How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark (5 page)

How things have changed – although people can’t agree exactly why that change happened, or when. The conventional answer is 2004, with the creation of the New Nordic manifesto, but really the seeds were sown long before then. Bi Skaarup charts it to November 1995, when three government ministers held a conference at Humlebaek’s Louisiana Gallery to discuss the problem with dozens of chefs and food critics. But Bent Christensen has another suggestion: the late 70s, when a Danish chef called Erwin Lauterbach moved to Sweden. At the time, the Swedish government gave pensioners meal tickets to use at participating restaurants. The pensioners provided a lot of business, and so competition between these restaurants was fierce. Each chef had to be particularly inventive in order to win the pensioners’ support.

“To make money, Lauterbach had to be very creative. He learned to make celery in 15 ways. He used special fish, special parts of the cow, special parts of the pig – like the nose, or ear or tail. Fish of no reputation. Vegetables of no reputation. And he had to focus on local produce, because it had to be cheap. So he invented simple Nordic cooking, because he started to be creative with local foods that people did not think were normally eatable. He was the one starting the tradition.”

But it would not be fair to end this account without devoting more space to Claus Meyer, the man who founded Noma, and who asked Rene Redzepi to work there in the first place. Outside Denmark, Meyer is virtually unknown,
and it is Redzepi who gets all the publicity. But while Redzepi deserves the adulation he receives, his success is mostly in making Noma what it is today. Meyer’s role has been far wider: he has had a hand in virtually every area of the Danish food resurgence.

Early in the chapter, I mentioned that the story of Danish cuisine is about more than one man and, as Skaarup’s and Christensen’s different narratives show, there are many people and influences in play here. But Claus Meyer deserves a special place in the pantheon, because few people have understood as well as him how Danish food could be saved. He realised early on that the problem could not be solved simply through individual restaurants. It was about wholesale social change.

Some chefs look down on Meyer because he has never run a gourmet kitchen himself. But he has done virtually everything else. He’s published 14 cookbooks and hosted his own show –
Meyer’s Kitchen
– on Danish television for the past two decades. Aside from Noma, Meyer has founded three other restaurants, each aimed at achieving New Nordic goals at more affordable prices. With Redzepi, he founded the Nordic Food Lab. He owns a bakery chain, he lectures in food science at the University of Copenhagen and runs a cooking school that teaches the values of the New Nordic cuisine. He has a catering business, a vinegar brewery and an organic orchard. He heads a research project aimed at improving children’s food. He set up a series of allotments for public use. Most recently, he filmed a show where he
trained convicts to cook, a concept later used by Gordon Ramsay. In his spare moments, Meyer runs a programme that teaches underprivileged Bolivians to cook. Incidentally, as a teenager, he was a regional badminton champion.

“It is a never-ending story,” he says when we meet in his garden in Frederiksberg, a smart part of Copenhagen. “My idea was to make a kind of virus, to create an enormous amount of initiatives and events and projects and partnerships that together in a very smooth, frictionless way would have an effect on both demand and supply. It was a total attack on this food culture of ours. My feeling is that it doesn’t work if the government comes in with some decreey.
Opening a restaurant doesn’t work on its own. But if you do a lot of things together, and you try to include a lot of people, and you inspire them and you think about both those who act and those who consume, then you might get a kind of critical mass. It’s like the snowball effect, or a tipping point.”

In this light, though Noma is the most famous of Meyer’s projects, it is but one of many means to an end. “When we started Noma, there were two objectives. One was to make a fantastic restaurant. The other was to challenge the French restaurant model, which was the way of the top restaurants in Denmark at that time. So it was just one means in my struggle to open the minds of my fellow Danes to the potential of food culture. Noma was the launch. But I wanted to do something that was much more for ordinary people. I wanted to deal with the everyday meal, the egalitarian meal. And so I had to focus on how to change demand – how to inspire consumers to be part of this thing.”

