We usually write an end-of-year summary of our favourite meals of the year. At the end of 2022, we didn’t. I forgot. Or I wasn’t bothered. Can’t remember which.

Anyway, too little too late, here is a round-up of our favourite meals, home and abroad, over the last twelve or thirteen months.

Last year, at the end of a cold and wet February, we travelled to Copenhagen. The trip was built around a meal in Noma, which was fantastic. Again. Noma 2.0 had evolved significantly since our previous visits, which were to Noma 1.0, but the food is just as awe-inspiring. Anyway, I wrote about that Noma visit here, so I won't bore you with it again. There were other culinary highlights on this Nordic trip. The one that is still vivid in my memory is Selma. Selma does smørrebrød and that is pretty much it, but they are the best smørrebrød. Oh God, they are good. So good. A lovely little restaurant with a small, but well-curated wine list to go with a selection of amazing smørrebrød. If you are in Copenhagen, you must go. We will every single time we visit this beautiful city.

It was a week in Alba next. Our splash-out meal here was in the much-lauded Piazza Duomo. This meal started brilliantly and ended splendidly, but much of the middle of our tasting menu was a damp squib. Or a pungent sea urchin in this case. The dishes were a little bit samey-samey texturally with a token cracker repeatedly appearing on a side plate to add some crunch. A cracker which looks at you as if saying “nope, I don’t know what I am doing here either”.

The food in the Piedmont region of Italy is of a crazy high standard though, with no one restaurant standing out, but a host of amazing meals in family-run trattorias. Sitting in the centre of the beautiful village of Barolo, drinking Barolo, with a plate of sausage ragu and tajarin pasta - pure bliss.

Our mid-summer jaunt last year was two weeks in Alsace and Burgundy. A lot of tosh has been spoken about a decline of dining standards in France to the extent that other countries, like Ireland, are surpassing it. Such nonsense. The average restaurant in France, the one you didn’t find in a guide, the one that isn’t on trend, will usually still deliver a fine meal, like the one we had in Le Cellier Volnaysien in the village of Volnay. Anyway, I digress.

If I had to pick one meal out as our favourite in Alsace it would probably be Bord'eau on the river in the centre of Colmar. A truly lovely and picturesque meal. In Burgundy, it might have been La Cabotte in the village of Nuit-Saint-George, where we enjoyed a meal outside in the square in the centre of this old town.

Our last holiday of the year was our first trip to Lisbon. What a beautiful city. We loved it. The four of us were having a terrific time until we all got terrible flu and spent the last four days in our apartment ordering food on our phones. We did manage to get 4 great meals before we were struck down. Gorging on all types of shellfish in Cervejaria Ramiro, was a great value treat, that all four of us really enjoyed. Cervejaria Ramiro is a sort of right-of-passage when visiting Lisbon. SÁLA de João Sá delivered a higher standard than we were expecting with some stunning dishes. But the highlight was without a doubt Jose Avillez’s flagship restaurant Belcanto. We had heard mixed things about Belcanto, but the food was clever, whimsical, perfectly executed and a great representation of the local cuisine. Fantastic service. Great wine pairings. A true world-class experience.

What about at home? Well, we didn’t eat out as much as we would have liked, but still managed a few brilliant meals. In the last twelve months, we have been fortunate enough to dine in Liath four times. Our barometer for eating out in the evenings is: “Is this restaurant worth a babysitter and all the hassle that goes with it?” Liath definitely satisfies that condition and then some. Chef Damien Grey’s food is unique, frequently balancing big, complex flavours with a fantastic use of acidity that amplifies the main ingredient on the dish. This was typified in what is one of the best dishes I have ever eaten. Anywhere! Ever! When the venison loin, a truffled bordelaise sauce with a side of venison tartar and foie gras was put in front of me alarm bells rang. It just seemed too much. Rich on rich with a side of rich, with not a vegetable in sight. I was wrong. Very wrong. It was heavenly perfection. Why? Because the bordelaise sauce wasn’t really a bordelaise sauce at all. It was much lighter with a terrific acidity; with the truffles somehow muted to just give a subtle earthiness. It was a sauce for the Gods and it tied all those other big flavours together. The food is Liath is creative and exciting - if we could only dine in one restaurant in Ireland at the moment, it would be Liath.

