The restaurant with a waiting list of over 27,000
IF someone gets cold feet over paying $485 for dinner at Noma Australia, there are plenty of hungry souls who will happily take their place.
There are 27,002 names on the waiting list for the Barangaroo restaurant (including this writer who is on standby for lunch and dinner), the latest extension of head chef Rene Redzepi’s impressive award-winner.
Over the next 10 weeks, staff are expecting to show 5500 diners to seats that sold out in four minutes in October.
With Redzepi listed among the 100 most influential people in the world in a magazine list a few years ago, you would expect that hype has played a part in its booming popularity. Especially when Noma has topped a prestigious world’s best restaurant list for four years in the past six.
Yesterday, the first 56 diners hovered at the entrance to a pop-up version of Noma at lunchtime, waiting in anticipation for their seats nabbed in an online flurry which grabbed all the spots months beforehand.
Savoury berries, seaweed broth, Kakadu plum dust — all yours at Noma. Picture: Instagram
Shells with chicken and crocodile fat shards. Picture: Instagram
Redzepi had dispatched a team of foragers, including fellow Danes Michael Larsen and Thomas Laursen to work with local northern beaches forager and chef Elijah ‘EJ’ Holland in the search for new ingredients.
The full Noma menu:
• Unripe macadamia and spanner crab
• Wild seasonal berries flavoured with gubinge
• Porridge of golden and desert oak wattleseed with saltbush
• Seafood platter and crocodile fat
• W.A deep sea snow crab and cured egg yolk
• A pie with dried scallops and lantana flowers
• BBQ’d milk ‘dumpling’
• Marron and magpie goose
• Sea urchin & tomato dried with pepper berries
• Abalone schnitzel and bush condiments
• Rum lamington
• Peanut milk and freekeh “Baytime”
Until noon, and at the same time as a Sydney Harbour flyover by F/A-18A Hornet aircraft from Number 2 Operational Conversion Unit at RAAF Base Williamtown, nobody knew what was on the menu, but social media soon started churning out the contents.
Dishes at the first lunch of the 10-week $485 per head pop-up included crab mixed with egg yolk and cured in fermented kangaroo and “crocodile rocks”, a dish of “assorted shells topped with chicken and crocodile fat shards”.
Scallop pie and lantana flowers (although not native) was on of the prettier dishes of the 10-course degustation menu that all Sydney foodies have been talking about.
Staff prepare food at the new Noma pop-up at Barangaroo. Picture: AP
Wattleseed porridge in saltbush leaves, marron in milk skin; savoury berries, seaweed broth and Kakadu plum dust, rum lamington (perhaps a nod to our colonial heritage), native tamarind and shaved frozen milk. Mango green ants hibiscus watermelon; abalone schnitzel with different sea lettuce, nuts and rushes and desserts of peanut ice cream and freeka.
It was all a bit elemental, but that has been chef Redzepi’s philosophy from the start at Noma in Copenhagen and what has put his restaurant on the global culinary map.
Photos: Abalone schnitzel and Snow crab in fermented kangaroo.
Among those to nab the first seats were Sydney Seafood School’s Roberta Muir, who had as her guests husband photographer Franz Scheurer, Gourmet Traveller’s Pat Nourse and chef Janni Kyritsis.
Redzepi, 38, has closed his Copenhagen restaurant — four times world’s best in the annual S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants guide — for the duration of the Barrangaroo pop-up.
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