Why it's cooler in the north

Herb yoghurt, anyone? Radishes in edible soil? The latest destination restaurant for foodie pilgrims - and now officially the third best in the world behind El Bulli and the Fat Duck - is the amazing Noma in Copenhagen. Jay Rayner treks northward to meet chef-proprietor René Redzepi, laidback genius and all-round great Dane.

Food blog: If Noma can do Nordic, what might a wholly British style of cookery entail?
Rene Redzepi
René Redzepi outside his restaurant, Noma, on Copenhagen harbour. Photograph: Ty Stange

The world of luxury restaurants doesn't exactly do rock'n'roll moments, but this one came bloody close: it was the night, a few weeks ago, of the event to celebrate this year's 50 Best Restaurants in the World list, and it had just been announced that the number three slot had gone to a relative newcomer from Copenhagen called Noma. Backed up by most of his bearded, bed-haired brigade, their arms slung about each other's shoulders like so many drunks at closing time, head chef René Redzepi took to the podium at London's Freemason's Hall to accept the award and slap the faces of a few critics. "They called us the seal fuckers," he said, glancing back at his boys for support. "They called us the stinking whale. They asked us if we had braised whale's penis on the menu." He grinned. "Look who's laughing now."

He can be forgiven his moment of triumphalism, because it really wasn't meant to be like this. For years the list - voted for by a worldwide panel of over 800 chefs, restaurateurs and critics, including this one; slagged off by those not invited to take part - had been dominated by huge three-Michelin-star names like Pierre Gagnaire and Alain Ducasse, Alain Passard and Thomas Keller. And now, slipping past them to sit just behind the usual one-two of El Bulli and the Fat Duck, was a mere two-star restaurant that promoted only Nordic food, when most of the world has no idea what Nordic food really is; indeed, which uses ingredients most Scandinavians haven't even heard of; which actually could put braised whale's penis on the menu were it not for the small matter of a few taboos around the eating of the genitalia of endangered species.

What's more, that night he was also given the Chefs' Chef award, voted for by the chefs of all the listed restaurants. That second gong only confirmed what others had been saying for months: that quietly, very Danishly perhaps, René Redzepi and his take-no-prisoners, unto-the-barricades commitment to truly seasonal and local food had become the most influential chef in the world. The likes of Heston Blumenthal and Marcus Wareing had all made the journey to find out what the fuss was about. When the well-known New York food blogger Steve Plotnicki asked the world's big-ticket eaters to name their best meal of 2008, chef after chef, including Fergus Henderson of St John and Claude Bossi of Hibiscus, picked Noma. It had become a place of pilgrimage.

Anyone making that journey expecting to find a restaurant in the grand luxe tradition, all bloated chandeliers and gold-encrusted toilet seats, will be disappointed. It ain't that. Nor is it some knowing expression of Valhalla, the Viking god Odin's celebration hall for heroes, here on earth. Noma - the name is a conjoining of the words "Nordisk" and "mad", a local word for food - is housed in a rough-hewn 18th-century shipping warehouse down by the river in the heart of Copenhagen. Dinner may cost around £100 a head, but it is all whitewashed, bare brick walls and craggy, limed beams. Animal pelts hang off the backs of simple, spindly chairs, and during the day and the long Scandinavian summer evenings the room is suffused with a bright, clear light reflected off the waters outside.

There is an equal purity and cleanliness to the food. As Redzepi explains to me, his approach is very simple: if it is not indigenous to the Nordic region, it doesn't go on the menu. At first that's easier to define by what it does not include: no olive oil, for example, for Scandinavia is not exactly renowned for its groves of olive trees. No tomatoes (unless, for a month or so, they happen to be in season). No foie gras, no Provençal herbs, no garlic or exotic fruits. Immediately one thing becomes clear: whatever the food at Noma might be, it isn't, can't ever be, French.

Instead it's about tiny wildflowers and seaweeds harvested from the ocean shore. It's about axelberries and wood sorrel, fiddlehead ferns and bulrushes, ramson leaves and a whole bunch of other things I'd never heard of before. "René does amazing things with bitter, green flavours which are very unusual," says Steven Harris, chef of the Michelin-starred Sportsman pub near Whitstable, who has been there four times and liked it so much he once took his entire kitchen brigade. "I really do think it's tremendous."

Harris is famed for his own obsessive interest in locality. He makes his own salt from the seawater at his back door, uses that salt to cure legs of local pigs to make his own ham. "But René makes me feel like a total lightweight. He's in a different league." That, chefs say, is why Noma and Redzepi matter. Local and seasonal have become easy buzz words, banded around promiscuously by restaurants searching for a unique selling point. Redzepi is forcing those chefs to think seriously about what they mean.

As does my meal. To start, inside a ceramic egg, a tiny smoked and pickled quail's egg sits on lightly smoking hay. It must be eaten in one go, for the yolk is still soft. To follow there is a sandwich of crisp chicken skin and the thinnest of roasted rye bread with between them salty, oily lumpfish roe. The sweetest raw Scandinavian shrimps come with deep green seaweed and the sudden acidic burst of rhubarb. There is the most enormous langoustine - it could have been a lobster tail - served on a rock with a seaweed and seafood emulsion that bursts with umami.