In December, we bagged ourselves a lunch reservation in Aimsir, a restaurant that has been delivering at a world-class level since opening in 2019. Our lunch, although not hitting the same dizzy heights as previous meals, was another lovely experience. It will be interesting to see what happens next with Aimsir, with chef-patron Jordan Bailey and wife Majken Bech-Bailey, the husband and wife team who made this restaurant so successful, moving on to a new challenge. The biggest challenge will be for the owners of Aimsir trying to replace such a talented duo.

A restaurant that is aiming to be judged at the same level as Liath and Aimsir, is Terre, which opened in 2022 in the Castlemartyr Resort in Cork. We visited whilst on a two-day stay in the hotel in February. It would be hard to find any fault in the dining or service, both of which were exemplary. The food slightly under delivered in comparison. The tasting menu offered up a few great dishes, the pineapple sundae dessert possibly being the best of the lot. Other servings, however, lacked balance with some components, which should have shone as the star of the dish, being lost. 

A highlight of last summer was a family lunch at Locks Restaurant in portobello. The food in Locks has gone up a couple of levels since Chef Andy Roche took over. A sharing main course of guinea fowl was just superb and the whole menu managed to be both homely and modern. A really great spot for any occasion.
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Possibly the most improved restaurant we visited recently was Volpe Nera in Blackrock. I say improved, but it was already a very good restaurant, but judging by a meal we had there recently, chef Barry Sun has moved his cooking up a notch since our visit last year. This was exemplified in a perfectly executed pigeon course. Add this food to a well-curated wine list and warm service and you are on to a winner with a meal in Volpe Nera.

Before I sign off, I must mention are local restaurant Woodruff. Our family loves Woodruff. Some of Ireland's best produce, cooked with skill and love with a fantastic wine list. 
 
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Well, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks in our gastronomic sphere.

First was the release of the 2022 Michelin guide. Besides my usual little chuckle at the food writers who throughout the year will drop Michelin into their reviews to add a bit of gravitas, but then cry foul when the stars do not align with their predictions, I normally couldn’t care too much about the release of the revered guide, but I was delighted to see Liath get recognized for the consistent improvement it continues to show – it is a more accomplished restaurant than it was when it was Heron & Gray, and it was pretty good then. 

A couple of days after the Michelin stars were announced, we were boarding a flight to Copenhagen. The build-up to this jaunt was fraught with anxiety. First is that modern-day, lingering background worry that one of the four of us will get covid and be unable to travel. Then there was the looming Storm Eunice which was threatening all week to hit hardest at the time we were due to take-off. But, we got there, a bit late for our dinner reservation in Kodyens Fiskebar, which turned out to be terrible.

Our primary reason for travelling to Copenhagen was for a meal in Noma. We ate in Noma three times previously, the last being in 2015, and it is where we had the two best gastronomic experiences of our lives. Since then, Noma has moved home and changed their approach. Now they are hyper-focused on the season, even more so than they were before, and change their menu three times a year to reflect the best the climate has to offer. In Summer, they focus solely on vegetation, and you will get no seafood or meat. In the autumn the menu is everything from the forest, such as game and mushrooms. And winter and spring, the season we went for, is strictly based around the ocean, when the cold water brings out the best of it.

We were a bit apprehensive going back. Could this approach match the experiences we had before, with so many of the dishes still etched in our brain and still, to this day, a regular talking point around our kitchen table? Would we miss the diversity of having different seasonal offerings, instead of just a whole menu focused on one genre? What if it just didn’t live up to our, probably untenable, expectations that the restaurant themselves set for us previously?

