Talk about living on a knife-edge.
Talk about living on a knife-edge. Chris Charalambous, chef-proprietor of Cail Bruich West in Glasgow’s Great Western Road, is preparing to fly to Copenhagen on Tuesday to spend a month working in the kitchen of noma, the world’s best restaurant. But as he packs his bags with his Birkenstocks, whites and other tools of his cheffy trade, he is hoping there’s something he will leave behind to enjoy what he describes as “the opportunity of a lifetime”: his nerves.
“I am looking forward to the experience immensely, though I am a bit apprehensive about going into a new kitchen to work with a team of 30 others, all of whom are from high-end, three-star Michelin restaurants from all over the world, such as the French Laundry in California and elBulli near Barcelona,” admits Charalambous, 28. “I’m more used to running my own small team, so this will really be a step up for me.”
The Danish restaurant, run by 33-year- old head chef Rene Redzepi and his team, knocked Spain’s elBulli off the top spot in the S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2010 list last April. ElBulli had held the coveted first position for four consecutive years, so noma’s success was all the more sensational.
It takes its name from an anagram of Nordish (Nordic) and Mad (food), and its ethos is to revive Nordic cuisine and its ancient food heritage by using local produce such as Greenland musk ox, Icelandic skyr curd, and foraged wild herbs and berries in modern ways. Redzepi eschews the classic Mediterranean basics such as olive oil, foie gras, sun-dried tomatoes and black olives and, alongside new cooking techniques, noma has revitalised age-old, curative and non-chemical methods such as smoking, salting, pickling, drying, grilling and baking on slabs of basalt stone. A 12-course tasting menu at noma, with matching wines, lasts more than four hours and costs around £300 per person.
Around 20,000 hopefuls apply each year to do a stage or internship at noma -- where they are expected to work hard for no pay -- and that figure reached 60,000 on the day it was voted the world’s best restaurant. Stages or internships are only granted to experienced chefs from all over the world, and it can take months for noma to respond to requests. But for Charalambous, who was born in Torrance, East Dunbartonshire, the answer was almost immediate.
“It was all done by email,” he explained. “I simply wrote to kitchen@noma.dk on the day they became number one, inquiring about the possibility of doing a stage next year, and mentioning my friend Mark Donald [chef de partie at Restaurant Andrew Fairlie at Gleneagles] who did a three-month stage there last year.
“They said yes straight away. I am extremely lucky. I chose to do only one month with them because I cannot take more time away from my own kitchen or my young family.
“But even a month will be a fantastic opportunity to pick up fresh ideas and techniques, while learning more about the operational side of running a top class restaurant. Noma is full for lunch and dinner every day, serving 45 covers at each sitting. They have two staff meetings every day to talk over customers’ preferences and to learn their names by heart. That kind of experience is invaluable. I expect that for the first few days I’ll be doing the really basic stuff like going out foraging and prepping.
“But I hope they’ll see I have something to offer and that I’ll get a chance to work in the main kitchen and to serve the diners.”
Charalambous is a champion of the current international vogue for lighter, imaginative food and to break away from what he calls the “stereotypical expectation of lasagne, pasta and pizza” in many Scottish restaurants.
The menu at Cail Bruich always showcases fresh Scottish produce, berries and wild herbs.
Dishes currently include crispy ox tongue, Devon snails, wild garlic, shallot, bone marrow and parsley; Gressingham duck breast, sage gnocchi, shallot purée, liver, morel and truffle ragout; and Peterhead lemon sole, parsley root, shrimps, capers, lemon, brown butter.
New-season asparagus from Eassie farm in Angus, wild garlic foraged from the Botanic Gardens close to Cail Bruich and squat lobster from Tarbert are about to join the menu.
Asked why he wanted to work at noma, Charalambous replies: “I admire how Redzepi has challenged our culture of Mediterranean cuisine. I’m looking forward to learning new techniques such as freeze-cooking squid.
“I hope to bring back something new to Glasgow, because Glasgow needs to change its entrenched attitude towards food and learn to embrace fresh ideas.” n
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