NOMA (Rest.)

*****
Next is Noma; number three in the list and the fastest rising top restaurant over the last three years.Stopping only in Bilbao to get a headful of fireworks, the giant silvercurls of the Guggenheim and a famous local cocktail of coke and red wine called “kalimotxo” at the Aste Nagusia Basque street festival (where everyone wears scarves round their necks and dances in the street; it's my kind of Festival!), we fly to Copenhagen from the beautifully stark and sleek-lined modern Bilbao airport.

Judgingby the global column inches, Denmark is famous for three things these days - design, Princess Mary and their thriving restaurant scene which likes to boast of having as many Michelin stars as Rome or Madrid. As Arne Jacobsen is to Danish design, so Danish-Macedonian chef Rene Redzepi has become to a re-emerging Scandinavian culinary culture.

This has been a huge year for Redzepi. He might have missed out on his third Michelin star but promotion to third spot in Restaurant's World's 50 Best list was a more highly prized honour.

Redzepi is a rare culinary inspiration. Smart Danish restaurant kitchens used to be a culinary colony of France but Redzepi's Noma has lead a revolution elevating traditional Danish ideas and Scandinavian ingredients to never before seen heights - but setting them against the modern ideas sparked by Redzepi's time at El Bulli. Razor clams, black lobster,sweet little shrimp, a whole manner of berries, flowers and wild greens seldom seen outside the North, star. There's even musk ox. This weird hairy goat of a beast has been sourced from the former Viking colony of Greenland.

Redzepi's stark restaurant sits in an old maritime warehouse on the other side of the water from Copenhagen's famous Nyhavn wharf. It's an unadorned space of beams, bare boards and distressed wooden pillars. Some of the wooden chairs are draped with animal pelts but a meal here is as fresh as the spring breeze off the Køge Bugt. Pickling, icing and just using ingredients fresh ensure seating here is a light experience; as does Redzepi's strong focus on acidity whether provided by green strawberries, lemony wood sorrel, tangy white currants or vinegars. The ingredients are always king in dishes that are less complicated than the Spanish places but which taste no less complex.

Here too there are jokes and theatre. Alarge warm rock is brought to the table dotted with a malt-dusted oyster cream and one incredibly - to the point of being buttery - soft langoustine. Baby radishes and carrots come in a flower pot embedded in what looks like earth. This is actually an herb cream covered with athick layer of rye, malt and beer. There is something rather fun about tugging these veg out of the “ground” by their green tops and the way the cream resists you pull the way the earth does.

The opening bars of the meal are the presentation of a battered old biscuit tin.What's inside are a million miles from a traditional Danish konditori -a creamy foie gras biscuit topped with a dehydrated berry powder of no little intensity. Yet another OMG moment of which there are many in this meal. The main theatre however is the way that the chef themselves often brings dishes to the table and explain them.

Outside the warehouse, it's a warm day in Copenhagen, the sky is impossibly blue and the sun is glinting off the water and spot lighting the multi coloured C18th warehouses that line Nyhavn. It's a perfect backdrop to tackle a lunch that starts with that biscuit tin and a selection of more rustic flavours. These include a soft- yoked quail's egg that been smoked with hay that arrives in a still smoking straw nest, a homage to crisp bread with wafers of crispy dry chicken skin and equally crisp rye bread sandwiching a broad bean paste, and artisan Danish bread. This comes with a funky goat butter and a little pot oflard crusted with a crumble of potato and pork crackling. Damn it's good in a “rolling-in-the-trough” sort of a way.

On the more avant-garde or expensive side there are teeny tiles raw squid served with a green strawberry ice, cream and a dill oil, those sweet raw shrimps that come under a seaweed veil with beets and wild beach side rhubarbs; and black lobster served with tangy currants (red and white), rose petals and a peeled and cooked cos lettuce root.

With touches like this root, Redzepi has rather lifted Andoni Aduriz's mantle as king of veg. He too also cherishes local flowers or foraged hedgerow and foreshore ingredients. At Mugaritz the chef's talk in awe of Redzepi's five foragers who keep the restaurant supplied with wildberries, grasses and flowers. Beet slices are paired with the sourness of gooseberry and some little white flowers that have a metallic heat similar to Sichuan pepper. While in two other dishes scurvy flowers feature. These little lilac blooms are so named because the seafaring Danes used them centuries back on long sea voyages to stop their teeth dropping out. They jewel a crisp bread dusted with a vinegar powder, and a cheese foam with is matched to the flavours of apple, whitecurrant, celery, spinach and herbs. Another veg dish is a hymn of praise to the onions. These comes out as a riot of textures and flavours - sharp and pickled, sweet, unctuous and slow cooked, hot and raw and a little trendily - the juice set into pearls or tears. Simple but impeccable, intelligent and quite delicious.