Noma has won the World’s Best Restaurant Award five times now, more than any other restaurant, including as recently as October, so surely it must be as good as ever, right? Maybe, just maybe, it’s even better. Can there really be such thing as the best restaurant in the world? It seems puerile to grant a title of “best” to anything that is so subjective and down to individual experiences and tastes. Notice above, we said we had the best experiences of our lives in Noma, we are not saying that they are the best restaurant in the world. I am always wary of any critic who tells you that a certain restaurant is “the best” in the world, a country or even a city. What they probably mean, if they are not just trying to seduce us with an attention-grabbing headline, is they had their best experience in this restaurant. Also, to declare anything as the “best” would require that the critic has recently ate in all other restaurants that may be vying for that title.

The World’s Best 50 Awards, for all its silliness, does draw attention to the industry and, at times, can recognize a chef and restaurant who are pushing the envelope and give that restaurant the opportunity to push it forward even more. Without the World’s Best 50, restaurants like Noma, and previously elBulli, would not have had the same influence on the culinary world as they went on to have.

Noma was not the first restaurant to diligently focus on the season and the provenance of the local landscape, but because of their success, and, it must be said their brilliance, they have had a profound influence, not just on many chefs and restaurants around the world, who started to centre their food more around their immediate environment and local food producers, but also on what we eat at home. In recent years there has been a greater push by supermarkets to source local ingredients and support local, small, farm producers. This, in part, is down to the influence that Noma has had.

There are many examples in history of a chef that has had a major influence on the food offerings in restaurants worldwide (Careme, Escoffier, Bocuse, Bras, Keller, Adria, Waters to name a few) and Noma’s Rene Redzepi has possibly had as big an influence as any in modern times. Even in Ireland, many of our most lauded restaurants are influenced by what has been named as the New Nordic food movement, which Redzepi unknowingly started when he setup Noma.

Just like after elBulli’s success some years earlier, some chefs, eager to jump on to a trend, created perverse manifestations of this New Nordic philosophy. While after elBulli’s rise to fame, some ill-guided chefs started to put foams, airs, spherification on every dish, since Noma there are chefs putting flowers and grass from their local vicinity on everything that left their kitchen, sometimes to laughable effect.

But, the New Nordic wave, even when misinterpreted, has strengthened relationships between the chef and the farmer, has made us look around our own neighbourhood for what is delicious and, consequently, has reduced food miles. This, overall, must be a good thing.
Possibly the biggest impact Noma has had has been on the Nordic region. This region, whilst having traditional food, had no compelling food culture like the French, Spanish or Italians. Noma changed that and the Nordic region, with the identity of provenance and food that represents the season always being at the fore, is now a world-class culinary food destination. This is thanks, in no small part, to the Noma alumni who have gone on to open some formidable restaurants of their own.

So, what of Noma in 2022? Could it match our experience of seven years previous? Would it be worth the high price tag (and a meal in Noma comes with a feckin’ eye-watering price tag)? In a word: Yes. But that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Noma 2.0 felt like a different restaurant than Noma 1.0 and it was different in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dishes in Noma 1.0 focused on an earthy feeling, with dishes having their subtlety shine through with brilliant use of acidity. This may sound abstract, but the food managed to taste like a reflection of the season, of the time and place. Many of the Ocean dishes on our Noma 2.0 tasting menu were bolder and they were accentuated with spice and heat that played no part in Noma 1.0. I suspect this change came out of Noma’s popups in Australia, Japan and Mexico. This spice and heat were deftly and expertly used, and it had the effect of bringing out the best of the seafood component on the dish.

When we visited Noma in 2014 and 2015 there were many dishes that blew us away. These are the sort of dishes that you don’t talk about at the time, but instead they would throw you into a savouring silence and only a glance at each other is needed to know we are both engrossed in something we will never forget. These are not only 10 out of 10 dishes, but 11 out of 10 as they have that factor of being immortal in our memory. On this same menu, there were some dishes that were excellent, but I would probably only give them 8 or 9 out of 10.
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On our 2022 Ocean menu, while there may have been less of those silence-inducing 11 out of 10s, there was no dish that would get less than 9 and giving any dish a 9 would be harsh. The consistent brilliance across the whole menu was astounding.

