Like so many Danish documentaries, this study of the Copenhagen restaurant Noma displays, like the cooking itself, an exceptional level of craftsmanship and good taste. However, as a piece of film-making it’s more conventional than the food featured, made under the supervision of executive chef René Redzepi, whose voiced-over humble-bragging about his achievements is like a cloying sauce that overpowers a dish. The individual plates of food, shot in loving closeup, look so inviting and delicious you may want to lick the screen; they even get their own credit block at the end (“Yeast caramel with skyr”), like soundtrack items or excerpts from poems or films. That at least may be a cinematic first. But ultimately this feels a bit too much like one long advertisement for the restaurant and misses an opportunity to develop a more probing thesis on, say, the foraging movement or the catering industry’s dysfunctional obsession with Michelin stars and the 50-best list Noma has topped several times.
