When Noma opened twenty years ago, we were committed to the idea of building a restaurant that could only exist in this windswept corner of the world: we had to find a voice. Easier said than done. I was practically a kid. I had spent the previous decade working: prep, service, clean-up, rinse, repeat. Now, suddenly, I was in search of something more, all while trying to keep a business afloat.

We did have one thing going for us from the start: the belief that the key to our future would be found in our proverbial backyard. In my scant free time, I did a lot of research to speed up the process. A field guide published by the Swedish Army offered surprisingly pivotal inspiration. It was one of those little manuals designed to help troops navigate the wild, especially at precarious moments when they might be forced to wonder: Will I die if I put that leaf in my mouth?

The pocketbook explained that you could actually live off of our region’s landscape for an entire year. This struck me as the kind of information that wasn’t just useful to famished soldiers. I started to wonder more intensely than ever before: What’s really out there? What’s been growing at our feet this entire time that we’ve surely seen but not truly looked at?  

And as we experimented with those crayons, we were able to leave behind a somewhat unfulfilling initial style that could be described as French cuisine with a sprinkling of Nordic ingredients. I’ll give you an example of a breakthrough that sounds almost quaint today: on a trip to the marshland, we watched a herd of sheep grazing on a magnificent field of sorrel. Given that nature itself seemed to be telling us we should give the combination a try, we decided to make a simple dessert of sheeps milk and wild sorrel. The resulting dish wasn’t just absurdly delicious. It was different. It was new. We were expressing our region on the plate.

We were capturing moments in time and, given the scarcity of ingredients in the harsher months, even finding ways to extend them. Wild roses, for instance, only come into season for a few weeks annually, and that’s if the weather doesn’t get in the way. But they have an absolutely extraordinary floral brightness that is so versatile, so potent, so vivid. We pickled them by the hundreds of kilos in apple cider. It was another new crayon, which, like so many other pantry hallmarks, spun off into many more directions, yielding even more crayons—misos, kombuchas, spice mixes, and, as you may have noticed, vinegars.