Very funny piece in Monday’s Guardian by John Crace in his Digested Read column taking the piss out of Copenhagen chef Rene Redzepi’s new £35 cook book Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine. This comes in the wake of his Copenhagen restaurant Noma being declared the best restaurant in the world in 2010. I particularly liked the spoof dishes of raw puffin, chips coated with dirt and jus de earthworm.
Noma is suddenly everywhere. Giles Coren, The Times food critic, did a fat piece on it in the Saturday colour supplement a couple of weeks ago but while it all read like agreeable good publicity, Redzepi took against Coren for some unimaginable reason and used his website to slag off Coren in particular and British food critics in general. So much so that Coren, a byword for being a shrinking violet in dishing out criticism, reached for his lawyers and forced Redzepi to retract his most offensive and presumably libelous comments. A case of if you can’t stand the heat… on both sides?
I must immodestly confess to a bit of one-upmanship here. I reviewed Noma for Restaurant magazine a couple of years ago when it was merely the 15th best restaurant in the world so I naturally claim all the credit going for its promotion to No. 1. And how guilty is Noma to the charge of Squidbeakery? Not a bit m’lud. It was brilliant, one of the best meals of my life, and I shall drizzle more pieces about it in blogs to come.