Only the live prawn went uneaten (and most of the sea urchin, which is a more complicated story). The prawn arrived in a glass jar filled with ice. When I opened the lid, its little legs waved. The sweet Irish chef who brought it described it as "very, very, very fresh; delicious; like essence of the sea". He saw my face and took pity. "Don't worry," he said. "A lot of people don't eat it."
Not much goes uneaten at Noma, the small restaurant tucked away in a watery corner of Copenhagen, that was declared "The Best Restaurant in the World" earlier this year by San Pellegrino. René Redzepi, the 31-year-old head chef, which is to say the best chef in the world, has created a new style of Nordic cooking, "an homage to soil and sea", taking seasonality and local produce (foraging forests, combing sea shores, picking up things "just outside the door, that we step on for so many years") to an extreme. His new book has been described as "the most important cookbook of the year". Noma is fully booked three months ahead, lunch and dinner, but they smuggled me into a table in the bar, and gave me little tasters of this and that: a smoked quail's egg; a leek, its roots deep fried, the next two centimetres steamed and stuffed with pureed roasted garlic; the still warm flesh of an Arctic sea urchin - they had let it creep across my hand in the kitchen half an hour before - on a sea of ice-cold milk, and cucumber and dill. ("It's the very one you held," Redzepi told me.) I devoured eight "snacks" and four dishes before I was so full I had to stop. They looked quite shocked. "Many people eat much more," Redzepi said, pretending not to notice the tongues of sea urchin, hidden under my bread. "Many people eat seven or 12 mains."
He is unexpected as a culinary sensation. He could be a film actor: floppy hair, penetrating brown eyes, surprisingly short. In no way could you say that the award, or the two Michelin stars he has collected, have turned his head. Danes, he told, me are an "unsnobby, down to earth lot". He was showing me round the dining room when he said this – 12 tables, in an old warehouse, all wood and simple cutlery and natural walls. He never wanted "fat linens and heavy silverware and the candelabras and the waiters in tuxedos, all those things that can feel so fake", preferring instead "a nice wood table to a shitty table in fancy tablecloth". He talks a lot about "rawness" and "authenticity". Only occasionally does he say haute cuisine-like things. "It used to be," he said, marvelling, "that people came into Noma on their way home from work, just for a meal!"
The day after dinner, I bump into him in a cafe and we walk back to the restaurant together in the slanting rain, him pushing his bike. He was a guest chef on MasterChef this week (a booking made before the award, now he would be too busy) and wants to know who won. ("Oh good, Claire, yes she had the best instinct.") He talks about the British chefs he likes (Jamie Oliver; Sat Baines; Gordon Ramsay – not so much). Lots of his friends run kitchens. "In the old days if a chef had a recipe for, say, a special vinaigrette, he would keep it secret, he wouldn't share it. Cooking is more co-operative now, thank God, more open." His best friend from school works in a canteen. "He doesn't like the stress and the amount of work that has to go through a kitchen like Noma," Redzepi says shrugging. Then, after he has locked up his bike, muses: "I understand perfectly. Often I think, 'why the hell do I do it?'"
We talk in a long, simple room above the dining room, rented out three nights a week for private dinners. Outside the window, streaks of grey sky compete with the darker grey of the canal. Redzepi strokes the wooden table. At one point, he says: "If you see someone in the kitchen that has good hands and a quick brain, then you need that person to be in the front of everything." His hands are small. A small end of finger is missing from an accident with a blender. Both index fingers are slightly bent. "The doctor says it is because of knife work. Your finger just twists." He looks at them as if they don't belong to him and laughs. "The first couple of years here every time I took something out of the oven, I would burn myself. Now I never get them. I know every movement of my kitchen."
He was born in Copenhagen and his mother is Danish, but his father is Macedonian. Redzepi thinks his success may be rooted in the fact that "I come a little bit from outside. I don't see things as a 100% native." His mother was a cleaner, his father "a taxi-driver, a bus-driver, a greengrocer, he delivered fish: all the cliches of a foreigner". They spent the winters in Copenhagen and long summers in the then Yugoslavia. A lot of Redzepi's memories are sensory. He and his twin brother "caught fireflies, collected chestnuts, picked blackberries". They grew everything; he never remembers going to the supermarket. Back in Copenhagen, while his friends ate ready meals and oven chips, his father cooked chicken livers with butter beans, or pasta with brown butter and cracked pepper. "It didn't cost a lot of money, but at least somebody cooked it and thought about it and tasted it."
