Latest news with #NewNordicCuisine
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fancy some iconic celeriac? New Nordic cuisine, now a blockbuster exhibition
When is gastronomy about more than just recipes? When it is New Nordic cuisine: to its advocates, the most influential culinary movement of the 21st century; to its detractors, a school of foodie puritans who have spent the last two decades sucking the joy out of dining and injecting it with po-faced declarations. If a decade of breathy Netflix food programming is to be believed, you could delicately tweezer some edible petals and micro-herbs on to locally foraged mushrooms and a bed of ancient grains, serve it with a naturally fermented lemonade, and you've got yourself a cracking (if not hugely substantive) New Nordic meal. In fact, what the movement tried to bring to the table was more than that: a wider philosophy that linked your lunch with the natural world, local culture and tradition, while being evangelical about improving your relationship with all three. As Martin Braathen, the curator of a major new exhibition marking New Nordic's 20th anniversary pronounces ominously: 'A carrot is not only a carrot.' New Nordic professed a strong interest in food education, public health and nutrition, it carefully tracked ingredients from farm, fjord or forest to table, and had a substantial environmental component. It was aspirationally low waste, low impact and low intervention. At its ambitious best, its chefs took on the challenge of replacing non-native imports such as citrus fruits, by asking questions like: can we create a vinegar that is light enough to imitate lemon juice? Failing that, could we just use ants? (Ants have a lemon-like flavour.) One dish singled out in Norway's National Museum's show New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place is Swedish chef Daniel Berlin's 'iconic' signature celeriac dish – where the vegetable is first grilled over an open fire, then baked in foil for hours. The charred skin is used to make bread, the celeriac roots are used to make a stock, and then a sauce, and a slaw is made from the tops, bringing waste as close to zero as possible. It is also avowedly seasonal and localist. Over the past two decades, New Nordic has navigated various controversies in a bid to elevate regional identity and folk heritage, and as the Oslo exhibition shows, it extends that enthusiasm to non-culinary local arts and crafts such as decor, architecture, design, visual art, pottery and glassware. Outside, the heady smell of birch smoke drifts through the custom-built pavilion, where they are making coffee over a wood fire – very much like normal coffee, perhaps with a hint of birch smoke. The exhibition brings in tableware and artworks from some of the New Nordic scene's garlanded restaurants, as well as maps, farming and fishing tools and photographs which speak to local landscapes as much as the food they produce. 'Moss is used both as decor and as an ingredient in broths,' reads one straight-faced caption. Earth tones abound, and drying seaweed, haunches, hides and leaves hang from wooden beams. All of this began with the 10-point Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen, published in 2004. Some of the manifesto's 12 authors would go on to become household names in Scandinavia and beyond, like Noma's René Redzipi and Claus Meyer. The signatories were drawn not just from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but also Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Åland; all 12 were male. Spiritually, it shared something with its Scandi predecessor from a decade earlier, the infamous Dogme 95 cinematic manifesto: ostensibly didactic and po-faced, but in practice more playful and loose (the film-makers nicknamed their manifesto 'the vow of chastity', and then proceeded to break most of their own rules). Its arrival in the mid-2000s begged the question: what was old Nordic cuisine – what was it replacing, and what was wrong with it? Meatballs, herring, potatoes, stodge, bacon and butter – but the greater complaint was of the excess of imported, unseasonal foods; it was a response to ever slicker global supply chains and culinary homogenisation, more than a protest against the Ikea lunch. In this respect, New Nordic is an heir to Italy's Slow Food movement, prompted by the arrival of Italy's first McDonald's in 1986, or French farmer and activist José Bové's elevation to national hero in 1999, when he and fellow trade unionists 'dismantled' a new branch of McDonald's in protest against American hormone-treated beef. 'New Nordic pushes back against the global food industry,' Braathen says: prior to its arrival, 'we ignored the local'. It places great emphasis on the immediate landscape the restaurant sits in, and a desire to 'capture' it in a dish – an idea now frequently cited in British food TV shows. Two decades is more than enough time in the spotlight to acquire dissenters, too. At its worst, New Nordic can seem dogmatic, chauvinistic, and elitist – little more than smug 'bro' auteur-chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants showing off to each other, and their rich diners. The backlash has grown in recent years. 