Travel and Adventure by Various Travel Authors

By Joan Scobey

No, you haven't come across a new pastry or a cross-country ski convention. "New Nordic" describes a relatively recent cuisine that's captivating Denmark, and, in fact, all of the North Atlantic countries. Its premise is simple: fresh indigenous ingredients in a healthy, flavorful meal. Pretty straightforward and familiar to anyone who celebrates local foods served in season, but to the Scandinavians — used to heavy meats, tinned vegetables and European-style restaurant cuisine — locavore was a foreign concept.

Enter Claus Meyer, Denmark's popular gastronome and television host, whose passion for regional specialties launched the New Nordic. Six years ago he and fellow chef Rene Redzepi made a monthlong culinary expedition through the North Atlantic countries seeking native food. To their delight, they found a bonanza of undiscovered surprises: seaweed and skyr (a cultured dairy product) in Iceland; horse mussels and juicy fruitlike turnips in the Faroe Islands; angelica, crowberries, reindeer and musk oxen in Greenland. They found brinier fish, richer grains, a host of natural products that hadn't been exposed to what Meyer calls "cultural influence."

Thank the temperate coastal climate, with mild winters and long, hot, light-filled summer days and cool nights.

"An old and well-balanced ecosystem is the perfect expression of the terroir in question as it has evolved gradually over centuries," he said. "Whatever we find out there is unique for our region."

In the process Meyer became the Alice Waters of Denmark.

To showcase the new cuisine, Meyer and Redzepi soon opened noma in a warehouse on Copenhagen's inner harbor, opposite the popular Nyhavn canal. A few months later, they organized a symposium at which participating chefs from all the North Atlantic countries formulated a 10-point New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto that spotlights purity, freshness, simplicity and regional foods, along with promoting health and well-being, animal welfare, local self-sufficiency and the Nordic culture behind its products. It was as much an ecological and political movement as a culinary one.

Denmark's cooking traditions are, well, traditional. Meyer was about to change that, too. Take wine, long a staple in traditional sauces. Vinegar will supply the requisite acidity in great cooking, said Meyer, and to produce it, he has spent years aging different fruits in a quest to make a Danish vinegar equal to Modena's balsamics. Noma would still pickle, smoke, salt and dry food but do it to improve flavors rather than just prolong shelf life. Menus would offer not only Arctic ingredients and shellfish, but also the earthy taste of Nordic grains, more vegetables and give homey soup its due. And he would banish fat unless there was a good gastronomic reason for it.

Redzepi, who had trained with some of the world's great chefs —Thomas Keller at California's French Laundry and Ferran Adria at Spain's El Bulli — was just the guy to pull off this new culinary razzle-dazzle.

Sit in noma's airy wood-beamed dining room with its white-washed brick walls, smoked oak tables and wooden chairs draped with animals skins, and among the inventive, often playful dishes you're likely to find are musk ox (a signature item) and grilled leeks with milkskin and pickled ramson seeds; langoustine and seawater with parsley and rye; black berries and beet roots with yogurt and rape-seed oil. All the better if you don't recognize some of the ingredients; it's all part of eating indigenous Danish.

Has this radical sortie on traditional Danish food paid off? For noma the answer is with not one but two Michelin stars.

Moreover, the spotlight on quality, invention and expanding the boundaries of traditional cooking has inspired a burgeoning restaurant scene in Copenhagen and won Michelin stars for a dozen other restaurants, though not necessarily with Nordic cuisine.

Two of those Michelin-starred restaurants are within Tivoli, Copenhagen's popular amusement park. At The Paul, British chef Paul Cunningham follows the regional/seasonal Nordic bent. Its hours are also seasonal; it is closed when Tivoli is, generally January to mid-April.

Tivoli's white Moorish-style Nimb complex — two restaurants, a wine bar, deli, even a dairy that churns its own butter and cream —- is open year-round. Herman's gives traditional down-home dishes an elegant spin, like scallops with hazelnut milk and cauliflower. Nimb Brasserie is a casual, less pricey alternative to those Michelin picks where chefs work their magic grilling octopus and braising lamb shanks in an open kitchen that runs the length of the spacious dining room between rows of wooden tables and colorful hanging lamps.

Other restaurants, like BioM, have picked up on the organic trend. Calling itself Copenhagen's ecological restaurant, BioM is so fiercely devoted to its mission that the chairs are made from recycled plastic bottles and the bread is served in small cotton bags. Needless to say, the food is as organic as possible, all the produce is from Denmark (except pineapples from Uganda, a project they support) and the menus are seasonal.

"We make what we like," said co-owner Brian Johansen, with a grin. "We steal from everyone."

Even that most traditional of Danish foods, smorrebrod, the famous open-faced sandwich, is undergoing a transformation. Ida Davidson, long the best-known emporium of the genre, is now getting some interesting competition. At newly opened Aamann's, a small cafe with bare wood tables that serves lunch and dinner, chef-owner Adam Aamann gives generous-sized smorrebrod a healthful twist: organic ingredients preserved with smoke or sea salt, no nitrates, lots of fish, more greens. His signature sandwich is steak tartare, pickled mushrooms and chips; the fixed menu of three courses changes monthly.

The Royal Cafe, a jewel box of an eatery tucked in an alley between Georg Jensen and Royal Copenhagen that includes a delightful garden for outdoor eating, has redesigned smorrebrod into smaller and sleeker but definitely not leaner versions called "smushis": smorrebrod plus sushi. Sure, there is raw fish but much more in these Asian-style Scandinavian bites. They are sushi mainly in size and style, not content, which runs to smoked venison, quail egg and tomato, whipped gorgonzola combinations, as well as shrimp and smoked eel. An order of three or four is laid out on a long narrow rectangular Royal Copenhagen marble slab.

I'm not sure if the word is actually copyrighted, but can other restaurants call their open-faced sandwiches "smushi"?

"They wouldn't dare," the manager says.

IF YOU GO

Aamann's, Oster Farimagsgade 12

BioM, Fredericiagade 78

Herman's, Bernstorffsgade 5

Ida Davidsen, Store Kongensgade 70

Nimb Brasserie, Bernstorffsgade 5

noma, Strandgade 93

The Paul, Vesterbogade 3

The Royal Cafe, Amagertorv 6

Joan Scobey is a freelance travel writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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