Finally, we come to the star of the show: Noma.  The restaurant and its chef, Rene Redzepi, have become legends in the food world.

It is reputed to be The World’s Best Restaurant based on its #1 ranking on this list for four of the past five years.  However, in a subject that has generated much debate about which ranking system is more relevant and valid (see here, here, or here), it has yet to achieve the coveted third Michelin star, remaining at two.

I already covered a bunch of Noma dishes in Part I; here I’ll go over some other dishes, talk about the experience as a whole, and weigh in on the debate about Noma’s proper standing among the world’s great restaurants.

Noma is located in an old stone building right on the water in Copenhagen’s Christianshavn neighborhood, which overlooks the old city center across the canal that separates them.  The dining room is rustic and beautiful, full of old white and brown woods.  Every chair is draped with a real, furry animal pelt of some sort, as if the restaurant is saying, “Welcome to Noma!  For the next three hours, you are a viking!”

The service is impeccable and seems effortless.  The restaurant feels relaxed and peaceful, but also serious, the calm atmosphere oddly punctuated with intermittent shouts of “YES CHEF!!” in unison from every chef in the open kitchen every half hour or so.  They yell this in response to orders from the chef de cuisine, like soldiers responding to a drill sergeant.

Though all of the restaurants I’ve written about in Part I and Part II clearly take their starting points from Noma, it still stands on its own in terms of creativity, ingenuity, and flat-out weirdness.  Consider this sampling of some of Noma’s most interesting dishes:

This is Noma’s renowned fried reindeer moss with mushroom powder, which you then dip in a generous dollop of fluffy creme fraiche.   It’s crispy and wafer-light, kind of like eating thin little threads of tempura.  It is absolutely delicious.

This dish is served still-smoking and tasted of the wood it was smoked in.

You don’t eat the whole leek; rather, a flap in the center opens to reveal the edible part of the leek, which was cooked separately and then placed back into the burnt leek, along with cod roe and a berry sauce.

One of my favorite dishes of the whole meal, here the goosefoot (the leaves) serves kinda like a ravioli packet encasing the almost-gelatinous raw shrimp, all swimming in a sauce made from yeast.  Delicious.

Very interesting sauce on this one, which was made of mold. The sauce shows a lot of restraint, perhaps too much, as the mold offers a very mild funk to the produce.  Kinda like blue cheese, but very subtle.  Though the asparagus was tasty, the sauce was more interesting and I wish its flavor was more prominent here.

The yolk was cured with bee larvae, producing a mushy texture and dull flavor that I didn’t care for.  Oddly, a mushy egg dish like this was also served at Geranium and Kokkeriet…I liked none of them, I’m not sure what they’re going for here.  The potatoes were fantastic though.

The server described these as such: “These are wild strawberries.  Nothing has been done to them.”  They were offered where a sorbet would usually go, between the savory courses and the desserts.  I admire that Noma has the balls to say “Our strawberries are so good, we’re just gonna give ’em to you straight”, and then they deliver.  The strawberries were delicious, and deserved to stand on their own.

Looks like a beautiful piece of chocolate with some dried berries, right?  Yes, and the chocolate coats a big pork rind, because fuck yeah.  Fatty and slightly oily from the pork skin, rich from the chocolate, and tart and sweet from the berries…I could eat these all night.  Somebody needs to mass market this one.

And last but not least, the much-ballyhooed ant dish:

Yes, those are freeze-dried ants all over the tartar.  This doesn’t taste nearly as weird as it looks or sounds.  The ants have a very strong citrus flavor, and function almost like a lemon caviar.   If you pop the body of one of the ants in your mouth, it basically releases a burst of lemon, owing to the acid in the ants.  Frankly, though this is a fun trick, the dish is out of balance.  The very good beef tartar is overpowered by too much of the acid.

Again I get to say something I have never said about food before:  it needs fewer ants…still some ants, but fewer.

And this brings me to the big question:

Who has it right?  Is Noma really the best restaurant in the world?  Or is Michelin right that this is a notch below elite?

Well…that really depends what you mean by “best”.   The World’s Best list’s Manifesto leaves it open to interpretation:

What constitutes “best” is left to the judgement of these trusted and well-travelled gourmets.  There is no pre-determined check-list of criteria; for example an interesting experience in a simple establishment, where exceptional innovation was discovered, could be judged better than a more opulent meal from a widely feted restaurant team. The results are a simple computation of votes.

I would say that if “best” means most creative, most inventive, most influential, or most interesting…then yes, I think Noma can make a fair case for being #1.  You can probably tell from looking at the food that Redzepi’s mind is operating on a different planet, with techniques, ingredients, and flavor combinations I have never tasted before and probably will never taste again.

But I don’t think that’s how most people interpret “best” when it comes to food.  I take that word to mean that it tastes the best.  That when you hear the phrase “World’s Best Restaurant”, you take that to mean that the food here tastes better than it does at any other restaurant in the world.

