In Hong Kong, Noma Presents a Sotheby’s Art Feast

Last Saturday, a team of chefs from Noma were flown in to create a one-night-only dinner for a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration with Sotheby’s auction house. It would be the award-winning restaurant’s first ever dining event in Hong Kong, and the kitchen team, led by the Noma’s sous chef Thomas Frebel, created a bespoke menu inspired by works in the A. Alfred Taubman collection that was on special preview that night. Hong Kong Tatler got in touch with the team of creative chefs who offered us an exclusive insider’s look at the making of an artful collaboration.

The dinner event was inspired by the A. Alfred Taubman Collection, featuring 500 pieces of contemporary art created by great figures representing styles from European avant-garde to abstract expressionism:Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, to name just a few. The colourful collection reflects Taubman’s special interest in human portraits, and through his keen, aesthetic eye we can witness and experience his appreciation to true beauty through the canvas of the masters. Sotheby’s will be holding an auction series for the Taubman Collection, and the auction of masterworks begin November 4, stretching through January 2016 and going through the entire collection.

 

Travelling across the world to Hong Kong for the first time, the team of Noma chefs were particularly excited to design a menu featuring courses that bring out the best of seasonal ingredients from the Nordic region. The key to cooking at Noma, on site or in the spirit of the restaurant, is to surround guests with ingredients that are in the surroundings, with strong respect to the changing season. The idea of the event’s menu challenges the chefs into creating not only from the surrounding, but also showcasing the best of produce and a taste from home.

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 Q&A with Peter Krenier, managing director of Noma;

Hong Kong Tatler: What were the challenges for the team of chefs to design and create a menu based on the Taubman art collection?

Peter Krenier: It is fun for us to be a part of this collaboration, and it is the second time we have worked with Sotheby’s. The main challenge we have is that we are cooking and delivering our services away from our home ground.

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HKT: How do you cope with not being on home ground?

PK: The physical space and entire set up of the event is inside an art gallery, and that alone is different from our restaurant. We try to create a ‘Noma away from home’ experience for the guests at the Sotheby’s dinner.

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HKT: Can you elaborate more on the ‘Noma away from home’ concept?

PK: We try to bring the concepts and recreate Noma here in Hong Kong, even just for an evening. We use our collected experience from both Copenhagen as well as our pop-up event at Mandarin Oriental earlier this year in Tokyo, Japan as the base of this dinner.

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HKT: With confirmed reports of Noma closing and reopening in 2017 as a restaurant with a farm, what can you tell us about this new project?

PK: This is an exciting project we are all very much looking forward to. The new Noma will move out of the city, and the restaurant will merge with a modern urban farm. The kitchen will focus on three distinct seasons. We will serve a 100% vegetarian menu in spring and summer; game meats and wild food will take over in the autumn menu; and fish and shellfish will be in the spotlight through the cold months between January and March.

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HKT: In light of the Sydney project and the new farm initiative for Noma, what can you tell us?

PK: The world of gastronomy may be too big a scale to comment on, but for Noma, the changes and new initiatives are part of the growth, allowing the new concepts to be born and us to think differently and facilitate innovation on the dinner plate and on the restaurant as well.

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Thomas Frebel, sous chef of Noma

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