Meyer ran his own chocolate business as a teenager, but it wasn’t until 1983, when he was 20, that he had his culinary epiphany. With an alcoholic mother and an absentee father, Meyer felt lonely and directionless. “So I said, what the hell – let me win some time. I’ll go to France. There was no real reason for it – I just went.” First, he went to Paris, where he lived with a dentist and cooked for his mistresses. But then Meyer came down with hepatitis and moved to Gascony to recover. He ended up living with the family of a pastry chef called Guy.

“That family,” he remembers, with some emotion, “they couldn’t have children, but they’d always wanted a boy. So they treated me like their lost son and spoiled me with fantastic cakes and desserts and love. As soon as I recovered from my disease – and I did it extremely quickly, to the surprise of all the doctors – I started working with Guy, who became my spiritual father, my mentor and my muse. And in contrast to my actual father, he taught me that I was good at something and he taught me that I could do great things and that I should love what I was doing.”

Something stirred. It wasn’t the full-scale understanding of food culture that he has today. It was just the realisation that people weren’t eating very well back home in Denmark. “I was compelled by the idea of going to a cheese shop and knowing what cheese is best at what time of year,” says Meyer. “The idea of spending five hours just to prepare a meal for your family. The idea of spending three hours just to share it. And then when I came back to Denmark I saw the opposite. I saw a desert. With only one cheesemaker, one pea producer, one slaughterhouse supplying the whole nation with uniform, generic, passionless food. And I saw a people without passion and love for the meal.

“I didn’t truly understand the way that our monopolistic food system had created a total lack of enthusiasm for food. It was just about me, and me being the child of divorced parents. I was in lack of love. I almost didn’t see my father for four or five years, my mother became an alcoholic when they divorced, my grandma died. So I felt that there was a
relation between the lack of love or care, and the terrible food in Denmark. And in France I saw the opposite – an abundance of love and generosity, and taste and smell and great meals. And you can say in some ways that when I started the Nordic cuisine movement, it was a replication of what I had lived in Gascony, 20 years before.”

Can the New Nordic kitchen last? Already, there are signs that a new generation of Danish chefs want to try something slightly different. One night I eat at Relæ, a new restaurant founded by Christian Puglisi, once the sous-chef at Noma. He still has close ties to his alma mater, but he doesn’t want his new project to be known as Nordic. Many of his inspirations are in fact Italian, he has a no-foraging policy, and – most blasphemously of all – Puglisi uses olive oil.

Another night in Copenhagen, I find myself sitting in a disused meat market, stabbing at a table with a Stanley knife. Eventually, I carve a hole in the surface, and underneath it I find part of my supper: a bed of herbs. Earlier, I stabbed another hole, inserted a straw and slurped up some sort of mushroom soup. Later, the waiters will hand me a kebab, and I’ll go outside to fry it on a barbecue with the dozen other diners. This extraordinary experience is known as “I’m A Kombo”, and it’s just one of the many wacky culinary concepts currently sprouting in Copenhagen. An occasional supper club rather than a permanent restaurant, “I’m A Kombo” is held twice a month by two young chefs, Lasse Askov and Bo Lindegaard, a big man with the beard of
Hagrid and the round glasses of Harry Potter. In one sense, it’s the perfect example of the kind of inventiveness that the New Nordic cuisine has encouraged. The bed of herbs is the kind of thing you might find at Noma. Then again, other bits of the menu display a frustration with some of the New Nordic mantra. Each course has a theme, and the third one – with a recipe nicked from a Japanese chef – centres on theft. It’s a vague dig at the way many of the New Nordic restaurants have become quite derivative and often steal each other’s ideas; carrots served in a pot of earth, for instance, is now quite a hackneyed Nordic trope. Then there’s the sixth course – a large chunk of malted pork that the chefs have simply called “Comfort Food”. New Nordic restaurants tend to serve lots of tiny, delicate courses that aren’t in themselves particularly filling, so the inclusion of something as big and homely as the pork is almost rebellious. “It doesn’t really seem like it,” says Lindegaard, “but we feel that it’s one of the most progressive things that we do.”

