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Chef René Redzepi made an indelible mark on the culinary world with his restaurant Noma in Copenhagen. Since the three-starred spot opened in 2003, it has been voted the world’s best five times by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Now, Redzepi is taking his culinary message to the screen with the documentary series Omnivore, which debuts on AppleTV+ on Friday.
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Each of Omnivore’s eight episodes tells the story of a global food: chilies, bluefin tuna, salt, bananas, pork, rice, coffee and corn. Redzepi said in a statement that, more than a decade in the making, the products “are the stars of this series.”
To tell the stories of these staple ingredients, creator and narrator Redzepi and Emmy Award-winning executive producer Matt Goulding (Anthony Bourdain: Explore Parts Unknown) travelled across five continents to countries including Denmark, Serbia, Thailand, Spain, Japan, Djibouti, Peru, South Korea, France, Colombia, India, Bali, Rwanda and Mexico.
“At every turn, we get walloped by the sheer magic of cooking, along with the breathtaking, joyous and sometimes perilous questions that surround what we cultivate and how we consume it,” said Redzepi. “Omnivore isn’t just a food show, because it reminds us that food is never just food — it’s a window into our lives, our history and our world.”
The series starts with chilies. Redzepi, who grew up in Macedonia and immigrated to Denmark at 12, makes his first stop in Donja Lokošnica, known as Serbia’s “paprika village,” where residents string peppers up to dry each October. He then visits the McIlhenny Company on Avery Island, Louisiana, to see how they’ve been making Tabasco for more than 150 years, and Bangkok, where chilies feature on the menu at husband-and-wife team Prin Polsuk and Mint Jarukittikun’s Samrub Samrub Thai.
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Redzepi told the Los Angeles Times that other TV opportunities arose over the years as Noma’s popularity exploded, but they weren’t the right fit. “I never had the desire to be on TV unless we were informing the world about how magical and important and delicious food is in a way that would be more like Planet Earth than a cooking show or travel show. It was always on the back burner. Then COVID happens.”
Making food delicious is a given, Goulding told the Los Angeles Times. But the stories of these culinary cornerstones go much further than taste and enjoyment. “We also want to understand what it means — not just political or cultural but also the natural world, the biological. All of those elements felt like they could be connected through the vessel of the ingredient.”
As for Noma, diners have until the end of the year to experience the restaurant that defined an era of fine dining, transforming people’s perception of Nordic food in the process. In 2025, it will become a full-time laboratory.
Redzepi’s announcement of the restaurant’s closure in 2023 followed a period of innovation. In 2018, Redzepi and Toronto-born co-author David Zilber, then director of the restaurant’s fermentation lab, released The Noma Guide to Fermentation. Noma then launched a line of fermented products such as corn yuzu hot sauce, mushroom garum, rhubarb tamari, and wild rose vinegar and has held ongoing pop-ups in places such as Kyoto, London, Sydney and Tulum.
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