The Noma Diaspora Edition

Colin here. The noted food writer Jeff Gordinier wrote a great book, Hungry, where he had the enviable task of following around Noma founder Rene Redzepi on a culinary world tour that culminated in the brand’s infamous pop-up restaurant in Tulum, Mexico. The entire book is worth a read, but one of the most interesting observations is something Rene did as a matter of course. After a night of service at one of the most demanding restaurants, Redzepi made the kitchen staff go into the kitchen and cook something they hadn’t tried before. It was a forcing function: using the tiredness and the fatigue to erode their self-censorship—pushing the team into more experimental phases. It sounds slightly perverse, but given the constant reinvention and experimentation at the highest level of the culinary world, something was working there.

Why is this interesting?

A lot of ink has been spilled on the iconic chef. But one of the lasting, most meaningful things is the exciting worlds of innovation that have stemmed from the Noma diaspora. Not everyone wants to work in a high-stakes kitchen forever, and many leave for their own endeavors or go back to their home countries and start a new place. Former executive chef and friend of WITI, Matt Orlando runs the esteemed Amass in Copenhagen, Rosario Sanchez has opened a super tasty taco spot in Copenhagen, and David Zilber took the work from the kitchen and wrote a definitive guide to fermentation. There are countless more examples of this. And what is intriguing to me is they are starting to expand into categories other than restaurants. Wired explains:

WHEN LARS WILLIAMS and Mark Emil Hermansen founded the Denmark-based microdistillery Empirical Spirits four years ago, they weren’t actually sure what they were making. For weeks, the two men—veterans of the haute-weird restaurant Noma, where Williams ran research and development and Hermansen was the “concept manager”—thought they were making a gin. It was clear and full of plant-y, botanical flavors. But it didn’t have any juniper in it. “And someone from the industry said, ‘You can’t call it a gin,’” Williams says. So: not gin.
They also thought they were making a whiskey. It was smoky, like whiskeys from the island of Islay, of Scotland. And it was brown, because they aged it in a barrel that had once held sherry. But this one did have juniper—which they had smoked before adding to the mix. “And so we couldn’t call it a whiskey,” Williams says. “So we were just like, ‘Pssh, fuck it.’” They bottled it anyway.
Today Empirical makes a half-dozen spirits, and only one of them fits the classic dozen or so categories you’d see on signs above the aisles in a BevMo. Their newest, Ehime, is definitely bourbon-like—brown, made from grain, aged in a barrel. (It’s also partially fermented with koji, the fungus that makes sake.) This booze is sui generis, made from substrates as varied as plum pits, pasilla Mixe chiles, and kombucha, distilled not in a steampunk copper pot but in a vacuum still plucked from a chemistry lab. The company has also started selling fizzy, boozy canned drinks that I suppose fit into the modern category of “hard seltzer,” except where White Claw might offer, say, mango, Empirical touts flavor combinations like oolong tea, gooseberry, and walnut wood.

There is a lot of innovation happening in the spirits and non alcoholic categories. It draws upon both the past—with fermentation and tried and true techniques—while also being future-facing with approaches that haven’t been tried. While the founders take a lot of credit for the entrepreneurial verve and execution, there’s still a lovely connective tissue back to the mothership of Noma, and the mindset and push for excellence that stems from Redzepi’s vision. (CJN)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)

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