Rene Redzepi - Head chef, Noma restaurant HARDtalk

veteran of the rough war. -- the Iraq War.

Time for HARDtalk. Welcome to a special edition of the

programme from Copenhagen. I am in the kitchen of what food critics

regard as the finest restaurant in the world, called Noma. My guest

today is Rene Redzepi, the chef at Noma. He is admired around the

world for his passion for local and foraged food. He is a kitchen

revolutionary but can he really changed the way we eat? -- change.

Rene Redzepi, welcome to HARDtalk. You are one of the world's most

famous restaurant to us but we have start have not in your restaurant

but in the Nordic food Laboratory, which you founded and which sits

next door to your restaurant. What goes on here? We said his art as a

non-profit organisation to generate knowledge about food and to

generate new flavours. New pillars fall cuisine that will help

ourselves and future generation create more delicious food. This is

set up for deliciousness. But you are not a scientist. And I can say

things like test-tubes and flasks and complicated equipment. This is

a laboratory and that feels unnatural for a chef. Yes, well, I

thought that for many years, that I am an artisan, a craftsman. But

then you find out that everything is about science, basically. This

is not a science laboratory. It is controlled and run by chefs. We are

here to create better kinds of deliciousness and to do that, we

have got to understand the signs of it. This is between a restaurant

and a science laboratory dedicated to deliciousness. When you talk

about the signs of deliciousness, what sort of experiments are you

running? What are you looking for? One of the things that we have had

great success with his permutations. Wigan have new and exciting

flavours. One vein is this liquid it right here. I would challenge

you to taste it. It is only six months old and there is some green

mould on it. And in Japan... This is an extract of mould, is it?

is a mould that has been inoculated with grains and overtime, it breaks

down and create a solid and a liquid. This is the liquid. In

Japan, when they do this with soy beans, it creates soy sauce. But

this was done with dried, yellow peas. Let's see how you go. That is

a very strong flavour. You mention soy sauce. Very savoury. So let it

but sweet. It is delicious. A cynic would say, why not just go and

purchase a bottle of Japanese-made soy sauce? You can do that but this

is different. This is delicious and a new product, a new flavour.

is a fascinating experiment over here. This is quite a bit like

Willy one carlos' chocolate factory. Lots of stuff bubbling away. What

is the aim of all of this? The aim is to improve -- these are

different kinds of vinegar. In a typical home in Denmark - perhaps

it is the shame as being the UK - you can find a white wine vinegar

and a sherry vinegar and so on. Here, we are trying to find out

what is possible with vegetable juices, pieces of wood. How we can

find different flavours to increase the vocabulary of our language. At

the moment, we are trying to create vinegar by extracting flavour out

of June Underwood. And there is a lot of what flavour. Also with

celery and beat us. This might have application in your restaurant

across the road. That you might be able to serve a new range of

vinegar? And a few drops of vinegar into a sauce can create a new

flavour. But we are not doing this in the Nordic foo' tree just for us.

We have a website dedicated to sharing the information. We intend

this to the research centre for all chefs who do not have the time. We

can give them finish and ready to go recipes for delicious new food

items that they can use in their kitchens and even in people's homes.

0 a fascinating insight into the more scientific end of your

approach to food but I would like to go to the restaurant now and

talk about how you have created what is regarded at the moment as

the world's best restaurant. Let's go. Need the way. -- Lead. Now that

we are inside the restaurant, I want to take you back and find out

what sparks your passion for food. There was a very specific moment

when I was 15 years old. I left to 9th agreed at school in dishonour.

In Copenhagen? Yes and I followed my best friend, who had a lifelong

dream of being a chef. I thought, I do not know what to do, they do not

want me at school, what better than to be with your friend? So I

enlisted in the school and on the second day, the teacher, who I

hated, he asked us to go for a dish so that we would be judged on how

it tasted and how it was arranged on the plate. And for me, that was

the first adult moment that I had in my entire life. Prior to that, I

was nervous about talking to girls and when I would play football next.

And then I was asking myself, how do I win this competition? I have

had to make something delicious. What is delicious to me? So white

hat into my memories of food and what I enjoy. Those memories that

you cherish above others. And I remembered one of those special

moments in Macedonia, where I used to spend my childhood summer or so,

my uncle would snort a chicken and the

chopping off of the head. The chicken would run around and the

children would run after it with the blood spurting out. And then my

auntie would pluck it. It was put into a wood-fired oven with rice

and the juice of driving down. And I remembered that mouthful as a

piece of heaven as a child. So for the competition, have found a

recipe with chicken. And I made a cashew nut sauce. I love it and us.