Best of all, in a dozen-strong tasting menu of tiny, perfectly formed dishes, is a rough-chopped and spiced tartare of raw beef, with leaves of wood sorrel and an emulsion of tarragon, to be eaten with your hands. "When Noma first opened, this dish almost seemed a provocation," says the food writer Michael Booth, who has been eating at the restaurant almost since it launched in 2004. "The Copenhagen restaurant scene really was dominated by these old, fussy French places. And then along comes this restaurant where they want you to eat raw beef with your hands like you're some Viking." The informality is aided by the fact that most of the dishes are served by the cooks themselves, including Redzepi. They emerge from the glass-walled kitchen, in the heart of the dining room, to reel off a list of ingredients - here shoots of axelberries, there leeks rolled in ash, which is used as a seasoning - as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

From this interaction with the brigade it quickly becomes clear that many of them are British, including the sous chef James Knappett, who worked with Marcus Wareing at Petrus for many years and at Thomas Keller's Per Se in New York before coming here 18 months ago. "It was difficult to adjust at first because the ingredients seemed restrictive," he says. "We don't use much salt, so I had to learn to season with vinegars that we make ourselves. We make almost no stocks. But René is very, very good at explaining what he wants. He has an extraordinary way of understanding what will work."

Redzepi himself, just 32, is short and slight and boyish. After the lunch service he wanders the dining room adoringly with his one-year-old daughter, who is a fixture here, before handing her over to the front-of-house staff. He agrees it would be fitting if he had grown up somewhere deeply rural, eating from the riverbanks, with only furry animals for friends. It was, he says, a little like that, if only in part. His mother, a cleaner, is Danish, and some of his childhood was spent in Copenhagen, but his taxi-driver father is Macedonian, and he would spend months at a time there with his extended peasant family, being home-schooled. "If we wanted a chicken my uncle had to slaughter it. If we wanted milk my aunt had to milk the cow. At the time I was very embarrassed about it. I just wanted to go to a nice hotel in Italy like my friends but instead we went to this very basic place. I am grateful for it now."

The break-up of Yugoslavia brought that to an end and Redzepi admits he drifted at school, had no idea what he wanted to do afterwards, and only went to cookery college because his best friend was going there. "On day two there was a cookery competition and I remember it so well, the sudden feeling that this was exactly what I wanted to do."

The story thereafter was conventional: a four-year apprenticeship in one of the classical French restaurants of Copenhagen, followed by time at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the South of France. "I didn't enjoy that period. A lot of shouting in the kitchen. A lot of aggression."

But it led to a moment that, although now familiar in the story of many breakthrough chefs, was still important. Redzepi was told about a restaurant just over the border in Spain called El Bulli, so he booked a table. "I was blown away. It wasn't the specific dishes that did it. It was the sense of freedom. Up to that point I had assumed all grand cooking had to be French." El Bulli showed him there was another way. He was so keen he worked there for a season, unpaid.

After a short period with Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in California, Redzepi returned to a senior position in another of Copenhagen's grand French restaurants and started trying to put together the various influences - El Bulli, the South of France - that had impacted upon him. Even so, he agrees he hadn't found a voice. "Then this building came up," he says simply.

Intriguingly, it was the very fabric of the place that would help define what Noma would become. The North Atlantic Dock building was to be home to the diplomatic missions from Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. They wanted a restaurant on the ground floor that reflected that, and went to Danish food personality and entrepreneur Claus Meyer to see if he had any ideas. "The concept of Nordic food emerged out of long conversations with Claus," Redzepi says. It made sense: Meyer already ran a number of delicatessens specialising in Nordic ingredients and talked passionately about them on Danish television. He believed it could be taken further.

For three months Redzepi travelled Scandinavia and eventually found himself in the Arctic hunting a kind of long, woolly coated goat. "It was very cold, minus 55, and I was suddenly struck by the enormity of where we were. We are a huge landmass with only 25 million people. Here, where we are, nature is as it wants to be, and I began thinking about how to reflect that nature, express it on the plate."

The solution he came up with could, I suggest, be seen as hopelessly restrictive and very difficult to realise. At Noma they don't simply call up suppliers and order stuff. They have a network of foragers picking wild herbs, sourcing hard-to-find seafood. They have a couple of farmers who raise ingredients to their exact specifications.

But, Redzepi says, none of this is a challenge. "A tight frame sets you free. It forces you to be imaginative. Yes, by February we are going mad because we've done everything imaginable with apples and pears for desserts. So then we start investigating the sweet potential of vegetables." Hence a dessert of a sorrel mousse and a beetroot granita, with a rose tuile. And very nice it is, too.

What becomes clear, though, is that this rigid food agenda wouldn't work were it not for Redzepi's flights of fancy. For example, early on in the meal I am served some perfect crisp radishes planted in edible soil, a dark, malty, nutty crumb lying over a herb-flavoured yoghurt, all of it in a terracotta pot. Heston Blumenthal cites that dish as the direct inspiration for the edible garden he served in the Victorian edition of his Channel 4 series Feast. "That's the thing with René," Blumenthal says. "It's not just the ingredients. He has a particular aesthetic, a way of doing things."

Even so, I also wonder whether Redzepi's food agenda might not present another risk: that it could be hijacked by Scandinavians wishing to make dark, nationalistic political points. "I understand exactly what you are saying. My dad is a Muslim. I see it as an issue." His response is to create what he says is a completely international restaurant, with a local agenda, which is why so few of the staff are Danish. Does he particularly like British cooks? "Yes I do. They are battle-hardened. They are good, strong. Ready for anything."

The past few weeks here have, he admits, been crazy since the third placing in the best restaurants list and particularly the chef's chef award. Everyone wants to come. Last night it was a trio of three-star chefs from Germany. Soon there will be others. Not that it has made things easier. "We still have tables free at lunchtime. With the recession it's been difficult. The truth is Copenhagen is pretty much the last stop on the gastronomic subway. People need a reason to come here, and if we can be that, we are glad."

If there were a way to guarantee financial security, if changing his food secured his future, would he do it? He shakes his head. Nor will he change anything just to try to win a third Michelin star. "There would be no point. We have to be what we are." True enough. Because what they are, right now, is one of the most important restaurants in the world.