Lindegaard is grateful for the platform the New Nordic kitchen has given I’m A Kombo, but says it’s not a movement he aspires to join. “We’re definitely more international,” he explains. “It would be stupid for a company like us to hook up with New Nordic cuisine. That would be the death of our future. That would be the worst business plan ever. Nordic cuisine is like the Spanish cuisine [a reference to the restaurant El Bulli, which closed recently]. It will die. Very soon. A few years ago everyone was looking at Spain.
Now everyone is looking at Copenhagen. In a few years time they will look somewhere else. So why would you want to build your business around it? I don’t get it.” When I put it to Meyer that the New Nordic kitchen might soon come to an end, he’s phlegmatic. “Whether it will last or not last - who cares? If you’re the minister responsible for tourism, then you might be worried about that. But I don’t wake up in the morning and think about whether it will last.”

In fact, he would welcome other regions picking up where Denmark has left off. For what’s important to Meyer is the survival not of the New Nordic brand itself, but the values and solutions that come hand in hand with it. “Obesity, diabetes, healthiness, the environment, biodiversity, the empowerment of the farmer” – these are the things the New Nordic diet addresses, he says, and these are things that will last.

“It goes beyond that one restaurant,” says Meyer. “It goes beyond being quoted in
Time
magazine. It’s about leaving something great for the world to come after you. Maybe all the international food magazines will stop writing about New Nordic food in three or four years. I hope that maybe it will be some South American country that will prosper. Or that Greece will fight back with Albania and Romania. As a foodie I would love that. As a global citizen I would love that. It’s not a war of ratings. We’re not declaring war against Mexican food. It’s not warfare – it’s a choir. It’s a global choir.”

“We’ve had our share of chairs now… We’ve had our share of furniture.” – Jacob Fruensgaard Øe

“I am Mr Egg,” smiles a chap who turns out to be called Mr Hans Mannerhagen. You can see where he’s coming from, though. The man is surrounded by dozens of cone-shaped chairs, most of which he helped build, and each one looks like half a hollowed-out hard-boiled egg. It’s a slightly unworldly scene. A warm fug of leather hugs the air, while dozens of upturned domes are heaped on the ground. Some are beige, some brown, and some checked – and they’re all splattered at jaunty angles across a factory floor.

The floor belongs to Fritz Hansen, one of Denmark’s oldest and most famous furniture-makers, and at its centre stands Mannerhagen, the firm’s master upholsterer. It’s his job to fix a coat of leather to each chair’s foam shell – a job
that might take three days and more than 1200 stitches. Mannerhagen is almost teary at the thought. He points at a chair. “When you work on these kinds of things,” he says, “you put so much of yourself in it. Your whole heart, and your whole soul. It becomes a part of me. The design. The handicraft. The history.”

For these are not just any egg-shaped chairs. These are the Egg chairs, and they have been built here continuously by Fritz Hansen for the past 50 years. Along with a lot of Danish furniture from the middle of the last century, you can argue that they have almost as firm a place in Denmark’s
recent identity as they do in the man who stitches them together. Dreamt up by the Danish architect and semi-deity Arne Jacobsen, the Eggs are a late, lauded example of Danish Modern, a school of furniture design that gripped the creative world in the 40s, 50s and 60s, and which still casts a long shadow over contemporary Danish culture. In 1951, when the UN wanted an extra debating chamber, they chose the great Danish Modernist Finn Juhl to design its interior. In 1960, when Kennedy and Nixon clashed in America’s first televised presidential debate, JFK was sitting on a chair – The Chair, to give it its usual title – designed by Juhl’s contemporary, Hans Wegner. In 1963, when Lewis Morley photographed a nude Christine Keeler, he asked her to sit astride a copy of another Jacobsen creation – the 7 Chair. And in 1968, when Stanley Kubrick wanted to stock the spaceship in
2001: A Space Odyssey
, he chose some of Jacobsen’s cutlery.