I love eating. Love it. It’s a wonder I’m not 500 pounds. I also love eating good food. Michelin starred restaurants, food blogger speakeasies, private kitchens, cooked food centers. As long as there’s good food, drink, and people aren’t obnoxious foodies* I’m there. Which is when I had a chance to go to Noma at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo for lunch, I was already on a plane.
Noma is a Copenhagen-based restaurant rated the best restaurant in the world by Restaurant Magazine for four out of the last five years. They picked up and moved shop to Tokyo in a partnership with the Mandarin Oriental for six weeks, which 1) is cool and 2) interesting, since their specialty is hyper-local cuisine. You know, the stuff you scavenge in the woods, or rather the stuff a Michelin-starred chef would find in the woods. If it were me I’d find a bunch of rocks and a poison ivy plant and we’d be dead in 24 hours. It’s an interesting restaurant proposition—how does a place whose concept is tied to the land around it move to another location? Would they bring the forest with them?
In a word, no. Noma found a new forest, taking local ingredients from all over Japan. Hokkori pumpkin, roasted kelp, seaweed oil, Koika cuttlefish "soba," sea urchin pies, freshly killed langoustine topped with ants… You know, kind the stuff your grandmother used to make, assuming your grandmother was a Danish guy named Rene Redzepi. So we headed to the Tokyo Mandarin Oriental, their pop-up location, to check it out.
It was, in a word, fantastic. The ankimo (monkfish liver) toast was a perfect mix of savory and crunchy and they offered a scallop dish treated in such a way that it perfectly and quietly dissolved in your mouth. On the vegetable front a tofu and shaved walnut dish provided a light flavor and crunch that you never get here in Hong Kong, and a “leaf” with the consistency of a fruit-roll up made of fermented black garlic that you never get anywhere. While there was one strike-out—a root-based dish that tasted like, uh, roots—the main course of a wild duck with rye soy was cooked so well I almost cried into my duck. You could take the meat off with chopsticks and it was soft and succulent enough that the memory of its flavor will stay in my mind for years.
Foodgasms aside—and if you like that, I encourage you to look at the SPLOID pictures of the meal—the thing I found particularly exceptional was the service.
What makes good restaurant service? is a good question we don’t ask ourselves enough in Hong Kong, partially because most restaurants have a bunch of people throwing food at you angrily in Cantonese. Good service is that which enhances the dining experience, which means it’s different depending on where you go. A local diner should have a surly waitress telling you what to order; a three-Michelin-star French restaurant should have an impeccable waiter who doesn’t tell you his name and is as unobtrusive as possible.