Each dish is based around a piece of fish or shellfish. A blue mussel filled with a quail egg was complexity masquerading as delectable simplicity. I have never had squid as good as that was cooked with koji spores, simply amazing. I could go on, but I reckon you get the impression by now that the food was bloody great. But allow me to just mention the one dish that may have been the most astonishing:  a dessert made with oyster – yes you read that correctly. The taste of oyster came across stronger than you expect, but with the addition of quince amazake to balance it out into the perfect dessert, which in the wrong hands could be a calamity. We were left speechless and shaking our heads at the awesomeness of this dish.

In Noma 2.0, Redzepi has managed to add extra layers to the food, still managing to represent the Nordic season, while focusing each dish on one superbly sourced ocean offering. The components in each dish complement each other, but are still identifiable in their own right and there is a minimalist restraint with each dish, with ingredients only added if really needed.

The wine pairings were perfectly matched, with a lot of natural wine and the occasional skin contact wine thrown in. They were generous with the vino too, constantly topping up our glasses.

The service this time around had slightly changed from Noma 1.0. Previously each dish would be presented to the diner with a detailed story of its development and makeup. Now, the dish is served with a brief outline of what is on the plate and you are left to your own devices to eat as you wish. Either way, we always found the service in Noma faultless, and this time was no exception.
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Best Restaurant in The World? Who Knows? Who Cares? All I know is that Noma is our favourite restaurant in the world, and we are already planning when we can get back for the summer and autumn menus.

We keep a sort of league table of the best restaurants we have been to on our travels around the world. For the past six years, we have had Copenhagen's Noma on the top, with an almost faultless score of 98 out of 100. We ate there three times between 2014 and 2015 and two of those meals were the best of our life. We would never say that Noma is the best restaurant in the world or that everyone who eats there should feel the same, but it was the best experience for us. Food is highly subjective and each person will have different criteria for what is their best restaurant. 

There are many reasons why Noma is top of our list. The service on each occasion, led by Aussie James Spreadbury, was fantastic, managing to be both professional and fun. The dining room was (it has since moved to a new location) comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. The ambience and atmosphere were just what you want in a restaurant like this. All this is essential to contribute to the perfect dining experience.  But, there are a  few things that set Noma apart from the other great restaurants on our list. 

Firstly, and obviously, is the food. We like food that can be innovative, original, seasonal, local and yet show clarity, we love to be able to identify the components that make up a dish. While a restaurant like El Cellar de Can Roca shows outstanding mastery in blending many different and unusual ingredients to compose a final dish that is delicious and harmonious, it sometimes is hard to identify the individual flavours. In Noma, you not only can taste each part of the dish, but you feel you like you can taste a season, the weather and the region that went into making it. Noma takes a snapshot of the season and serves it on a plate. 

Secondly, it is the memories. We have had excellent meals in other restaurants, but shortly after you leave, maybe on the flight home, it is a struggle to remember the dishes. We can still remember nearly every dish we were served in Noma, despite it being nearly five years ago. Not only do we remember what it looked like, but we remember the taste and way we felt eating it. In Noma, there were many special, unforgettable dishes. The sort of dishes that we didn't even talk about whilst eating, but instead just luxuriated in it in silence. It isn't just high-end dining that has given us these memorable food experiences. We get peeved sometimes when people say they only like classical french, or they don't like formal dining, or they don't like Michelin starred restaurants, or they only want to eat a certain genre of food. Why make a choice? Isn't it great that you can have it all? Of course, we have had unforgettable experiences in the halls of the great chefs, but also in classical french bistros, in beach bars in Thailand eating the food of a local family, eating chilli crab in the hawker centres of Singapore, vongole on the pier in Ischia watching the fishing boats come in, a great pizza in New York, having tomatoes with olive oil in a stripped-down tapas bar in Barcelona, prawns simply cooked on a plancha in San Sebastian. The magic of dining for us is that we can have all these different experiences, whatever we are in the mood of, and we don't have to pigeon-hole ourselves into one genre. 

