When the Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen was first published, in 2004, the reaction in the world of fine dining was sceptical, if not outright suspicious. The manifesto’s points were criticised for being too vague, too piecemeal, too male – all the signatories were men – and too focused on “encouraging cooperation” rather than challenging the region’s industrial food producers through legislation and policy. There are also plans for a Mad Academy, with funding from the Danish government, which aims to become “a Bauhaus of food”, as its executive director, Melina Shannon-DiPietro puts it – a place where all the different steps in food production are taught, and where efforts are geared towards answering the most urgent questions of the day: “How do we make food sustainable? How do we make food available to all? How do we protect food cultures against globalisation?”

In 2012, Redzepi launched the Mad non-profit, to “unite a global cooking community with a social conscience”. Aside from its larger symposiums, Mad has run pop-up salons in London, New York and Sydney, inviting local chefs and journalists to talk about topics as expansive as abandoning ego, indigenous food culture and questioning the very value of life itself. They have partnered with Yale to teach students about leadership, have published essay collections on how food cultures overlap all over the world, and launched a foraging app, VILD MAD (“wild food”), to help users find what’s edible in their local park. Further afield, in Bolivia, Meyer has opened restaurants and cooking schools to revive the nation’s hospitality industry. In the US, Dan Giusti, a former head chef at Noma, now feeds more than 4,000 school children a day with nourishing meals, while in Albania, Fejsal Demiraj, one of Noma’s current sous chefs, runs a foundation that researches and catalogues the nation’s village recipes to give the country a documented culinary history for the first time. For the past twenty years, noma has been a restaurant ever curious to learn and grow—to be the best that we can be! Our origin is rooted in an exploration of the natural world, which began with a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients by foraging and to follow the seasons.

It's not going to be a destination restaurant, just a bloody good pub” - Tom Kerridge on The Butcher's Tap Chelsea Scandinavia now leads the world in food policy, too. In 2018, Dr Afton Halloran, one of the world’s foremost experts on sustainable food systems, published a collection of innovative food policies from around the Nordic region, the Solutions Menu. It outlined the benefits of 24 innovative food policies, aggregated from successful initiatives around the Nordic region – including universal free school meals, organic food in hospitals and schemes to help farms move towards zero food waste. Halloran and her co-authors cited Noma and the New Nordic movement as their chief inspiration. 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. The Noma team says that while its new book is ostensibly a cookbook, it’s not necessarily to be cooked from. This is very much the case. Though Noma 2.0​ - so called because it is concerned with the work of Noma’s test kitchen since the world-famous Copenhagen moved to its new location in 2018 - does give chefs a good insight into the makeup of its dishes it only gives limited instructions as to how to actually replicate them.

The multidisciplinary cohort for this year's Design Researchers in Residence includes April Barrett, Eliza Collin, Jamie Irving and Freya Spencer-Wood, who will explore the theme of ‘Solar’

Noma began attracting talents from outside the food world: anthropologists, molecular chemists and agricultural scientists who would work in its Nordic Food Lab. This lab space – which was, for many years, a rigged-up houseboat moored outside of the restaurant – developed new local products, such as miso made with Danish yellow peas, or salt from shoreline seaweeds for the restaurant to use, while doing original research into the culinary biodiversity of Scandinavia. Spanning music, fashion, design and food, a new book, Make Break Remix explores the global rise and rise of Korean culture Noma Bar’s illustrations do the thing visual communicators are always told not to: they tell not show. They’re brazen in their simplicity, and often, simply brazen. They manage to distill hefts of meaning with precision, concision and a heavy, heavy wink.

Frebel said the range of sauces and fermented products would be expanded, and there “could even be could be little Noma stores around the world”. With Noma Projects we want to share Noma’s innovation and flavour ideas with the world,” Frebel said as he prepared for evening service at the restaurant’s waterside location in the Christianshavn neighbourhood. We typically see a high demand for smaller tables, so it may be easier to find availability if you are able to come as a larger group. Lars Williams, who was drafted to Noma from Heston Blumenthal’s test kitchen in 2009, moved to the houseboat in 2010 to run the Nordic Food Lab for two years. “We’d be as scientific as chefs could be,” Williams said. “We’d try the same idea 30 different times, with 30 different incremental variations, and record it all to assure we’d been rigorous.” Much like the restaurant, the lab operated with solely Nordic produce, but did its best to stretch that definition: “Things from the Faroe Islands were fair game, things from Northern Norway were fair game – we didn’t just operate around a kilometre’s radius around Copenhagen.” It’s as if Fergus Henderson took his “ nose-to-tail” philosophy into Whitehall, got funding from the National Lottery and ended up getting people across the British isles to butcher their own meat, instead of just feeding offal to well-heeled Londoners. What the New Nordic movement is trying to export is not a single cuisine, but an all-encompassing philosophy of food.Of course, there have been powerful voices challenging the mainstream food industry before. At the height of the first-wave of the environmental movement, in the 70s, Alice Waters’ groundbreaking restaurant Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, shone a light on the relationship between food producers and cooks, encouraging diners to reject commercialism and supermarkets, and return to the farmers and ranchers who produce their food in a more sustainable way – even if it means paying more for that produce. Publishers have spread themselves thin over the Bauhaus centenary – concrete-like, covering new ground. Everyone has found an innovative way to approach the subject, all the while republishing editions with updated introductions. It's been a big old year for Bauhaus – here are some of our favourite printed celebrations René Redzepi is head chef and owner of Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where he creates his inventive take on Nordic cuisine with a distinctive emphasis on regional specialities. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s most influential chefs. In fact, both chefs would probably say they were now moving beyond New Nordic,” she said. “The principles still apply, of course: they’re united by a real respect for nature, which obviously changes food fundamentally, but also by collaboration, and by wanting to be the best workplace – for employees, producers, the environment.”