NEW YORK • Danish chef Rene Redzepi is moving his lauded restaurant Noma to Sydney next year.
He announced on Noma's site over the weekend that he and his team of more than 40 cooks, servers and dishwashers would set up the restaurant in Barangaroo, a suburb of Sydney, for 10 weeks beginning in January next year.
His Instagram feed has already been a tease, with green lip abalone, fat local mussels and conch.
Earlier this year, he experimented with the long-term popup structure in Tokyo, where he ran Noma on the 37th floor of the Mandarin Oriental for five weeks.
The meal was astonishing, beginning with a wriggling shrimp covered in ants from the Nagano forest. The wait list for dinner was reportedly 60,000 names long.
Noma won the title of world's best restaurant in 2010, 2011, 2012 and last year. It dropped two places to No. 3 in the high-end restaurant awards this year.
British chef Heston Blumenthal popped up in Australia earlier this year too.
His approach in Melbourne was to faithfully recreate the menu at the Fat Duck, rather than experiment with local ingredients.
In a video on the Australian website Gourmet Traveller, Redzepi describes his first experiences in Australia and explains how the temporary move is a chance for him and his team to learn about the landscape by experimenting with local ingredients.
Just like in Tokyo, the cooks will scour for tasty things that live and grow there.
Redzepiwrites: "From the tropical fruit in the north, to the native pepper leaf of Tasmania; the pristine fish and shellfish of the very south, and all the new exotic wonders in between. Our research forays will take us into the bush, around every shoreline, weeding our way through Flinders and Kangaroo Island. Somewhere along that course, I may even get my first surfing lesson."
Dinner for two at Noma, Tokyo, cost about US$1,350 (S$1,845). It is not clear yet if Sydney tickets (which are not yet on sale) will be comparable. BLOOMBERG
