Thursday was the Australian release of the NOMA film documentary called “NOMA, my perfect storm“. I knew about the 10 weeks NOMA residency at Barangaroo (Sydney), it has been in the foodie sections of a number of papers and I had read about it. For those who don’t know, NOMA is a Danish restaurant in Copenhagen, NOMA started in 2003 with René Redzepi. René’s idea was trying to define the cooking of the Nordic European countries through Nordic produce. To achieve this goal, they had to dig deep into forgotten foods and foraging. NOMA is now one of the World best restaurants.
I did not know about the documentary film, until the name came up on the screen, my husband somehow found out and bought the tickets. What a lovely surprise! The funny bit is that he didn’t know anything about what the film was about and had never heard of NOMA.
It is a beautifuly filmed documentary. It is a great story, there are some stunning images of the food (of course) and also of the places where the ingredients come from and the people who know about all those little things.
I do like the concept of cooking with what comes from your area and what is seasonal. My only concern would be not being able to cook with chocolate!
I guess I grew up with some of that, my sister and I, would go and get the milk from a small dairy farm in my grandparents’ country village, we loved it. We were also asked to help picking red currents a few times over the summer, we would only be allowed to go and play if we each had collected a small bucket, I guess it was not as much fun as the dairy farm. There were other berries, some nuts towards the end of summer and the start of autumn and the larger fruits. Once we had picked two big buckets of blackberries and went climbing a few apple trees nearby. When we came back, the cows had eaten from our buckets about half of our harvest! I generally liked doing those, they were associated with specific dishes, yum! Fast forward quite a few years, about 5-8 years ago if I am correct, in Australia, there was a trend of foraging and return to bush-tucker, but it did not really last very long. Maybe the NOMA experience will revive some of that.
It is too late to get a place for the Sydney’s NOMA, the waiting list is some 20,000 people long, no chance! But watch the movie, this is a good story.