'I have eaten in Michelin-starred New Nordic restaurants where presenting the menu felt more like a lecture than a treat.' wrote Petri Burtsoff in Monocle last month, in a piece that claimed the 'fiddly', 'fussy' and 'pretentious' style has fallen out of favour in Scandinavia itself, replaced by something more hearty, relaxed and simple. Copenhagen's Noma – five-time winner of Best Restaurant in the World, for those keeping score – announced they were closing in 2023, to great fanfare, although still haven't pulled the plug, with reservations filled until the end of this year, for a tasting menu that costs a cool 4,400DKK, or £500 per head. For an institution inclined to grandiose talk about sustainability, recent revelations that Noma's business model seems to have been built on legions of unpaid interns, or stages, have undermined fine dining's reputation at large. In Noma's case, the Financial Times found that up to 30 stagiaries were working in the kitchen in 2019, almost as many as their 34 paid chefs at the time. It's all very well treating your hand-foraged molluscs with care – one New Nordic legacy is the frequency with which TV chefs talk sanctimoniously about 'respecting the ingredients' – but what about respecting the sentient beings you're getting to clean them? For all of its elevation of traditional, preindustrial techniques, New Nordic always claimed to have remained a living, breathing movement. Oslo-based ceramicist Anette Krogstad, whose hand thrown stoneware appears in the exhibition, stresses that point. Like the food on the table, her plates themselves are seasonal – some designs more suited to winter, others to summer. But Krogstad is keen that these lofty ideas are not on a pedestal, or out of reach. 'I don't want people to buy my ceramics and then put them away, and save them for a nice dinner,' she says: 'I want them to be used every day.' Can the same be said about the trickle-down effect of New Nordic's fine-dining masters on local eateries? Just beyond the museum, the cheerful cafe Elias makes no mention of New Nordic principles – the head chef had not heard about the new exhibition and said he would probably be too busy to visit – but they are on display nonetheless. I ate a meltingly tender, deep-red elk carpaccio, sprinkled with tart lingonberries, bitter rocket, the crunch of pine nuts and red onion, and a salty local organic cheese, Holtefjell. For dessert, the cloudberry panna cotta was made with cream and tjukkmjølk (a soured milk) from Røros, to the north of Oslo. The meal came to £50 for two courses, a soft drink and tip, pretty affordable by Oslo standards. To pull off the trick of being sophisticated and surprising, but still accessible and unpretentious – that's the sweet spot. Walk further around the affluent Tjuvholmen neighbourhood surrounding the museum, though, and the gastronomic upheaval lauded inside its walls becomes less tangible. Among the Kapoor, Gormley and Bourgeois sculptures, and underneath the waterside apartments, the restaurant options included Eataly, Los Tacos, Entrecote, Big Horn Steakhouse, New Delhi and Yokoso sushi and ramen. The food huts outside sold macarons and gelato. This isn't to say New Nordic cuisine has proven a failure, just that its advocates are fighting an uphill battle against the Instagram-enabled appeal of the same global smorgasbord you might find in London, Melbourne, Los Angeles or Barcelona. But is New Nordic over? For Braathen, this exhibition is indeed a retrospective; but while we might be talking about it in the past tense, there is clearly a lot more work to be done – and some of its advocates are refusing to call time at the natural wine bar. 'While the Nordic food movement has been a success by any standard, the vision that guides it still holds a great deal of unrealised potential,' said last month's report from December's New Nordic Food Summit. To realise this potential, in the face of the global food and farming industries, will be a challenge. Soaring food prices have caused concern in Norway recently, as in so much of the world – with prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre promising to address them ahead of September's election. The cause of these high food prices? Extremely high tariffs on imports, to protect Norwegian farmers – it is hard to imagine easing that protectionism will do much to support New Nordic Cuisine. For Noma co-founder Meyer, the movement's legacy should be to blend into the background. 'Now we should just move on, talk less about the New Nordic cuisine and just let it become a part of our lives,' he said back in 2015. It's a noble intention – but the struggle to extol the virtues of the local against the global food industry will not be won easily. New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place is at the National Museum, Oslo, until 14 September