Lastly, is something hard to quantify. It is a sort of energy in the restaurant that is very hard to articulate. Maybe it is the enthusiasm of the staff, a sense of passion from both the kitchen and front-of-house teams - a pride and love of what they are doing. A feeling you get that this isn't just a job for them, but they are excited to come into work each day and have a true love for what they are doing. Maybe it is also a special sort of hospitality that isn't just being welcoming, but more a feeling that they are inviting you into their house and they are going to do everything possible to make your experience as brilliant as possible and for the three or four hours that you are there your troubles will be forgotten. We have spoken here before how we nearly cancelled one trip to Noma as we had just received devastating news about the health of a family member hours before getting on the flight. But we went and for the four hours in Noma we were taken away from our troubles, and it this power that good food can have that makes us love it so much.

It is rare when everything comes together in a restaurant like this. It is why we travel to seek out the best dining experiences and often restaurants can be quite brilliant, but they are missing that something that makes it extra special and memorable. But twice in the last eight months, we had an experience like this and we only have to travel as far as Celbridge.

We first ate in Aimsir last August and had no real expectations, we hadn't eaten in Maaemo, the Oslo restaurant where Cornish chef Jordan Bailey was the head chef before moving to Ireland, but as soon as we walked in we got the sense that this could be something a bit special. And it was. It was brilliant; the food, the hospitality, the wine, the sommelier, the dining room. So, last week we returned in the hope that it would be as good as we remembered, but this time it was even better.

Again, when we walked into the restaurant we picked up a vibe off the staff that they are excited to be part of this project. When we were taken from our seat in the bar through to the restaurant, we were shown some of the offerings of the season in their dry ageing fridge; charcuterie that isn't quite ready for the menu and some aged venison that was in store for us later in the evening. This managed to heighten our expectations even higher.

The food, around 18 courses of it, is seasonal, local (some even from their own gardens), innovative, original and much of it was definitely memorable. As we said above we do have a penchant for restaurants that can present the landscape and the season on a plate, it is a style of food we can really identify with, and Aimsir definitely fulfils this wish.

On our first visit last August, we had the most amazing Heritage Wheat Soda Bread, so we were a bit disappointed to hear the bread had changed because the cream they used to make it was out of season, but it was replaced with a sort of sourdough bread made with Jerusalem artichoke that was just as good, The Dexter beef tartare served in its own tripe was still on the menu though, and was just as good this time. Irish bluefin tuna belly, which was dry-aged in bees' wax served in a vertebra from the tuna with mushroom soy and honey was remarkable and extremely moreish. Dry-aged halibut, which we were also introduced to on the way in, was beautifully cooked on the bone with confit garlic butter, served with possibly the best, most addictive, sauce we have ever had with fish. Another amazing dish was organic onion steamed in roasted bone marrow and filled with sheeps' yogurt and ramson capers.. To finish the savoury courses were two courses served with the venison we had met earlier in the evening. First smoked heart served on puffed tendon with burnt chive emulsion, followed by a dish of Sika deer cooked over hot embers with marrow and vinegar.

The best dish of the night was a dessert and it is not often we say that about a meal. A serving of pumpkin with salted rapeseed ice-cream and pumpkin seed brittle was remarkable; just the right level of sweetness, textured and perfectly balanced. It was an  unforgettable dish. Michelle has been talking about the Koji tart since our visit last August and was delighted to see that it is still on the menu - it is extremely decadent and a nice ending to the meal. Recently we compiled an Irish tasting menu of the last decade and Aimsir featured heavily - we would expect this showing again in ten years time when we make our tasting menu for this decade.

