August 11, 2010

Best restaurant for 2010

"What makes the best restaurant in the world?" -Article by Telegraph about the chef Rene Redzepi who won the award for the best restaurant in the word. Rene's father is from Republic of Macedonia while his mother is Danish.

Excerpt from the article:

Rene Redzepi is not only better at cooking than anyone in the world, he is also, infuriatingly, better at writing about cooking. When you read his menu, it's not just the flavours of his extraordinary ingredients you long to roll round your tongue, you start to savour their sound, too.

In an elaborate ceremony at London's Guildhall on Monday evening, Redzepi beat the two men flanking him, Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, as his restaurant Noma was declared greatest place to eat on the planet – decent going for a converted whale blubber store in Copenhagen, once dismissed by a sniffy critic as "the stinking whale".

We met yesterday for breakfast in a London hotel and it took approximately thirty seconds to realise this was no ordinary chef.

So where did his improbable tale begin? "Many chefs have a grandmother story," he smiles "you know 'I only cook what my grandmother taught me'. I don't really have that." Instead, he left Denmark every summer for his father's native Macedonia: "To go anywhere, you got on a horse. If you wanted to eat, you slaughtered a chicken. I would go off for hours gathering wild blackberries. And we would go into the mountains picking chestnuts. We would then have them for breakfast with milk from the cow."

He peers up from under the fringe of his boyishly parted hair and says in near faultless English: "It seemed so backward. In Denmark everyone ate frozen food." He hardly need spell out that now he thinks it was Denmark that needed change.

His summers in Macedonia – curtailed by the outbreak of war in 1992 – informed his values. "We had very little. My mother is still a cleaning lady. My parents come from almost nothing, all they have is family. They are proud about the award but for them it's not about being on TV. Instead they ask 'Are you happy?' or 'Has your daughter been seeing enough of her father?' They keep you pretty grounded."

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