{CHAPTER 14}

NOMA, THE WORLD’S
BEST RESTAURANT:
A MANIFESTO AND AN
EXPLOSION OF IDEAS

One of the central and most difficult dilemmas concerning the promotion of sustainable creativity is that the way forward may involve both limitations and decidedly conceptual thinking on the one hand and an explosion of ideas on the other. Christian loves to say that quantity begets quality. The more ideas, the more you can run with, and the greater the chance that one of them is good. Other times, however, a tight and thought-through concept is in control of creativity.

We know that authors occasionally decide to write poems to sharpen their product since it requires them to polish down a thought into ten lines instead of allow it to spill out over 300 pages. Novellas serve the same function. The author Allen Ginsberg believed that the first thought was the best thought, and the musician Leonard Cohen can spend years tinkering with a single line or verse. This is why it took Cohen 21 years to complete his fantastic collection of poems, essays, and illustrations, Book of Longing, jokingly referred to by some of his friends (and his publisher) as Book of Prolonging. LEGO has been successful by limiting creativity for a period of time and by placing faith in the basic and simple play potential of the LEGO bricks themselves. Heaps of ideas as well as strict limitations can both be regarded as legitimate paths to encouraging creativity.

In this chapter, we will take a trip to Restaurant Noma. We will hear about the importance of constructive limitations in the form of strict and thought-through conceptual thinking concerning the idea of “Nordic cuisine”.

AT NOMA

In 2010, 2011, and 2012, Restaurant Noma was recognized by the British food magazine Restaurant Magazine as the world’s best restaurant. Noma is a good example of the importance of strict and overarching conceptual thinking for the development of creativity. Noma has managed to contribute to reforming the Nordic cuisine in the direction of the special raw ingredients available in the Nordic world and by cultivating the way in which we consider and handle these ingredients.

So how did Noma manage to change its “industry”? What are the underlying innovative ideas that have meant that Noma has acted as a catalyst for a true paradigm shift in Nordic culinary culture? How could a restaurant unleash creative potential in other stakeholders in other niches of the culinary, agricultural, and foodstuffs industry? Danish entrepreneur Claus Meyer is the restaurant’s creator. We interviewed Claus in March 2013, and he told us the story behind Noma’s inception:

“Noma literally grew out of an event we call ‘Dish of the Year’. I’d presented the idea in 2000 to the food critic at Berlingske Tidende newspaper, Søren Frank, that one could gather together the Danish food critics to celebrate the dishes that had made the biggest impressions on them over the course of the year. At that point, I’d got seriously tired of French cuisine’s dominance in Denmark. I was tired that yet another year would go by with Kong Hans and Søllerød Kro getting their predictable Michelin stars for their monstrously delicious overall presentations, and then it would be that kind of party. Stars and hats would be distributed to the safest and most expensive establishments, but the food, the dishes got lost in oblivion, and renewal laboured under very difficult conditions.

“It was paradoxical considering that noteworthy, meaningful, wonderful food could by all means be anything other than foie gras and turbot baked to perfection. The meal ought to be able to challenge the diner, represent the season and the landscapes, like in Southern Europe. Maybe it could even set new agendas and point toward solutions to problems outside of the restaurants themselves. It just didn’t happen.

“I wasn’t running a restaurant myself at this time, so Søren and I organized the competition for Dish of the Year. The competition was later renamed ‘Gericke of the Year’, and the Association of Danish Food Critics was formed. It later turned out that the dishes that all of us agreed on celebrating the next years were dishes constructed from local ingredients in season, subjected to original ideas for preparation. The French dishes also taste lovely, but they’re not moving in the same way.

“So it happens that in 2002, I’m invited to run a restaurant in the old warehouse at Christianshavn in Copenhagen and am informed that representatives from Greenland, Faroe, and Iceland will be staying there in a sort of cultural centre and that the space was also an object of trade between these countries 300 years ago. And while I’m looking around the warehouse there, I start thinking of a lesson from an earlier project, namely that a wide diversity of raw ingredients has always been a prerequisite for ‘the great cuisines’, the food cultures that make an international impact. It was at this time I started to realize that it might make sense to establish this restaurant. That it could function as the vanguard in the efforts to form a new cuisine. Or as we later wrote in Noma’s first menu, ‘With this restaurant, we seek to reconstruct Nordic cuisine so that it embraces the Arctic and lights up the world on the strength of its good taste and character.’ We probably should have written ‘travel across’ instead of ‘reconstruct’.

