From the Vegetable 2023 menu—⁣

A few bites of summer🌱

NOMA IN KYOTO: A LIMITED-EDITION MAGAZINE

Summer’s finest

The height of summer in Denmark bears many certainties for us at noma; the days are longer, the swims are warmer, and the mulberries are ripe for the picking. While it is common to find other summer fruit in large amounts whilst roaming the surrounding areas, like blackberries, Mirabelle plums and hiproses, the mulberry makes you work for it. The berries take nearly the entire season to ripen, the trees are often extremely tall and the yields on trees that aren’t centuries old is disappointingly low.

Congrats to team @restaurantalchemist on a game well played, and HUGE shout out to FC Noma for bringing victory home.

Wild beach rose, or rosa rugosa, is an invasive species from East Asia that was first introduced to Denmark in 1875. Since then they have spread prolifically, taking up residence in sandy soils throughout the country. Every year in early summer, our team forages for these fragrant rose petals, bringing them back to noma to be processed and preserved for future dishes. Some find their way into oils, others into kombuchas, and a large amount, of course, are featured fresh on the Vegetable Season menu, where we endeavor to express the prowess of Denmark’s (short) growing season. 

From the Vegetable Season 2023 menu—ice cream of Danish bitters, blackcurrant leather and molded barley.

The bounty of summer at noma

The mentality going into the menu development phase of a pop-up is to strike a delicate balance between the perspectives of two cultures to produce an original dish. We don’t want to replicate a noma dish we could make at home, and likewise we wouldn’t want to appropriate a classic dish of our host country. On our most recent pop-up in Kyoto, we once again endeavored to generate a menu expressive of both Scandinavia and Japan.