Jens Dresling/Polfoto via AP
You’ve probably read the press accounts. Grotesque, grossly overpriced, fussy food finally reaches its limits. Reindeer penis is one of the specialties. The tab is typically $500. The restaurant’s creator, chef René Redzepi, termed the business model “unsustainable.” Well, mercifully, yes.
There is no better symbol of the wretched elite excess of this era. Noma is an advertisement for more progressive taxes on income and wealth; and, as the saying goes, for eating simply so that others may simply eat. And what’s Noma doing in Copenhagen, capital of a nation known for its modesty, social solidarity, and social democracy?
I actually ate there once, through no fault of my own, as the guest of the leader of Denmark’s Social Democratic Party no less. And therein hangs a tale.
In my work on the project of housebreaking capitalism, I became fascinated with Denmark, as a nation that manages to square the circle of a dynamic and flexible economy with extensive social bolsters and impressive equality of income and wealth. The secret sauce is a very powerful labor movement, a long tradition of consensual social bargaining, and a strategy known as “flexicurity” that makes it easy for workers to change jobs without losing living standards and, conversely, easy for employers to move workers and thus stay competitive.
I’ve written about this for the Prospect, for Foreign Affairs, and in my books. Over more than two decades, I’ve spent a lot of time in Denmark. I became friendly with the prime minister who served from 1993 to 2001, a former trade union economist named Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who was a truly great man and Europe’s last truly socialist prime minister.
It was a pleasure to go out for a meal with Poul in simple neighborhood places, with no staff or bodyguards, and see ordinary Danes come by to shake his hand. It’s the way that I imagine democracy is supposed to be. He would not have been caught dead in Noma.
Fast-forward. I’m on another of my reporting trips to Copenhagen. Denmark is a small country. I’ve done scores of interviews there over the years and I’m slightly famous as an American journalist who takes Denmark seriously.
My friend Poul is out of office. The new Social Democratic leader, later to win election as prime minister, is Helle Thorning-Schmidt. I ask her office for an interview. They suggest dinner, with her and her entourage, and I’m invited to bring my wife.
It’s at Noma, where we discover what my wife calls slime-on-a rock cuisine. We are both serious cooks, even foodies. But we were dumbfounded that this is where a social democratic leader would bring American lefty guests.
Maybe, come the revolution, the entire proletariat will eat slime on a rock and reindeer penis. Let’s hope not.
