Irish chef aids reinvention of former best restaurant, Noma

“I’m not finished yet,” Rene Redzepi told journalists in London in June, just before Restaurant Noma lost the world’s best title. The 37-year-old Danish chef proved true to his word with the announcement that he is to close Noma in fifteen months, and reopen the restaurant at the heart of an urban farm.

The former Noma souschef, Dubliner Trevor Moran, has a key role in Noma's new chapter, and will return from Nashville restaurant The Catbird Seat to Copenhagen. Redzepi told The Irish Times that Moran’s role had yet to be fully worked out “but basically me and him will be working closely together on all creative aspects of Noma.”

Redzepi is to transform a derelict site in Copenhagen’s Christiania district into a farm, the New York Times reported, with a greenhouse on the roof and a floating field on a lake.

The project will require a full-time farmer with a team, Redzepi said. And the restaurant will ditch the tasting menu formula. Instead they will serve only game in autumn, greens in spring and summer and fish in winter.

Noma will close after service on New Year’s Eve 2016 and reopen in the new location the following year. Before that happens the restaurant will move to Sydney for four months from December to April next year. Redzepi has transformed the world restaurant scene from a country once famed only for butter cookies and industrial ham. In an interview with The Irish Times last year he talked about the philosophy as being “to sort of cook our place.” And he stressed the importance of a farm to a kitchen. “To truly have that farm to table ethos: where you go to a farm and you work with that farm and whatever that farmer gives you - that’s what you cook. That’s a different level, very, very difficult but utimately very gratifying.”

The news of Moran’s move came as a surprise in the Tennessee food world. According to a statement from the restaurant quoted on the Eater Nashville blog, Moran is expected to “remain at The Catbird Seat at least through the end of the year.”

Moran previously worked in Brasserie na Mara and with Dylan McGrath in Mint before he joined Noma in 2009, working his way from an unpaid stage to a sous chef role, one of a number of Irish chefs to go through the Noma kitchen.