“I met René Redzepi in the spring of 2003 and suggested that he become head chef and partner. Later, he asked whether he can bring in Mads Refslund as a collaborating chef and partner, and I agreed. On a research trip to Greenland, Iceland, and Faroe, we tasted some turnips in Torshavn that tasted like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. They’re sweeter, juicier, and have a fantastic bite. I was pretty surprised to learn that it was the same variety I grow in my own garden. Maybe the local climate and soil conditions could have the same influence on Nordic produce as it’s said to have on grapes and thus wine? Maybe the French didn’t hold exclusive rights to the notion of terroir, meaning matter in a certain place, after all? I began having discussions with the prominent botanist Niels Ehler from the agricultural college. I knew from my work with cocoa and coffee that if things grow coolly and slowly but can reach complete physiological ripeness, they develop more complex associations inside and more complex structures and a greater concentration and diversity of aromatic associations. So what about these ingredients we have in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, which can be ripened only here or which in any case grow unusually slowly: barley; oats; rye; pomes; cabbage; herbs; oysters and mussels from Limfjorden; all of our berries; the grass that turns into meat, milk, and cheese? Just to start with? Just think if we’ve had a unique basis for creating worldclass ingredients for millennia but had simply overlooked it in our desire to produce cheap, standardized foodstuffs. Niels and I began writing to one another and sharing experiences. The dialogue ended up becoming an essay on the concept of terroir, which is printed in the book concerning Noma’s inaugural year, which René and I published together in 2004.

“The goal from the start wasn’t to create the world’s best restaurant. The goal for Noma was to explore the potential of Nordic ingredients as a basis for creating a new world-class cuisine, which I’d realized was potentially possible as long as we took into account the entire Nordic region, from the Arctic to the garden in the back of the house. This is why it became ‘Nordic’ and not ‘Danish’. Also, of course, because ‘Nordic’ had a completely different power and because it was a ‘virginal brand’.”

TOOL FOR A GREATER PURPOSE

It is clear from the preceding story that Claus Meyer regards Noma as a tool for a greater purpose. The principles underlying this purpose are formulated in the “Nordic Cuisine Movement Manifesto”, which was presented at the Nordic Cuisine Symposium in 2004 and came to serve as a lodestar for the Nordic cuisine movement. But it was also the result of an innovative, spectacularly successful communication campaign that spread the word like a benign virus to all corners of the Nordic world. As Claus explains, “The idea was to get the actors in the Nordic culinary landscape to share knowledge with one another and undertake sublime things and that these initiatives would eventually achieve critical mass and thus represent a paradigm shift or an avalanche, which would then lead to exponentially increasing demand, interest, and innovation. In the short term, Noma was rewarded for its inclusive initiatives by creating a massive amount of momentum because the movement quite simply generated enormous interest for its underlying idea, and the restaurant was bombarded by prospective diners.”

The project’s timing was also key, Claus says. “The sense of greater purpose was exemplarily absent from French and Spanish cuisine. These leading cuisines deliver lots of great-tasting food, but the chefs didn’t take responsibility for anything. The meals were celebrations of the chefs themselves, and their restaurants were temples reserved for a narrow elite with high purchasing power. And all in an era when more and more people were interested in nature, the environment, obesity, diabetes, hunger in Africa, and in there not being enough food to feed a growing global population. International food journalists were tired of writing about El Bulli and Spanish cuisine again and again. In 2002, the world lacked a gastronomic concept that just landed a direct hit on the global zeitgeist by attempting to address these issues. I was convinced that, if one could deliver on these premises without compromising on taste, it would be possible to completely alter the premises of competition on the gastronomic scene. René turned out to be the right man in the right post at the right time. I have to be honest and say that I didn’t realize his full potential back then. We could’ve perhaps achieved it with less, but it’s difficult today to imagine anyone could’ve fulfilled the assignment better than he did, and he deserves enormous credit for consistently delivering renewal, even outside of his own comfort zone.”

The manifesto led the way in establishing broad public interest concerning Noma’s concept. Noma was incredibly good at marketing the thinking behind the manifesto in Denmark and the rest of the world. Today, Claus Meyer himself is in full gear putting his experiences from Noma and the Nordic cuisine movement to further use. He is currently seeking to use these experiences as a sort of “software” for instilling hope and progress in La Paz, Bolivia – South America’s most impoverished capital. Claus explains, “Using a Bolivian trust that’s been established for the purpose and that’s received money and regularly receives all sorts of knowledge, we’re in the process of opening a gourmet restaurant that educates people from the poor slums into gastronomic entrepreneurs. We’ve simultaneously started up a widely supported movement to open up the potential of Bolivia’s culinary culture. If the project succeeds, I think it will prompt new perspectives concerning Denmark’s international development aid.”

A CREATIVE FUTURE

So much for the thinking concerning the creation of Noma and the Nordic cuisine movement as well as the synergies between these two distinct yet related initiatives, but what about the restaurant’s own precipitous rise, and what about the food? What does Noma’s administrator and CEO Peter Kreiner, who acts as René’s daily source of feedback, think about Noma’s future and potential for development? Peter stresses to us that the tension between limitations and renewal has been central to Noma’s success.

