The flavours from Noma, the poster child for destination restaurants, may be coming to a city near you. Next up: London.
The team behind the fabled Copenhagen restaurant is promoting its new business concept, Noma Projects, featuring the restaurant’s fermented condiments and sauces.
The first collaboration took place earlier this year in Kyoto, Japan. In September, it’s coming to the UK.
On September 10, half a dozen Noma Project chefs will descend on the modern Mexican restaurant Kol, in London’s Marylebone district, for three timed tastings. Customers will be served five Mexican-accented dishes that highlight Noma Projects’ products, a retail line that launched in 2022.
The event will be relatively affordable: tickets for the 90-minute slots cost £95 (US$120) and include two drinks as well as two products to take home.
There will be 60 tickets for each of the three time slots. For comparison, a meal at the restaurant in Copenhagen costs 3,950 Danish kroner (US$580).
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The project is part of the next iteration of the Noma brand, led by chef Rene Redzepi. Throughout the years, he has continually innovated the restaurant, doing pop-ups in cities around the world and even closing the original restaurant and reopening it in a new location as Noma 2.0, which in 2021 was crowned the No. 1 restaurant in the world by the influential World’s 50 Best list.
Earlier this year, Redzepi announced that the restaurant would cease to exist in its current form at the end of 2024, pointing toward a future of experimentation through the company’s test kitchen and lab.
The new Noma would be focused around Noma Projects, a series of ventures ranging from “special pantry products to new media endeavours to environmental programmes”.
Thomas Frebel, creative director of Noma Projects, says the London pop-up is a potential model for what Redzepi has called “Noma 3.0” going forward.
“The purpose of Noma Projects is to share the flavours of Noma to a wider audience, so we hope to bring our team and products to more cities in the future,” he says.
Kol’s chef and co-owner Santiago Lastra is a Noma alumni. He was part of the team that operated Noma’s residency in Tulum, Mexico in 2017, where he first met Frebel, who was then head of Noma’s research and development team.
The London meal will include dishes that feature products such as smoked mushroom garum, a condiment traditionally based on fermented fish; cep oil, made with locally foraged mushrooms; and dashi RDX, made with kelp, kombu and sake.
Among the dishes, which will be made with British produce in keeping with Noma’s “locavore” focus, are a seafood ceviche with seaweed, succulents and Noma Project’s bottled Forager’s Vinaigrette, which is made from its wild rose vinegar and blackcurrant wood oil.
There will also be an octopus tostada filled with cabbage and flavoured with Noma’s vegan XO sauce, and a dessert of chocolate sorbet flavoured with the roasted kelp salt.
A few new products will be featured, including the Forager’s Vinaigrette. London guests will also have access to Noma Projects’ latest experiment: corn yuzu hot sauce, which is not yet released.
Noma Projects earlier this year collaborated with the restaurant Locale in Tokyo, coinciding with a full-scale, nine-week restaurant pop-up in Kyoto, Japan.
“We wanted to open ourselves up and have fun engaging with more of our community rather than at a sit-down dinner,” Lastra says of the London event.
He sees it as an opportunity to interact more closely with guests than a sit-down dinner usually presents, “while showing the possibilities of the products in everyday life”.