Under the rustling palms of Tulum, Mexico, the chef René Redzepi has been serving what Kevin Sintumuang, reporting for Esquire, called “the most enviable meal of the year.” Mr. Redzepi, who transplanted most of his staff to the Yucatán, while Noma, his restaurant in Copenhagen, prepares to move, said he wanted Noma Mexico to be “the meal of the decade.” For Jacob Richler, who wrote about the dinner for The Toronto Star, it was “the meal of a lifetime.”And I’m going to miss it.
Not that I will be entirely in the dark about what other people have been eating when Noma Mexico, sometimes referred to as Noma Tulum, reaches the end of its seven-week run on Sunday. Despite having accommodations for just 7,000 people, all of whom claimed reservations within two hours last December, it may be the most exhaustively documented pop-up restaurant in history. Instagram has more than 5,000 images tagged #nomamexico, and journalists have been trooping into the jungle for weeks now.
And so, from Food & Wine’s Joshua David Stein, we have learned how the interior of a bromeliad called piñuela tastes when it has been blanched, peeled and “dotted with grasshopper paste onto which adheres delicate coriander flowers.” Samantha Teague of Gourmet Traveller told us what it was like to eat octopus wrapped in masa and corn husks that were placed in a clay pot and buried in hot coals. The fire-and-ice thrill of pasilla peppers poached in honey and stuffed with chocolate sorbet was detailed by Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post. “A sliced tiny banana, slicked with seaweed oil and dotted with a paste made with its own burnt peel” is among the impressions Jonathan Gold recounted in The Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Redzepi transplanted most of his staff from his Copenhagen restaurant to prepare what he calls “the meal of the decade” in Tulum. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
As these you-are-not-there dispatches clattered in over the Teletype, I had two thoughts: The first, of course, was, “Holy banana peels, can I pull some strings and get in?” This was quickly followed by, “What is the point?”
I could describe the workings of this Brigadoon in Quintana Roo if I wrote strictly as a reporter, the way Julia Moskin did in The Times last week. But Noma Mexico short-circuits my wiring as a critic. An actual review of a pop-up that sold out months ago strikes me as spectacularly useless. It would be as helpful as reviewing a wedding.
Of course, there are other reasons to write reviews. We restaurant critics do more than fill our mouths and then flash our greasy thumbs up or down. We try to assess the way a place fits into its context, including its environment. Part of this is simply sorting out whether, say, a new Sichuan restaurant in Queens is as good as, better than or different from all the other Sichuan restaurants nearby. We ask whether it’s providing something the location doesn’t already have, and whether it makes sense there. These are separate questions: Queens might not have an overpriced, incompetent Sichuan restaurant, but that doesn’t mean opening one is a good idea.
You don’t need to eat at Noma Mexico to know Tulum doesn’t have anything like it. But does it make sense there?
Start with the advertised cost — $600 a person, or $750 after tax and service charges. This is considerably more than Noma charged for its pop-ups in Sydney (around $350 without drinks) and Tokyo (about $380), two cities where it’s not unheard-of to spend that much on a meal.
Tulum is not a city; it’s a resort town, formerly a sleepy getaway of tilted palapas and sunrise yoga classes that has been climbing upscale. Largely thanks to the tourist economy, the state of Quintana Roo has the highest employment rate in the country, but the average income is in the bottom third. About half the state’s residents live in moderate to extreme poverty.
Before dinner reservations were available, Mr. Redzepi announced that he would also be serving free lunches to Mexican culinary students for the last two weeks of the pop-up. But, clearly, most of the people coming for dinner have paid for not just the meal but for flights to the Yucatán, a car rental or taxi to Tulum, and at least one night in a hotel.
It is no surprise that a paying audience exists for this tropical getaway. At this point in his career, Mr. Redzepi could sell out a weenie roast in Death Valley. What I find hard to run through my critical algorithms, though, is the idea of a meal devoted to local traditions and ingredients that is being prepared and consumed mostly by people from somewhere else.
The Noma philosophy, from the start, was rigorously local. Mr. Redzepi drew a circle around the Nordic region and gathered almost all his ingredients from inside it, with rare exceptions. Noma founded a next-level locavorism that is widely if not always intelligently imitated, and one of its legacies is the notion that restaurants with global ambitions must demonstrate a strong attachment to their location.
This “sense of place” expectation animates a lot of the jousting behind the annual list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, among other things. And it has led to a strange new sight: dining rooms where expensive celebrations of the local environment are enjoyed largely by tourists.
By all reports, Noma Mexico has sense of place in spades. The path to the jungle dining area is lined with baskets of jackfruit and mangos. The tables slipped in between the palms were made from a local hardwood. Directly in front of the kitchen, four women from a nearby Mayan village make tortillas.
But can a restaurant really be of its place if it doesn’t bend and sway to the breezes of local tastes and local demands? I doubt it, and I doubt that my own ecstatic reveries (for the sake of argument, let’s assume that I would have enjoyed Noma Mexico as much as everybody else) would help on that front. I’d be another tourist, hoping to be knocked out with sensations that would carry over to the flight back to New York.
The staff working on salbute with dried tomatoes and chapulines (grasshoppers). Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Back home at the keyboard, I’d calculate how many words to spend on sensory pleasures and how many on the $2,000 or so that my employers were on the hook for, whether it was “worth it” and whether the local standard of living was likely to be helped by the attention Noma had brought to Mexican ingredients.
Fretting about the ethics of eating a meal costing hundreds of dollars is a particularly awkward form of talking with your mouth full. I know, because I’ve done it before and will do it again, always with a small pit of shame in my gut. The two things can never really be reconciled, without some shady bookkeeping.
I don’t blame Mr. Redzepi and the Noma crew for coming up with an event that makes my critical lens fog over. They’ve acknowledged that they owe something to Mexico and tried to pay it back. In Tulum, they’re chasing their curiosity and raising new bars to vault over, which is what creative people should do.
That’s the artistic side of Noma Mexico. On the business front, they’ve chosen to pour their creativity into something that, because of its planned scarcity and relative expense, has to be seen as a luxury product. Luxury goods tend to float free of the everyday world and create their own cultural context, one of wealth and exclusivity. There are many ways to respond to that, but in this case, I don’t think a review written by me is one of them. I’d rather review a restaurant that has its roots in the ground.
― Josh in Chicago, Friday, 26 May 2017 13:04 (nine years ago)