The food: Malt flatbread and Juniper

Where to find it: Restaurant Noma, Copenhagen, Denmark

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Welcome to another edition of #FoodEntrepreneur Friday, where I serve up an order of international food with a side of insight for entrepreneurs.

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At Copenhagen’s Restaurant Noma, they limit their culinary resources to only what they can find and forage in the Nordic region. Executive Chef René Redzepi of Noma will never serve foods such as tomatoes nor pineapples on the menu. If the food does not grow around the Nordic region, then Noma will not serve it.

This places great limitations on the restaurant, but these limitations helped make it the world’s best restaurant of 2010-12. The Nordic region, especially during the harsh winter season, provides sparse resources for a chef. In fact, the scarce Nordic resources forced Redzepi to serve live shrimp, ants and what he calls ‘shitty carrots.’ However, from great limitations comes great creativity. Restaurant Noma has broken past the stereotypes of what people label as ‘food.’ Before restaurant Noma, the Nordic food staples comprised mostly of Italian pastas, rye bread sandwiches and Middle Eastern shawarmas. Denmark did not have a noteworthy food scene, to say the least. But Restaurant Noma changed everything and pioneered new concepts of what could be considered ‘food.’ They did this by ignoring the perceived limitations society had placed upon our food.

Featured on this #FoodEntrepreneur Friday we have the malt flatbread and juniper, which starts off a meal at Noma and epitomizes the restaurant’s approach to limitations and creativity. A vase waiting on the table playfully serves these malt flatbreads as a pre-meal snack. A diner can pluck one of the flatbreads from the branch, dip it in crème fraîche and sample a flavor of the Nordic region.

Normally a restaurant will serve a loaf of bread, some olive oil and balsamic vinegar and call it ‘a starter,’ but Noma does not have this luxury. First of all, the Nordic region does not grow olives for olive oil. Secondly, Noma looked beyond the “bread and olive oil staples” and saw that their Nordic malt grains (usually used to make great Danish beer) and Danish juniper trees could start a creative, Nordic meal. Noma’s chefs have a healthy disregard for the limitations of what a restaurant can serve—even at the most basic and standard stages of a meal.

Noma’s ‘healthy disregard for limitations’ can stand as a model for any startup or (food) entrepreneur out there.

Consider this entrepreneurial challenge: you’re given only five dollars as seed funding for a business idea. You have a weekend to develop this business idea, generate a profit from the idea and pitch the idea to investors in a five minute pitch to a panel of investors by the end of the weekend. What would you do?

Some people could look at the five dollars as the limitation of this exercise, or the ‘budget.’ In contemporary society five dollars does not go very far, especially if you only have a weekend to grow its value. There isn’t much you can buy in capital (property, plant, equipment, etc.) with five dollars.

However, others might disregarded the five dollars all together. With no budget at all, they liberate themselves from the ‘budget,’ and can use their greatest asset—their minds—to turn a profit. At the most basic level, I’ve heard of self-made entrepreneurs who sell on Craigslist and eBay with no initial money invested in their ventures. Stanford students conducted this entrepreneurial challenge and sold rubber bands they found on campus as Livestrong-esque wristbands. In fact, some entrepreneurs could be clever enough to sell their pitch presentation time slot to another startup company. These creative entrepreneurs recognize that the greatest asset they have is the five-minute time window in which they could pitch to serious investors.

Opportunity exists all around you. Limitations are sometimes ‘rules’ that are meant to be broken with creativity. A few decades ago, the concept of eating raw fish prepared by an ungloved chef would have been seen as crazy. But now sushi bars dominate culinary culture. If you re-frame your approach to the world and recognize the abundance of options around you, then you might be the next best restaurant or business in the world.

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A video of the ‘shitty carrots’ René Redzepi serves at Restaurant Noma.

Noma signature dishes by Rene Redzepi – 1 from Kristof Deak on Vimeo.

¹ Fun fact: The name ‘Noma’ is a portmanteau of the two Danish words “nordisk” (Nordic) and “mad” (food); thus, Nordic food.