The “scraped beef” which is a sort of steak tartare made using an old traditional Scandinavian shaving technique is a long-running favorite at Noma. You eat it scooped up with your fingers along with springs of mouth-puckering lemony wood sorrel and a smear of a tarragon emulsion and roast juniper dust.

The arrival later in the meal of a leather sheathed hunting knife signals a return to more meat. Pulling it from its tight leather scabbard feels like a suitably Joms viking-like to do before falling on a chunk of musk ox (think somewhere between gamey venison or roo in texture and taste). This arrives garlanded with garlic flowers, sweet mellow roasted garlic puree, milk skin (which is exactly that - the skin skimmed from cooked milk), roasty-charred leek and zucchini plus some little bobbly seed clusters that provide acidity. I ask if these are traditional accompaniments to musk ox and the waiter laughs, “I have been here five years and I am still trying to work that out! Everything here could be traditional or it could be a 'Rene' tradition. He does like to twist tradition!”

There are misses here however like a pedestrian cheese course of a sort of fluffy cheese bavarois with cucumber and lemon verbena leaves and meringue or a nondescript ball of shreddedcrab flesh that sits in a loose head cold of jellied stock and peppery foraged greens they call “sea mustard”.

What is especially nicea bout Noma however is that there is little on the menu that is there to be wacky for wacky's sake. Well, OK the combination of blueberries, a bright green and icy pine-flavoured granita, and ice creams or pine and blueberry pine is a bit like falling first into a snow drift in a German blueberry forest but the pairing of ice powders and ice creamsin the flavours of walnut and blackberry is on far, far safer ground.

While no little effort is put into the wine list - our meal was matched with wines solely sourced from vineyards in the Loire - wine is just not a Danish thing. (It's a story for another place but Redzepi has however just made a white wine using sauvignon, riesling and other locally grown fruit with a couple of friends. It's named after his daughter and isn't at all bad, if a little spritzy). As Mr Carlsberg likes to tell us Denmark is about beer. Hence the recommended aperitif here is glass of Noma's own ale brewed by a local craft operation using birch sap instead of water which they like to think accounts for its silkiness.While dotting the menu are suggestions of refreshing juices rather than wine to pair with dishes. Perhaps a beet juice flavoured with a little almondy woodruff (but not so much as it'll make you trippy), or the brilliant mango-orange of pressed sea-buckthorn berries which have twelve times the vitamin C of oranges and a flavour that is somewhere between passion fruit and guava. It's strangely better than wine with a bowl of differently and lightly pickled strips of beet, turnip,cauliflower and zucchini with drops of bone marrow with hot browned butter. The juice's pep cuts against richness of the marrow and butter.The taste of green, in the form of pure celery or cucumber juices, sitson neighbouring tables. This is the course, along with the cherry gazpacho, that I most often find myself daydreaming about.

This Noma lunch is a more of a complete meal than the stunner that I had here back in June. This might be because this time I'm sharing it with the woman I love, it might be that Redzepi is constantly tuning its pitch, or it might be one other major change - the number of Australians now in the kitchen at Noma since Redzepi's visit in March 2009.

Since Redzepi's inspiring visit to Australia Noma has been bombarded with requests to come there to work. While Redzepi had an Aussie sous chef until last year, subsequently Ayhan Erkoc from The Manse in Adelaide, Tasmanian chef Luke Burgess and Aaron Turner (from Loam in Victoria) have all passed through the doors. When I was there Josh Lewis who runs Vue de monde's restaurant in Oman was taking a turn in the kitchen alongside chefs from Quay and Tetsuya. It all makes the experience oddly familiar - especially when Lewis and another Danish-born Vue de monde alumnus bring dishes to the table.

While we don't feel heavy after this epic procession of courses, for dinner we can stomach no more than that other Danish tradition; a hot dog from one of the city's sausage vans. It's processed and fatty and almost the antithesis of the meal at Noma. Yes, obviously I enjoyed it too!