Escape From Noma
This is not the post that I thought I was going to write about Noma, the massively influential Copenhagen restaurant that’s been declared “The Best Restaurant in the World” five different times.
In fact, I didn’t even think I’d ever get to eat at Noma, especially when they recently announced that they’re closing the restaurant permanently at the end of 2024 to become “a full-time food laboratory.” I put myself on the waitlist when we booked our trip to Denmark and never thought in a million years that we’d score a table. And then, somehow, miraculously we did.
When you score a table at Noma, there’s no screwing around: you pay for your full meal immediately upfront or you’ll lose the table. The meal almost cost more than our flight to Europe, but we were celebrating some recent good news and decided to splurge.
The reservation fell smack dab in the middle of our trip: we were going from a Friday to a Friday and our reservation was for a Wednesday at 5 o’clock. The nights leading up to it we ate terrific meals at restaurants created by Noma alumni: Restaurant Barr, in the old Noma space; Sanchez, a Mexican restaurant created by Noma’s former pastry chef; and a few non-Noma restaurants, including our favorite meal of the trip — dinner at Kodbyens Fiskebar. (I’ll write about all of this in my next post.)