Restaurant manager and Maitre'D Majken Bech Bailey commands her dining room with poise, grace, charm, friendliness and wit. She strikes the perfect balance between professionalism and hospitality like very few Maitre'Ds we have ever seen and this transcends the whole front of house team who deliver an evening of faultless service. Michelle, because she is still feeding four-month-old Amy, didn't want the full wine pairings so asked could she have fewer wines. This was not only accommodated with ease, but Michelle got some different wines than those on the wine pairing, so we could try more off their list. 

That brings us nicely to the wine. We have all had experiences listening to a sommelier rattle off some over-rehearsed speech about a wine with no enthusiasm while you sit there bored wondering when it will end. Well, this isn't the case in Aimsir. Sommelier Cathryn Steunenberg presents each wine with infectious enthusiasm and it is obvious that each one is personally selected by her and means something to her. After each wine, you look forward to the next and hearing the story about its origins. The wines themselves were all excellently matched to the food. Starting with a very interesting wine, Agostado from Bodega Cota 45, that tasted like a blend of a Palo Cortado sherry and one of the wineries other wines, UBE. It was extremely unique and went perfectly with the first couple of courses. Another unusual wine was a Soave from Noûs Cooperativa that didn't taste like any other Soave we had before. One of the stars of the night was Maximus, an IGP made from a grape we had never heard of, Fer Servadou, which had great acidity, with red fruit and hints of pepper. Another gem was a Brouilly from Pierre Cotton in Beaujolais, which was very easy to drink and had a distinctive earthy taste and almost bacony nose. Cathryn doesn't just pair the food with wine, the bread was matched brilliantly with a red ale from the Kildare Brewing Company and dessert was paired with an apple ice wine from  Killahora Orchards in Cork which was splendid. 

Aimsir is truly a world-class dining destination and we are very lucky to have it just outside Dublin. In Aimsir they consider the whole experience; the food, the wine, the service, the dinnerware, the setting and they try to perfect each of these to give an unforgettable dining experience. Maybe, what is most exciting about Aimsir is that they are only open less than a year, so it is reasonable to expect that there is still better to come, especially since they haven't fully reaped the rewards of their kitchen garden yet. We were in Aimsir for nearly 4 hours, but it felt like we there for just a few minutes.

We would never support the World's Best 50 List at all, it is nonsense to suggest that there is a 'best' restaurant in the world, but until recently the idea that Ireland would have a restaurant good enough to be in the best 50 in the world seemed absurd to us. But now, with Liath in Blackrock making great strides and continuing to improve in the last couple of years and now Aimsir, Ireland has two restaurants that can really rival the best on a world stage.

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Recently we returned to Noma for the 3rd time in a little over 18 months. Why go back this often to an expensive restaurant in a very expensive city when there are other restaurants we could travel to?

The main reason for our repeat visits to Noma is that each season offers a different interpretation of the Nordic region. Our latest meal was our first during the summer and the tastes were lighter and more refreshing than previous visits, with some dishes having a tart, slight astringency, but very cleansing tone. As always in Noma, the flavours were clean and pure, typified by a fantastic serving of seasonal green leaves and a scallop marinade which was absolutely delicious and showed perfection in deceptive simplicity. A flower tart - thin pastry with an assortment of edible flowers - was delicate, floral and earthy. A beautiful serving of pumpkin, rose petals and caviar in a milk broth was sweet, but with a slight umami undertone.

Dishes that were on previous menus were not homogenised across the seasons, but showed how the same produce can taste differently at certain times of the year. A fantastic dish we had last year of shrimp, nasturtium, yeast and rhubarb root broth tasted quite different and had more subtlety, as did a serving a chilled monkfish liver which was a more delicate flavour than previously.

Some dishes had bolder flavours, like lobster with nasturtium which was delightfully rich and moreish and the same can be said for a serving of roasted bone marrow. A particular highlight was an addictive and very clever dish of fermented garlic served shaped as a flower. With a deep, complex flavour and a chewy toffee like texture, this dish was not one we will forget quickly.