Forbes
7 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Discover The Story Of New Nordic Cuisine At Norway's National Museum
Local ingredients are at the forefront of New Nordic cuisine. Two decades ago, a group of Scandinavian chefs met in Copenhagen and signed a manifesto that would quietly spark a global culinary revolution. Their mission was to redefine Nordic food culture by embracing seasonal, local ingredients and reviving traditional methods. Today, New Nordic cuisine has become a major culinary movement and one of Scandinavia's most influential cultural exports. This summer, Oslo's National Museum is peeling back the layers of this phenomenon in a major new exhibition: New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place. Running through September 14, the exhibition explores how the movement's philosophy of seasonality and sustainability has spread far beyond the kitchen, impacting the likes of design and architecture too. Among the 500 words on display, visitors will find handmade ceramics used in Michelin-starred restaurants, landscape paintings, sculptural menus, and photographs that reflect on nature, place and identity. When the manifesto was signed in 2004, it outlined ten principles, including purity, freshness, ethics and sustainability. Rather than replicating French haute cuisine, chefs like Claus Meyer and René Redzepi (of Noma fame) called for a culinary identity rooted in Nordic soil, climate and heritage. The movement redefined luxury in a Nordic context. Wild garlic or berries gathered from a nearby forest became just as prized as imported truffles. Pickling and fermentation, once survival techniques, were reimagined as high art. An outdoor pavilion will host interactive opportunities for visitors to the New Nordic Cuisine exhibition at Oslo's National Museum. Even the visual language shifted. Rustic wood, muted ceramics and dishes plated like miniature landscapes took center stage. Norwegian restaurants quickly became part of this wave. Oslo's Maaemo earned three Michelin stars by showcasing hyper-local ingredients with philosophical flair. Kontrast, RE-NAA, and Credo soon earned stars, each interpreting the New Nordic ethos in their own way with menus that change with the weather and interiors that echo the natural world. The National Museum's exhibition captures this intersection of cuisine and creativity. Alongside a langoustine press carved from wood and menus disguised as literary first editions, you'll find photographs, landscape paintings, and craft pieces that reflect the same aesthetic ideals: simplicity, nature, locality. A highlight is a handcrafted menu from the now-closed Ylajali restaurant in Oslo, designed to mimic the first edition of Knut Hamsun's Hunger. Another is ceramicist Sissel Wathne's bone-glazed tableware, created for Credo using reindeer bones. In true New Nordic style, the exhibition is not confined indoors. A specially designed outdoor pavilion on the museum's square will host foraging walks, open-fire cooking demos and fermentation workshops. Constructed from Norwegian spruce with wild plants growing on the roof, the space reflects the movement's principles of sustainability and local rootedness. The pavilion kitchen will host guest chefs and communal events through the summer. Visitors can participate by picking herbs from nearby forests and return to cook with them over a fire. Today, New Nordic Cuisine is studied in culinary schools and emulated in restaurants from Tokyo to Toronto. But its staying power comes not from trendiness, but from its grounding in a sense of place. Its call for seasonal, ethical and local eating resonates in a world packed with processed foods. The exhibition runs until September 14 at the National Museum in Oslo. A version of the show will then travel to the National Nordic Museum in Seattle in late 2025. Oslo is a fitting place for this exhibition given the Norwegian capital city hosts so many restaurants with Michelin stars earned for their innovative approaches. Maaemo stands at the pinnacle with three Michelin stars. Led by Chef Esben Holmboe Bang, Maaemo offers a seasonal tasting menu that emphasizes organic, wild and biodynamic Norwegian produce. Tables must be booked months in advance. Kontrast, holding two Michelin stars, is known for its commitment to sustainability and seasonality, while its name explains its concept of combining colors and tastes. Chef Mikael Svensson crafts dishes that highlight the purity of local ingredients, presented in a minimalist and modern setting. Other Oslo highlights include refined dining in historic surroundings at Statholdergaarden, and the hyper-modern takes on New Nordic cuisine at Bar Amour and Savage.