According to Peter, Noma intends to continue being sublimely creative by simply letting the creativity grow – within, however, a closely controlled Nordic concept in which everything needs to be perfect and in which routine and repetition are not enough on their own. Peter also emphasizes that securing continual renewal is extremely hard work and that Noma is run in accordance with a number of unambiguous goals concerning the consistent creation of new dishes:

“Right now, for example, we have a main course with reindeer tongue. And so, we’re trying to find some things that people haven’t done, and we challenge ‘the accustomed’ to a great degree.” One could conclude that the creative ambition will always overshadow the desire for financial profit at Noma.

We also of course ask Peter whether he can relate to the idea behind moving along the edge of the box. He says:

“You’re always bound by the context from which you come. Even if you say you want to think outside the box, you don’t do it anyway. With the framework we’ve set for ourselves, we can’t think completely outside the box since we’ve, you know, created a box for ourselves. It’s entirely true that we’re working in a totally peripheral area. And only there. Because that’s where we’re challenging everything. That’s where we take an ingredient: where does it exist in nature? What, for instance, does it exist alongside?”

Creativity in daily practice in an extremely creative environment like Noma is, in other words, strongly limited by its own context; in this case, an exclusively Nordic context. This limitation, we should note, functions quite productively. A raw ingredient is introduced as an idea and is then associated with its own context because the dish is meant to represent an environment or maybe even a kind of recreation of nature. The ingredient is thereby set within its framework and gains expression via its recreated original context on the plate. This everyday improvisation, Peter says, involves René taking the initiative by considering certain keywords, such as “pine”, “reindeer tongue”, a colour, or a natural habitat. Peter explains:

“This dish, for instance: sheep milk mousse with sorrel granita. I mean, it’s based, of course, on the fact that sheep graze on sorrel. We also have a number of dishes based on the word ‘fiasco’.”

The keywords generate ideas. But an important point is that the experiments do not permeate all operations. Huge numbers of mistakes are made, and many dishes never make it anywhere near the menu. But inside the restaurant itself, when customers are involved, there are nearly never any mistakes.

OBSTRUCTIONS OR LOADS OF IDEAS?

In all of our interviews, we asked about the relationship between loads of ideas and limitations in the form of manifestos or concepts, so prominent in Noma’s story, as set forth earlier. With Jørgen Leth, it was easy to get talking about the importance of limitations and obstructions in the form of concepts and the like in the creative process. As we have heard, Jørgen’s process is characterized by strict conditions involving hikes and peace and quiet. The idea of obstructions as useful elements in a creative process is realized in the Lars von Trier film The Five Obstructions, which, like much else in Jørgen’s artistic production, is a film concerning the draft, the fragments, and the obstacles that can create the jolts that set a work in motion. Jørgen says:

“von Trier comes up with impossible conditions. You can get totally desperate, but the worse it is, the more innovative you’re forced to be. I believe in difficulties. I believe in the kickstarter of being confronted with impossible conditions.”

Later in the interview, we ask what Jørgen thinks of the relationship between quantity and quality, between drafts and limits. He argues that Picasso serves as a particularly good example of how quantity can promote quality since he was spectacularly productive in his later years. It was always about the model sitting in front of him, and he had an almost desperate, raging energy expressed in a myriad of variations on themes. This is an example of the accumulation of quantity leading to quality.

Yet Jørgen himself prefers strict rules – something being forbidden and needing to choose a set of limitations. It could be a rule that the camera cannot move. Because why do you need to use all the possibilities? That is childish, Jørgen says. Let us take the consequences instead. “Just because you have these apparatuses, it doesn’t mean you have to use them.” Rules can be introduced that prevent one from doing everything. This is a solid principle for artistic work. Jørgen is glad that the Dogme 95 film directors – such as Thomas Vinterberg, Søren Kragh Jacobsen and Ole Christian Madsen – got involved in the movement. They were his students and later criticized him, but Jørgen regards it as a great virtue to have so few techniques at one’s disposal: “Getting down to the fundamentals – I mean, what’s a sound, and what’s a picture? Down to the basics. It makes me very happy to be confronted with that thought.”

We can affirm that creativity can go hand in hand with quantity, largescale production, energy, and excitement – as well as with limitations, rules, and forced boundaries. This is in line with our interview with Bjarke Ingels. The worst, according to Bjarke, is when the contractor says, “Do whatever you want.” There need to be parameters for you to follow. It is necessary to have space for both giving free rein and having strict control in creative processes.

A CREATIVE CULTURE

This is of great relevance in an organizational context. Should one focus on the value-driven organization of creativity, for instance in the form of a manifesto (as at Noma), or should one instead allow creativity to flourish freely? The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling once said that the best way of getting good ideas was to have a lot of ideas. This could suggest that giving free rein to pursue ideas is the best way forward.

