Three years ago, a bunch of talented Scandinavian chefs, including those behind this restaurant, wrote the “Manifesto for a New Nordic Cuisine,” a statement of intent whose themes include “purity, freshness, simplicity” and “food produced in unique climates, waters, natural settings, cool temperatures and light.”

When was the last time you heard food or cooking discussed in a way that takes growing temperatures, water composition and luminosity into account?  In a way that suggests that wild foods are superior because they express a region’s terroir more truthfully than farmed? In a way that believes that Scandinavia’s short growing season is, counterintuitively, a boon for produce, because the less intense light makes the produce grow more slowly and forces roots to shoot deeper for nourishment, creating flavors more profound?

Redzepi, using a network of hunters, farmers, fishermen, and foragers that range from the Faroes to Lapland to cull the best of the region, cooks dishes both intuitive and innovative. 

The seasonally organized cookbook offers spring recipes for glazed sheep’s milk mousse with sorrelgranité; summer ideas for musk ox with spinach purée, dried berries and rose hips; and prescriptions for lamb’s neck baked with charred hay, poached quail’s eggs and celery root when temperatures dip below negative four hundred. Once the recipes end there’s a photoglossary of Scandinavian herbs and spices like seakale and dead-nettles, and recipes for pantry staples, like beer-cured rose hips and syrup made from spruce shoots. There’s also an essay on The Nordic Terroir. 

The experimental cooking scene currently the rage outside Barcelona, London, Bordeaux, and in Chicago uses science to make food taste better, but Redzepi lets season and instinct guide him. My missives for the next two months will come from Europe, where I am working until November, and I am seriously tempted to book a train to Copenhagen. “Honestly, it’s easier this way,” says Redzepi in an interview with Travel & Leisure. “The restrictions give it focus. Now there’s a logic to what we do, and a natural fit between the ingredients.”