Top-Ranked Noma Restaurant Will Open a Brooklyn Pop-Up in May
Top-Ranked Noma Restaurant Will Open a Brooklyn Pop-Up in May
(Bloomberg) -- It’s hard enough to get a seat at Noma in Copenhagen, where the waiting list routinely contains thousands of names.
Now, devotees of René Redzepi’s influential restaurant, currently the No. 1-ranked restaurant by World’s 50 Best—the fifth time it’s achieved that recognition—have a new reservation to covet.
Noma will open a pop-up location in Brooklyn, N.Y., for five nights, May 16-20, in a specially built venue at 26 Bridge St. in the Dumbo neighborhood. The restaurant will serve 50 guests each night. Nine-course dinners, which will include beverage pairings and service, will cost $700, not including sales tax.
Reservations will go live on Wednesday, April 27, at 12 p.m. East Coast time on Resy.
“It’s time to kickstart ourselves, kickstart the world,” Redzepi says via phone. “I’ve appreciated being a local restaurant, but I'm ready to feel like a world citizen again.”
Redzepi says the menu will feature signature dishes based on ingredient availability. “We’re going to do something with cauliflower and truffles and waffles,” he says. He hopes for wild lobster and East Coast seafood. “We’ll base the majority of the menu on that and what’s in season, from a spring perspective.”
Among the dishes planned for the menu are Noma’s riff on aebleskiver, a savory snack that dates back to the restaurant’s early days. To make it, the team will be bringing an aebleskiver machine that looks like a contraption for making doughnut holes.
The team is also considering a dish that is on Noma's current “Oceans Menu.” Called “Fjaesing & Cabbage,” it features a fillet of the little-known Danish fish and a pristine cabbage leaf.
What there won’t be is Noma’s take on such Brooklyn specialties as a pepperoni slice or hot dog. That’s in contrast to the high-profile pop-ups that the chef did in Tokyo, which featured live, ant-covered shrimp with a proclivity to jump off the plate, or the seven-week-long stint in Tulum, Mexico, where a lot of attention was paid to tacos.
“Tokyo, that’s bringing 120 Noma staff members and their children,” says Redzepi. “It requires a long research time.” For the Brooklyn event, he’ll travel with about 18 people from the kitchen and dining room and will enlist some U.S.-based Noma alumni. The restaurant’s director of fermentation, Jason White, is also working with a to-be-named New York kombucha maker in the hopes of producing a drink that’s ready to be poured at dinner.
The Brooklyn event has been in the works for a while. “During the course of the pandemic, we thought, ‘When was the right time to do something together?’” says Alex Lee, chief executive officer of Resy and general manager of global dining for American Express Co. “Amex has a long history and partnership with René and Noma. We played around with the [2022] Olympics. But we landed here.”
Redzepi says the space will have the feel of the original Noma, which was set in an old waterfront building. “It’s a raw industrial feel that’s like the beginning of Noma, in a warehouse that used to store salt—with old wooden beams, an industrial space.”
The last place Redzepi and Noma staged a pop-up in New York was a private club in September 2017. The cost came to $2,000 per person.
After Brooklyn, Redzepi says he’s planning a pop-up later this year in a place yet to be announced. This will involve shutting down in Copenhagen to move Noma to a different part of the world. “We’ll probably be gone from Copenhagen from October for the rest of the year,” he adds. “But the first journey to getting back for us is sniffing around in Brooklyn.”
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.