Some of the world’s most creative individuals have also been extremely productive and full of ideas. Picasso joins the ranks of Marcel Duchamp, Cézanne, and van Gogh in terms of being the most productive and perhaps most important painters in recent history. Conservative estimates state that Picasso produced around 20,000 works in his lifetime. Others say that the real number is closer to 30,000. For many years, Bach wrote a cantata a week, and even though Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity, he also produced some 250 other publications. Thomas Edison still holds the record for having filed a total of 1093 patents.

Many of these so-called geniuses produced much work – not all to an equally high standard. Indeed, many of the aforementioned individuals and their peers within other fields produced a relatively large number of poor treatises, works, or pieces. For instance, it would not be quite honest to say that everything Picasso produced in his final years – in which he was very productive – was a masterpiece. Whereas most artists and critics were busily engaged with abstract expressionism, Picasso was working on a new form of expressionism, often with rather rough and semi-pornographic themes. Claus Meyer, for his part, is not ashamed to admit he makes mistakes. He has many ideas, some of which are ahead of their time but others of which are just not good enough. It requires a degree of courage as well as the will to soldier on, yet as Claus says, making mistakes is not quite so bad when you know deep down inside that, even if the project in question fails, the world will benefit regardless.

So what should we choose? Our advice is that, for most organizations, the way forward involves control in the form of a concept, a direction, or a vision that provides a framework for inventiveness. This means that, if you wish to create or maintain a creative and innovative company, one of the most important tasks is that you – especially as manager – should aim to create a culture characterized by play, humour, and a degree of risk-taking at the same time as you exercise the courage to set the course for creative processes. The Swedish creativity researcher Göran Ekwall describes in his work with creative organizations that the first step toward a creative culture is to establish a creative climate in which there is space to discuss, play, use humour, and think freely. A creative climate can gradually establish itself as a cultural characteristic; that is, as something more sustained within and fundamental to the organization. The more ideas and input we have on the table at companies and educational institutions, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be good. And even after a course has been set, people should have the opportunity to challenge it.

In other words, we need to encourage the desire to offer and receive suggestions as to how things could be done differently, better, and more efficiently, all depending on which work area or type of business is in question. This requires that the organization not be beset by fear and anxiety. In this case, one risks tunnel vision: people become nervous as to whether their work is good enough, and this uncertainty, doubt, and self-correction can be crippling, potentially blocking off the flow of ideas in the creative process.

The Japanese master swordsman Takuan Sōhō was said to have stated, “When the master swordsman confronts his opponent, he thinks neither of his opponent, himself, nor his sword movements. He just stands there with his sword without thinking of technique, fully engaged with doing what his body tells him.”

This state is reminiscent of what Zen Buddhists call mu-shin, in which subject, object, and action become one. The link to the creative process – both on an individual and a group level – is the same. If, when we get into the flow, we let ourselves go, become less self-conscious and self-correcting, and surrender to that with which we are working, then it will be easier for us to reach our subconscious, where our knowledge, experiences, and abilities reside – and from whence good ideas often originate. Then, afterwards, we can assess the ideas, the proposals, or the notes.

Michael Michalko, author of the book Creative Thinking, uses pearl divers as an intriguing example of how quantitative productivity can sometimes beget quality and of how one should hold off on practising self-correction until later in the process. He explains that when pearl divers sail out to find pearls, they do not dive down to get an oyster, come up, and then sail to shore to check this single oyster and see whether there is a pearl inside. Instead, they gather up a critical mass of oysters before sailing to shore and checking whether they have got lucky. This saves a huge amount of time in the long run.

From a business perspective, one can use various tools to ensure that sufficient quantity results from the company’s creative processes. It is a case of setting the bar high relative to how many ideas employees should offer and perhaps even working within tighter timeframes. This forces the employees to come up with ideas without the possibility of their inner self-conscious criticism coming into play. We will describe this in greater detail in the next chapter, which concerns teamwork and employee involvement in creative processes. Before then, however, we will draw the following three lessons from the present chapter:

1. Those who succeed in creating something new occasionally make mistakes. It takes courage, but the more ideas you have to work with, the greater the chance that one of them will be good.

2. Obstructions or limitations can help control a product or brand. They can also ease the work process by circumscribing the work area. Noma’s manifesto on Nordic cuisine is a good example of this.

3. Creative innovations are often solutions to contemporary deficiencies. The trick is to decode these deficiencies and create products that provide solutions to them.

In this chapter, we have used Noma as an example of the necessity of identifying the greater purpose that can drive creativity. In the next chapter, we will return to Noma and LEGO. An interesting aspect of these companies is that they illustrate the importance of both topdown control of and employee involvement in creative processes. The flat leadership structure (with a short distance between top and bottom) is asserted as characteristic of Danish and Nordic businesses. It is precisely this element that the research literature identifies as decisive for the promotion of creativity.