Dinner at Noma, where your ingredients watch you eat their friend

Let me start by saying I enjoyed our dinner at Noma, even if this review suggests otherwise. Most of the food tasted great, had a fun story and looked good. We sat at a shared table and met some cool people. But it was also a somewhat perplexing night and the third best dining experience we had in Scandinavia, behind Re-Naa and Iris.

They start off by lining the table with ingredients for the night, including a live lobster lying on its back. Then they take the teaser away and start serving. That’s where they started off poorly. Noma’s first dish might as well have been a parody: Hot pot with flowers and an elderflower sauce in an oyster shell on the side. Waitstaff advised us to dip the flowers in the hot water, then eat them. My old Irishman seatmate turned to me and said, “If my mum had made me a dish like this growing up I’d have asked what was wrong with her.” We both laughed. If I wanted to script a pretentious dining experience, I could do a lot worse than “eat some flowers from my garden.” The sauce, at least, was great.

Dinner improved from there. Next up was a shrimp that had allegedly been rubbed for days and wrapped snugly in magnolia petals. Somewhat silly, but tasty. Then there was my favorite dish: A baby shrimp cocktail, followed by peas and squid with roses. (For the record, I’m not against flowers or plants in a dish — Re-Naa and Iris both had a bunch, but nothing like Noma’s silly opening course.)

Halfway through dinner, they served us what was essentially a snail in a wrap. It’s called “Wasabi and snail” on the menu. This was delicious, but they adorned the dish by putting a live snail on the edge of the flower pot it was served in. The Irishman’s snail was quite active and started to crawl up toward the dead snail — we joked that it was looking for its friend, who we named Fred. This one was a little too cute by half.

I loved the crab broth served in a crab body. The ugly ice cream dessert was delicious. The nonalcoholic pairing was overpowering and not very good, especially compared to what we had in other places.

All said, I’m glad we went. It was good to experience the multiple time best restaurant in the world. Just about everything we had was unique. But sometimes it’s unique to its own detriment.