Going up in Macedonia, roasting chestnuts is a very strong memory.

You insist that a large part of the food that you could is taken from

the wild, from the Forest, the sea shore. How can you ensure that you

can find enough material around Copenhagen? We are fortunate to be

in this region. 25 million people in this region of abundance.

Literal abundance. And we have discovered it is a double world

fight at our feet that we had forgotten about. To be so severe,

what are you talking about? Grasses, fouled by...? Fruit as well. One of

the most intriguing moments I have was a few years ago when we were

walking along the shoreline searching for seaweed or whatever

was there, just to see what was a double and what was not. And I

could see this tide of grass and I had this intuition, and instinct,

to see if it was a double or not. And I pick it up and its Latin my

teeth and the juice poured into my mouth. And it hit me that it was

the purest and most wonderful flavour of coriander but it look

like a chive and it was going on a northern beach in Denmark. This

flavour that supposedly only exists in other parts of the world, where

it is very hot. How far can you save this -- take this? I know that

you have experimented with serving insects in the restaurant. How far

can you push not only yurt innovative cooking techniques, but

how far can you push your diners? We can push to were ever the

deliciousness is. You say that but, frankly, if many people are

presented with a plate of live ants as you have done in the past, many

would say, I am sorry, I am not eating that. For a little while.

When we opened seven years ago, we might as well have served crocodile,

some strange animal, the boy just the fact that we were serving a

wild grass that tasted like coriander, people objecting to it.

But these things do not take long. The thought of putting an and into

your mouth and eating it is no different than eating a corner. It

is just a cultural thing. The air are some obvious limitations with

your approach to food. To begin with, you insist that everything

has got to be very local. There are certain things that almost become

ubiquitous in western cooking - garlic, olive oil, rice. These are

not available to you because you cannot get them within 100

kilometres of Copenhagen. So you cannot have access to many of those

very common staples. No and there is good reason for that. First, we

have to remember that usually, if you want the freshest and the best

flavours, the closer they are to you, the better they will be. Brian

Rice is different. The reason why are we do not put a rise in our

food or olive oil is not because I do not love them. I think they are

incredible and I eat them at home all the time. But we are in a part

of the world where we have not explored the ingredient of base for

so many years - for decades - and we have got to allow ourselves to

see what is out there. And if we keep retreating to the obvious, we

would never go the whole way through. Another issue is

seasonality was told in Scandinavia in winter, there is not a lot of

that will grow. And what is in the ground may be frozen or under a

foot of snow. So you are saying to your diners, if they come to eat at

your restaurant in January or February, there will be pretty slim

pickings. Yes, they will have to enjoy root vegetables and onions.

But the world is amazing in that sense. If the earth it sprouts and

gives us richness in winter, the oceans changed. And that is a full

season. Fish has a role, and it changes. One way that we are able

to make sure backs we have these green, fragile flavours like we do

in spring and summer is through preserving. We have a storage room,

which is away from here, where we have more than 1,500 kilograms of a

food, dozens of food items, in storage. Some have been sold it,

Because the restaurant has become so well known, critics have voted

it the best in the world for a few years in a row, there is now a huge

waiting list. He have to book many months in advance. And you have to

pay an awful lot of money, hundreds of dollars for an individual meal.

How do people react when you serve them for example, Morse on a-plate?

When they have just played -- paid hundreds of dollars and waited

months? There are people who would say, I demand my usual luxury food

items cooked in a Scandinavian way. There are those people. To that, we

have nothing to say because we don't do that. We are about serving

the perfect distillation of what is in season right now. If Morse is

one of those things, and we can make a delicious, Moss will be on

the menu. Luckily, lately, especially since being voted number

one, people approach us different day. They are more open. They are

here to see our world of foods and what we think his book. Does it

bother you do you have become a place where the Super League's wish

to come and be seen? You talk about your memories of the most local,

authentic, practically peasant food experiences in Macedonia with your

father, and here you are catering to the super-rich. Multi-

millionaires and billionaires. Does that stick in your throat? It would

if I only Kate Adie to them. pretty much do. The ordinary man in

the street couldn't conceive of coming here. It is too expensive.