When his mother went to parties, where everybody brought a dish, she always took the salad "because my father did the best salad. He took onions and tomatoes and sliced them and left them to macerate a little in vinegar and oil and salt. Now it is so common; then it was something only this guy could make."
Redzepi's step into cooking came, he says, as a result of failure. He left school at 15; at ninth grade, "the school wanted me to leave. I didn't care, but I still remember holding the letter saying 'no' and thinking, 'oh f-'." His friend (the one now working in the canteen) was going to restaurant school so, with nothing else to do, he went too. "That was the year I grew up." His big break came at 16 when he was given an apprenticeship at a local family-run Michelin star restaurant, Pierre Andre. He worked there for four years. "I still remember the first dish I got on the menu. I took a piece of pineapple and I rubbed it with saffron and spices, roasted it, turning it caramel butter, like a piece of meat, and served it with ice cream."
In those days, he had France in his head. "I thought all high gastronomy was French cuisine." He remembers the sound of the fax whirring with a contract for the three-star Le Jardin des Sens in Montpellier. "When I got there it was very surprising, very tough. I thought I was going to see the perfection of the perfection. Not at all. It was such an intense vibe. No team work. All the different sections work against each other. I was 19. It was like in the army. Not allowed to talk, cameras in the kitchen. You say, 'How was your day off?' 'Ssssh.' I mean ..." He breaks off and recovers himself. "Listen, I have one little two star, they have three stars, 20 restaurants all over the world. Who am I to say anything?"
He was 24, and had gained experience in several other places (El Bulli, Kong Hans), when he was approached by a local entrepreneur to run Noma. "I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch." Nobody prepared him for the stress that would ensue. "I was very alone at first. You are 24 years old. You have two partners who are never there. So many decisions. It pushes you to make your brain work faster." But when they opened, was it fantastic? "It wasn't great because ... it wasn't great. Even though we got a Michelin star in the first year, I felt I was cheating people. We weren't touching anything new. It was Scandiavian French – I was cooking things I knew, I just replaced products. I was borrowing someone else's brain."
One day, he remembers, he was walking to work and "I just had this feeling of wanting to cry. I wanted to lie on the floor and cry. I didn't feel I could take one more step. The terrible stress, the sense of self-doubt, the responsibility. I didn't have a life. Then I thought about the three girls, the two boys in the kitchen – we have always been a young team – and that if I wasn't there it wasn't going to work – so I sort of manned myself up and it was gone."
His epiphany (though he wouldn't be so self-important as to call it that) came in a trip to the North Atlantic islands. He realised, among the fishermen and farmers, he needed to jettison a lot of what he had learned. "A gastronomical supermeal didn't necessarily have to involve the things I had brought from other top kitchens." He pared things down, discovered forgotten Nordic ingredients (bulrushes, sea buckthorn, lingonberries), saw the possibilities of surrounding a particular food with the foodstuffs it lives on (wild boar, say, served with corn and berries). His new book, Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine, a collection of recipes, diaries and photographs, charts this progression. "If I get stuck, that's the mantra I come back to: time and place. We are cooking in a part of a world where most people think cooking can't exist. It's too cold, we don't have enough products. And perhaps it is too cold, perhaps we don't have enough products. But if you use your intuition and see the possibilities, it's happening."
Nowadays, he also has a life, or two-sevenths of one, outside the kitchen. He is married to Nadine, a former waitress who now runs bookings; they have a two-year-old daughter, and another baby on the way. On Halloween he had friends for supper and cooked pumpkin, sliced thin, and pear, a little thicker, laid with slices of lemon, butter, salt, thyme and cooked very slowly. "It was delicious. It reminds me of why I am doing this. If you are in doubt, you invite friends and you remember that feeling of giving." He says when children come into the picture, things change. On Sundays and Mondays he is "a devoted husband and a perfect father". The rest of the week, he works at least 80 hours. "At the beginning, I said I would give Noma 10 years of my life, give everything I have in me. I will try to be almost manic about it. We have had seven of those. In three years we will revise things."
He is not interested in making lots of money (which is lucky, because he isn't). "One of the things I hate about having a restaurant is charging people," he says. (The set menu – which is the only menu– costs 1100DK or £128.) "For an evening, they are your friends, you have a good time together, then it's 'give me your money'. It feels weird." It is the process that interests him, "the process of shaping the team, of watching an apprentice become a master, the process of cuisine slowly developing, the process of a dish. Once you are at the end result, it is finished. You leave. Somebody else can take over."
He looks out of the window. It has stopped raining. A barge floats by – a flash of red against the grey. "I think perhaps if you reach number one it is the beginning of the end," he says.