And if that’s the definition, then no, Noma is not the best restaurant in the world.

Not even close.   As much as I enjoyed Noma; as creative, amazing, and thoughtful as the meal was, it is not the best-tasting food in the world.

Frankly, I agree with the Michelin judges: this is two-star food.  And that is not in any way meant as an insult.

Noma has all the trappings of a three-star restaurant:

It has phenomenal, three-star service, which I would rank (along with Per Se and Pierre Gagnaire) among the best I have ever experienced.

It has an insane, definitely three-star level of effort and degree of difficulty in executing the food: 50 chefs work there, more than the number of diners they serve per night (45).  The food is intricate, complicated, and detailed.

It has three-star wine, the 7 unusual glasses from the wine pairings matching the uniqueness of the food.

It has a gorgeous, three-star dining room.

It has three-star creativity in spades: The ingredients, the flavors, the combinations were all new to me. I have a hard time describing most of the dishes because I simply lack reference points for the flavors.  They’re that unique.  I have only had one other meal that gave me that same feeling, and that was Pierre Gagnaire.  That’s high praise.

It is lacking just one thing: three-star taste.  There’s no other way to put it than saying that for all that it does well, the food just doesn’t taste as good as the food I’ve had at almost every three-star restaurant I’ve ever been to.

At three-star restaurants, I feel consistently blown away by dish after dish after dish.  They have a “wow” factor where the food just tastes so freaking good that you can’t contain your excitement.  I really liked Noma, but that just wasn’t happening here.

Since most of those meals have been French (not just in France but also French places in the U.S.), it’s hard to not compare it to French cuisine.

Yes, I have never had a scallop in the form of a block of caramel…and it was delicious.  Yes, I have never had fried moss before.  And it too was delicious.  But do those things actually taste as good as classic, perfectly prepared French 3-star food?  I don’t think so.

The quail’s egg, the shrimp and goosefoot, the leek, the white asparagus…this is all great stuff, but most of it didn’t knock my tongue’s socks off.  It didn’t give me the feeling I have at those other places where the food is so undeniably, unquestionably, often aggressively delicious that you don’t even question whether it deserves to be ranked among the world’s restaurant elite.

I think it’s similar to how Kevin Durant won the NBA MVP award this year.  Yes, Durant had a phenomenal year, but so did LeBron, as usual, and everyone still thinks LeBron is the best player in the world.   But LeBron couldn’t win the MVP this year because of voter fatigue: he’s already won four of the last five MVP awards before this year.

I feel like that’s what the World’s Best list is all about.

France has won food.  French food is generally considered, even if it’s sometimes begrudgingly these days, as the best food in the world.  But it’s been that way for decades. It’s like LeBron.  It’s been so good for so long that you’re tired of crowning it the best.

So you get this list, where taste comes second to what’s new and what’s hot.  That’s fine, but it shouldn’t be called the World’s Best Restaurants list then, it should be called World’s Most Interesting, or Most Creative, or Most Unique.

Some view the World’s Best list as something of a reaction against Michelin, which is often seen as biased in favor of French food, and too slow to both give and take away stars.

On the 2014 list, there is not a single French restaurant in the top 10.  There is one in the top 20.  If it’s really supposed to be about listing the best food in the world, then I call bullshit on that.  There’s no way the French are represented once in the top 20 best restaurants in the world.

I feel confident that if you removed context from the equation, if you erased a person’s taste memory entirely, meaning they have no recollection of ever tasting food before, and then do a blind taste test where you have them eat at Noma and any average French 3-star…the vast majority of people would say they enjoyed the French one more.

But, context does matter on a list like this…Noma is truly something new and exciting and amazing.  It has almost single-handedly spawned an entirely new type of cuisine.  No current French restaurant can claim that.

And so new wins out, even though it’s not really best, because it’s boring to say that Michel Guerard, the legendary chef at the 3-star Les Pres d’Eugenie in France, has been serving perfect food for 35 years.  Even though almost every dish on his menu tastes better than every single dish at Noma.

Michelin, on the other hand, seems to grade simply on taste.  It’s different when you’re handing out prizes like stars as opposed to making a ranked list.  For Michelin, you’re either good enough for the stars or you’re not.  I don’t always agree with them (see the previous post re: Relae), but I find them to be accurate more often than not.

I agree with them on Noma: it’s a two-star restaurant.

I actually liked Geranium and Kadeau a little better than Noma…I think if Michelin is underrating anything in Copenhagen, it’s Kadeau.  I felt their food was clearly 2-star, occasionally even reaching into 3-star territory.

Anyway, calling Noma 2-star food is not exactly an insult.  Noma was awesome.  It made me feel like this:

I had a blast eating this food and experiencing something so new and different, even if it’s not really the best restaurant in the world.