would object to that. I hear this from my own friends, we can't

afford it. When I ask them how much they spend in a week down at the

pub or wherever, it is almost as absurd. But of course, there is no

way around it. This is the up most extreme of dining. It takes a lot

of hands and a lot of people. The ingredients are expensive. But this

is something you said is a joint statement with some of the world's

top chefs, there was a manifesto issued and these are the words that

came out: "We dream of a future in which the chef is socially engaged,

fully conscious of his or her contribution to a just and

sustainable society." that is a little bit grandiose. It is, I

agree. But you have to remember that we're there on the board a

vague culinary centre. This is like the amazing food University. Where

a lot of young people will invest. -- A-List. They asked us to write

something for these students, these 18-year-old. Within the group of

these nine people, there are a few who have done amazing things, not

only for deliciousness, but also for the food culture. I think it is

an important message. I don't see why that hurts. It may not hurt but

it may be something that pushes you over the edge from being highly

respected as a chef to becoming almost a laughing-stock, to be

honest. Here is what a British food critics said. He said he felt this

was a grand act of self- delusion. He said, we need to remember that

these guys are not secular saints, they are simply good chefs cooking

dinner for very rich people. Well... Yes. That is one of the things.

Absolutely. But your message to him is, what? There is a message in

what to do that we is ordinary consumers of food can take on board

about the different ways of producing food? I think that if

people don't think that what happens at the best restaurants

don't trickle-down into other restaurants and normal people in

the kitchen... Is there a trickle down? There is. I can give you a

very concrete example. One of them is with a farmer. One of Balmain

farmers. He had a culture of carrots and he started selling them

to chefs. He became him -- aware of the importance of what he does. He

nourishes the people. So he starts to experiment. He puts more variety

into his soul. Now he operates 100% Poli quarter with 10 types of

cabbages, many lettuces. You name it. He will have hundreds of

ingredients. It started with the restaurants, with chefs. Today, he

sells weekly sacks of vegetables for �10 for 10 kg a sack that

hundreds of families receive every week. We have seen an extraordinary

rise in recent years of celebrity chefs. Here you are in Denmark

known around the world. There are other chefs in the UK and so on. Do

you see a problem with this deification of the world's best

chefs? I do not see it as a problem. Sometimes it can be a problem to

the extent that youngsters who want to enter our trade get a bit

unrealistic about what it is like to be a chef and forget that it is

hour after after -- an hour of slicing and carrying heavy things

and being in a very stressful environment. There are some people

enlisting in culinary schools with a dream of perhaps being a famous

person and not realising there is a lot of work behind it. Do you think

it is realistic to expect people like yourself, top chefs, to have a

role in public policy-making on how we and what we eat. The issues

concerning food. Jamie Oliver for example has been involved in a

campaign in the UK to change the quality of school meals. AU keen to

play that sort of public role when it comes to food policy? Personally,

know. I run a restaurant. I am keen on educating my staff and the chefs

here and an creating a forum where the chefs of restaurants learning

new things and inspire each other to want to learn new things and

take part in what is current in the culture of food. But to work for

change of politics and so on, that would be unrealistic for me to take

part in that. I don't even want to. I'm surprised you don't want to get

more involved. You live in Denmark which is one of the first countries

in the world to impose a fat tax on food very high in saturated fats.

Did you not feel you should take a view on the imposition of such a

tax? I have a view of course. You should have a view on everything.

If you don't have an opinion, if you're not a human being. But I

would not understand how these operations work and in terms of

politics. I am an artisan and I work with my hand. I talk to people

and cook food. A final thought. I was very struck by the way you

started by describing memories of eating with your father in

Macedonia. I am intrigued to know what you're dead things when he

sits in this restaurant and the serve him one of your amazing

dishes, the snail wrapped in flowers of the Quayle said served

with a fantastic source, the ice- cream with dill sauce... Bodies to

your dad think? -- What does your dad think? He has been here but he

grew up after the Second World War with a father in prison eating

beans for most of his life, hearty stews of beans and other legumes.

He does not connected to it. He does not relate to it at all. He

can't sit still for four hours. He is really happy for me, because in

his world, the way you measure success is by how well the support