René Redzepi

Rene Redzepi has been widely credited with re-inventing Nordic cuisine. His Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, was recognized as the best in the world by the San Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurant awards in 2010 and received the unique 'Chef's Choice' award at the same ceremony in 2009. Redzepi operates at the cutting edge of gourmet cuisine, combining an unrelenting creativity and a remarkable level of craftsmanship with an inimitable and innate knowledge of the produce of his Nordic terroir. At Noma, which Redzepi created from a derelict eighteenth-century warehouse in 2003 after previously working at both elBulli and The French Laundry, diners are served exquisite concoctions, such as 'Newly-Ploughed Potato Field' or 'The snowman from Jukkasjarvi', all painstakingly constructed to express their amazing array of Nordic ingredients. Redzepi's fascination with giving his diners a real taste of their food's environment extends to serving dishes on pebbles found in the same fields as his produce. His search for ingredients involves foraging amongst local fields for wild produce, sourcing horse-mussels from the Faroe Islands and the purest possible water from Greenland. Redzepi has heightened the culinary philosophy of seasonally and regionally sourced sustainable ingredients to an exquisite level, and in doing so has created an utterly delicious cuisine.

At noma - four times named the world's best restaurant - every dish includes some form of fermentation, whether it's a bright hit of vinegar, a deeply savory miso, an electrifying drop of garum, or the sweet intensity of black garlic. Fermentation is one of the foundations behind noma's extraordinary flavour profiles. Now Rene Redzepi, chef and co-owner of noma, and David Zilber, the chef who runs the restaurant's acclaimed fermentation lab, share never-before-revealed techniques to creating noma's extensive pantry of ferments. And they do so with a book conceived specifically to share their knowledge and techniques with home cooks. With more than 750 full-colour photographs, most of them step-by-step how-tos, and with every recipe approachably written and meticulously tested, Foundations of Flavor: The Noma Guide to Fermentation takes readers far beyond the typical kimchi and sauerkraut to include koji, kombuchas, shoyus, misos, lacto-ferments, vinegars, garums, and black fruits and vegetables. And - perhaps even more important - it shows how to use these game-changing pantry ingredients in 100 original recipes. Fermentation is already building as the most significant new direction in food (and health). With Foundations of Flavor: The Noma Guide to Fermentation, it's about to be taken to a whole new level.

Dispatches is the inspired and ambitious collaboration between MAD, the international nonprofit organization founded by Rene Redzepi, the chef and co-owner of noma, and Lucky Peach cofounder and editor in chief Chris Ying. Each edition of this new series of single-subject books will encourage readers to think about food in new ways and take action to make food better. Each book will unpack a single urgent and interesting topic, from the history of creative cooking to farming in a world changed by global warming. The first book-You and I Eat the Same-proposes that immigration is fundamental to cuisine, and that good food is the common ground between different cultures. The book comprises long-form writing about the ways in which immigration has shaped food, and shorter features that point to our similarities, including the many ways we wrap meat in flatbreads, a basic primer on fire, and a catalog of all the species of animals that we eat. Dispatches is poised to take all our ideas about food to the next level.

The world-famous chef Rene Redzepi's intimate first-hand account of a year in the life of his renowned restaurant, noma A Work in Progress: A Journal is a highly personal document of the creative processes at noma and the challenges faced by its chefs over a twelve-month period in an unspecified year of the restaurant's history. After a month of vacation, Redzepi made a resolution to keep a journal and to dedicate a year to the creativity and well-being at noma. The result is an unusually candid, and often humorous, insight into the inner workings of one of the food world's most creative minds. Originally featured in the bestselling A Work in Progress, first published in 2013.

A companion piece to Noma, A Work in Progress is a personal account of life at the now famous restaurant. Written by Rene Redzepi as a series of journal entries the text will be accompanied by approximately 75 brand new recipes worked on during the year. Illustrated with a combination of candid photography shot by Rene and his team (125 images), plus final dish shots (90), A Work in Progress promises to be a unique insight into the inner workings of the restaurant and its highly creative team of chefs.

There's a reason Noma sits atop the list of the world's best restaurants. Every bite, every dish, every course surprises, delights, challenges, and deeply satisfies in a way that's unique in the world of dining. As the New York Times's Pete Wells wrote recently in praising Noma's flavors, "sauces are administered so subtly that you don't notice anything weird going on; you just think you've never tasted anything so extraordinary in your life." In Noma 2.0, Rene Redzepi digs deep into the restaurant's magic through the creation of nearly 200 dishes, each photographed in spectacular beauty and detail. Noma 2.0--the title is a reference to the reinvention of Noma after it closed in 2018 to move to its new compound across the water--is about true seasonality, from wild game in the fall to just-picked peas in the summer. It is about using only local ingredients, to build a cuisine that is profoundly situated in its place and culture. It is about transforming the ordinary--a mushroom, a chicken wing, often through fermentation--to develop haunting, memorable flavors. It is about composing a plate that delights the eye as much as the palate, whether through the trompe l'oeil of a "flowerpot" chocolate cake or a dazzling mandala of flowers and berries. It is about pushing the boundaries of what we think we want to eat--a baby pinecone, a pudding made of reindeer brain--to open our palates with a startling confidence. And it is about how to stay creative and challenge yourself over the course of a career. For foodies, for chefs, for artists and art lovers, for thought-leaders and makers, and for the kind of reader who is compelled by the idea that sometimes one person can change everything, Noma 2.0 is the gift book of the season.