When Star Chefs of the New Nordic Movement Cook in Brooklyn

Welcome to Consumed, in which Matt Duckor devours the food world, documenting the people, places, and plates that keep him hungry

Ever since I got back from my late-summer trip to Copenhagen for the MAD Symposium, I've been talking incessantly about Scandinavia's clean streets, its kind people, their adherence to traffic laws while cycling, and, most important, their food. Nordic chefs may hate the phrase "New Nordic," a blanket term used to distinguish the modern cooking that's developed in the wake of restaurants like Noma, but this much is clear to me: The food of Scandinavia is more than delicious smørrebrød and fancy plating. Hey, even Anthony Bourdain is interested—he dedicated Sunday night's entire hour of Parts Unknown to René Redzepi and Noma. I want to learn everything I can about this new cuisine and the people responsible for it.

That why I found myself at Brooklyn's ** Aska, the No. 10 Best New Restaurant in America, last Friday night: Two of the movement's greatest talents, Esben Holmboe Bang, of the two-Michelin-starred Maaemo in Oslo, and Aska's own Fredrik Berselius were cooking for two nights as part of the North Nordic Food Festival.

From my seat at the bar, the kitchen's pass was in plain view, with Bang and Berselius running back and forth throughout the evening. Berselius has a slight build (dangerously skinny, you might say) and long, thin hair that hangs in his face, and he works with monk-like intensity—in other words, the embodiment of the New Swedish Chef. Bang, meanwhile, is extremely tall, with a thick build, a buzz cut, and, when he's not on the line, a baseball cap on his head. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he was a football player for one of the Big Ten, not one of Europe's most influential chefs, the youngest ever to earn two Michelin stars, at just 30 years old.

And then there Bang was, approaching my counter flanked by a team of waiters carrying plates. In the small bowl set before me was what he described as a Maaemo "classic": an emulsion of raw oysters and oil (call it "oyster mayonnaise" and New Englanders would lap it up), topped with a gel of mussels and a sauce of mussels and dill. It was at once luscious and earthy. Berselius followed this with a dish featuring two Swedish staples—herring and potatoes. Potatoes, especially the diminutive new potatoes, show up everywhere in Scandinavian cooking, both savory and sweet, but here they were simply boiled and paired with thin slices of the cured fish and two types of greens (burnett and lamborn mini-leaf). I'd take a quart container of the potatoes to-go if offered.

The next Maaemo stunner to hit the table, Bang said, has been on the restaurant's menu since day one: a barely cooked quail egg basted with bone marrow, studded with layers of lightly burnt onion, and topped with a sauce of what the menu describes as "salted mutton," which Bang adapted from fenalår, a traditional Norwegian cured meat. Bang takes things a bit further by purchasing the lamb from a local purveyor who ages the meat for an insanely long 8 years. The result was...intense. Just a few tiny cubes of the meat, in a dish that was mostly onions and egg, had the impact of a much larger piece of meat—without being heavy.

One bite can change the way you think about something—food is powerful like that. Bang's mutton was one of those rare moments: profound but quiet. And those were the characteristics shared by the best of what I had in Copenhagen and at Aska on Friday—subtlety and simplicity. There may be unrecognizable ingredients—a foraged herb here, a crazy aged meat there—but nothing screams at you. It may be doing it in a different language, but the food at places like Maaemo, Aska, Noma, and Relæ speaks to you, or at least to me.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go book a flight to Oslo.