhere. Perhaps the next big cuisine will be in Poland or wherever, you know, and most people there laugh a little bit when you say Poland.”

“But 10 years ago, people would laugh if somebody said Denmark.”

Excerpts of this article are from ABC News Sarah Rosenberg and Tom McCarthy’s online article “René Redzepi, Chef at Noma, on Being No. 1”. To read the entire story, click here.

ABC News “Nightline” is anchored by Cynthia McFadden, Terry Moran, and Martin Bashir. James Goldston is the executive producer. “Nightline” airs at 11:35 p.m. (ET/PT) weeknights on the ABC Television Network.

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Lanee Neil