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Culture Agenda: The best things to do, hear, see or watch in Europe this week
The sun is (hopefully) shining wherever you are — and great food, art, disco and flower shows are calling... Although we're most excited about watching Tom Cruise hanging upside down off a plane's wing in the upcoming Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning. If you're still catching up with last week's happenings — check out the latest culture catch-up, in which our critic David Mouriquand and editor Tokunbo Salako delve into the vinyl release of Pink Floyd's iconic 1971 live recorded set, Cannes' opening film Partir un Jour, and the latest gory Final Destination instalment. Until next time, here are this week's highlights. New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place Where: The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo, Norway) When: 23 May - 14 September 2025 Pioneered by prestigious restaurants like Noma, New Nordic Cuisine took off in the mid 2000s — and re-shaped Europe's culinary landscape. At its core is a focus on minimalism through fresh, seasonal ingredients, which in turn became a distinctive Scandinavian aesthetic found in everything from architecture to art. A new exhibition at Oslo's National Museum of Art explores the movements' cultural roots and evolutions, featuring more than 500 artworks, photographs and objects from renowned Nordic restaurants and contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson. It's a delicious deep dive into the intersection between food, art and environment. Karl Stengel's debut solo UK show Where: Oxo Tower (London, UK) When: 21 May - 30 May 2025 Hungarian artist Karl Stengel was one of the most prolific yet overlooked post-war artists. To mark what would have been his 100th year since birth, various exhibitions have been paying tribute across the continent — from Florence to, now, London. This one is particularly special as it's also the UK's first ever solo Stengel show, offering a rare opportunity to discover the breadth of the artist's dynamic creations, including 24 paintings, works on paper and mixed-media compositions spanning the 1970s to 2010s. They're powerfully introspective, reflecting both Stengel's personal experiences and the evolving artistic world around him. Disco: I'm Coming Out Where: Philharmonie de Paris (France) When: Until 17 August 2025 Disco is uh, uh, uh, uh, stayin' alive, with this dazzling exploration of the movement's cultural origins. From its roots in Black America to the rainbow-lit dance floors of the 80s, disco's vibrant energy may have subsided, but still speaks to contemporary culture — especially within the dance hall spaces of LGBTQ+ communities. The Philharmonie de Paris highlights this through an immersive (and suitably groovy) display of costumes, instruments, objects, and more! Ain't no stoppin' us now, we're on the move to see this one asap. RHS Chelsea Flower Show Where: Royal Hospital Chelsea (London, UK) When: 20 - 24 May 2025 Nothing screams spring like perusing the perfectly manicured grounds of the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. Often referred to as the 'World Cup of gardening', it's a lavish display of florals, cutting-edge garden designs and products — although perhaps most notable for its royal attendees. This year's theme, titled 'Your Space, Your Story', celebrates gardens as spaces for individual expression, while sustainability (including innovations involving AI) will also play a big role. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning Where: UK cinemas When: 21 May 2025 Your mission, should you choose to accept it… is to go to the cinema this Friday for the latest (and possibly final ever) Mission: Impossible movie. Having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week, Tom Cruise returns as death-defying secret agent Ethan Hunt, who this time is attempting to save the world from a rogue AI named the Entity. As always, you can expect plenty of nerve-shredding stunts, blockbuster spectacle and, indeed, a few cliché lines. If you needed a franchise refresher — here's our ranking of all the previous films. Stay tuned to Euronews Culture for David Mouriquand's full review. Cannes Film Festival Where: Cannes, France When: Until 24 May 2025 As the Cannes Film Festival enters its second week, there's lots to keep an eye out for — including the upcoming premieres of Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind and Julia Ducournau's Alpha (find out more about the French filmmaker here). Meanwhile, other highly-anticipated contenders have already screened, including Lynne Ramsay's Die, My Love and Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme. Here's a reminder of the programme in full — and our favourite Palme d'Or winners from the past 25 years. Rick and Morty season 8 Where: Max When: 26 May 2025 Wubba lubba dub dub - the popular Adult Swim cartoon returns for more intergalactic adventures involving Rick, an alcohol-guzzling scientific genius, and his highly strung grandson Morty. Beloved for its comedic absurdity and dark philosophical undertones, the show has built a cult following that doesn't seem to have diminished — despite its co-creator and star Justin Roiland being dropped in 2023. In fact, the show is currently locked into a 10 season contract (so won't be leaving our universe any time soon). Sparks: Mad! When: 23 May 2025 Before Chappell Roan was being called "your favourite artist's artist", Sparks were. Throughout the course of their 50+ year career, the American band has remained a cult gem of the pop world, notable for their playful experimentation and Anglophile-inspired idiosyncrasies. They're also nothing if not prolific — the release of 'Mad!' marks their 28th studio album, which includes sweet synthy singles like "My Devotion" and shows the band's continued ability to evolve. PS: For those curious to know more about the band, we'd recommend watching Edgar Wright's 2021 documentary The Sparks Brothers! Morcheeba: Escape The Chaos When: 23 May 2025 Another album to look out for this week — the return of trip hop band Morcheeba. Founded in 1995 by Skye Edwards and brothers Paul and Ross Godfrey, 'Escape The Chaos' is a nostalgic pastiche that pays tribute to their 30-year career. In reference to lead single 'We Live And Die', Edwards told Rolling Stone: "[It's] about my duration in the band and the music world and life in general. The lines become blurred after all this time. In a way, it's a homage to the thirty years of being in Morcheeba which is 60% of my existence.' Bonus suggestions: Skunk Anansie's 'The Painful Truth' and our top ten live albums.
