Noma Australia pop-up to open in Sydney’s Barangaroo
WOULD you pay $485 for dinner?
That’s the price Australian foodies will fork out for a meal at the Australian branch of Noma, the two Michelin star restaurant run by chef René Redzepi in Copenhagen.
Noma is the Mecca of fine dining. Since opening in 2003, it has topped Restaurantmagazine’s prestigious World’s Best Restaurant list in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014.
Mr Redzepi, who is often hailed as the most influential chef in the world, was listed in TIME magazine’s 2012 list of the 100 most influential people on the planet and was named International Chef of the Year at the Lo Mejor de la Gastronomia conference in 2008.
Noma’s “residency” will run for 10 weeks from January 26 until April 2nd. The restaurant will be open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday-Saturday and the meal will set you back $485, excluding wine.
In comparison, Quay’s degustation menu costs $235 per person and Attica’s tasting menu costs $220 per person. The restaurants are ranked #58 and #32, respectively, on the World’s Best Restaurant List. Bennelong offers a 10-course degustation for $650 per person.
Bookings will open at 10am AEDT on Friday October 30th and potential customers will have to pay the full cost in advance, even though the menu is still being developed.
All bookings will be made available at once, in an attempt to “provide a fair and transparent way of accessing a reservation to all potential diners,” the restaurant said in a statement.
Australian customers are used to feeling disappointed when overseas fine dining pop-ups come down under. In November, thousands of Heston Blumenthal fansmissed out on a table at the Melbourne branch of his British restaurant The Fat Duck.
Demand for a table at the restaurant was so high that potential diners were asked to enter an online ballot system. Successful applicants were then “indiscriminately selected” by an independent third party. But of the 267,537 people who applied for a booking, only 14,000 made the cut.
A spokeswoman for Noma said their booking process is “entirely different” to The Fat Duck and has been designed to offer the “fairest process for securing a booking”.
The menu at the original Copenhagen restaurant includes unusual ingredients like sea urchin, fresh milk curd and kelp. The Sydney pop up will feature Australian produce.
“The menu development is looking really good,” Mr Redzepi said in a statement.
“Between our sommeliers and kitchen staff we’ve already been on six research trips to Australia over the past ten months. We’ve gone to as many regions as we can, to get a good perspective on the amazing produce in Australia.
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“In December, we’ll move the entire creative team to Sydney so they can spend time putting together a menu that best showcases what we’ve found on our trips,” he said.
It seems the 37-year-old will be experimenting with some left-of-field ingredients. Over the past few weeks he has posted photos of a magpie goose, green ants, crocodile fat and mud clams on his Instagram page.
This isn’t Noma’s first overseas pop-up. In 2012 it opened for 10 days in London, and relocated to Tokyo for a sellout five-week stint.
Originally published as Would you pay $485 to eat this meal?
Source: Perth Now, Rebecca Sullivan, 20th October 2015