In Noma you don’t notice the technique that goes into the food, they are not trying to impress you with their latest advancement or say ‘look what we can do!’ It just feels like a natural representation of the landscape, geography and the climate at that particular time. Eating in Noma you feel like you are somewhere unique, somewhere that doesn't come along very often. Rene Redzepi has changed the culinary world and his influence has been felt more than any other chef in recent times. Often copied, but seldom understood, the terroir centric approach of his food is capable of giving the diner not only a taste of the restaurant’s food, but a taste of the restaurant’s place on the map.

Redzepi’s greatest legacy may be the changes to the Nordic food scene. There are many excellent restaurants in the region now and ingredients are being used that previously were not considered food. He has given a food identity to a region that never really had one. Sure there are many chefs throwing grass on every dish so they can put ‘foraged’ on their menu, just as many put insipid foams onto many dishes where it isn't appropriate, but the legacy of Noma will outlive the chefs who are just trying to cash in on a trend.

Restaurants with this amount of influence and success make them easy targets to criticise and ridicule. Exponents of classical cooking can be quick to dismiss restaurants doing something new, but what we now consider classical food was at one point the cutting edge and the great classical chefs of the past were the innovators of their time. Today’s modernities could be tomorrow’s classics. If a new technique, philosophy, method or even dish is good enough it will outlast fashion or fads. In years to come we may think about Nordic cuisine the same we do about French cuisine, with Redzepi being a founding father.

Noma is never standing still and behind the scenes they are experimenting with new techniques and flavours, using methods like fermentation and preservation to develop dishes for future menus. Constantly looking at better ways to express their philosophy, a few weeks ago Redzepi announced that Noma will move at the end of 2016. In their new location they will try to grow many of their ingredients themselves and will take seasonality even further. In the summer they will be a vegetarian restaurant serving up the edible shoots and fruits of the season. In the autumn they will put all their focus on game, berries and mushrooms. The challenge here will be able to add enough diversity to the menu to keep the diner engaged and it will be very interesting to see how this works out.


To us Noma feels special and has a sort of atmosphere that can suck you in. On a previous visit last November, we had, just the day before, received some very bad news about the health of a family member and came very close to cancelling the trip. But we went and for the three hours we were in the restaurant our mood was lifted and our minds taken off any troubles. It reinforced to us why we love good food and the power it has to uplift. There are not that many restaurants that could have, for those few hours at least, taken us away from our troubles on that day, but Noma managed it and because of this the restaurant holds a special affection for us.

Service is friendly, fun, professional with the right amount of informality and despite being a big business, with reservations still extremely hard to get, Noma has managed to keep a sort of neighbourhood feel to it. Noma is expensive by any standard, but we have always left thinking it was worth every cent. The wine list though, like most in Copenhagen, is quite costly and hard to pick up a wine of decent quality.

Above all though, the reason to go back to Noma is that the food is delicious and, besides all else, this is all that really matters.

See Noma on our list of world ratings

Last January we ate in Noma for the first time, a restaurant that has been crowned best in the world four times. Our meal back then was excellent; very different, a little bit challenging, slightly overwhelming and extremely memorable. The moment we stepped outside the door we decided we needed to go back to try another season. Well this autumn we went back and this time the meal was even better, in fact, it was quite amazing.

Once in a generation or so there is a chef who completely changes the whole culinary industry; Escoffier, Bocuse, Adria to name a few, and most recently Rene Redzepi, the man behind Noma. Redzepi didn't set out to take on the world, his aim was just to do something different. He decided to explore his own doorstep to discover ingredients that he could use to help him find a taste, an identity and a representation of the Nordic region. This part of the world wasn't known for its abundance of ingredients, especially growing in nature - when we visited last January it was so cold and icy it was hard to imagine anything growing or surviving the winter. He didn't just discover these new ingredients and substitute them into a tarte tatin, or roll them in a ravioli, or any reinvention of a classic. Instead he also  wanted the interpretation to be new. Maybe more than any one chef in history Redzepi has transformed a whole region, one which has never been known for gastronomy, and given it a food culture whilst unearthing some great Nordic produce. Copenhagen alone is now littered with really high quality and exciting restaurants as a consequence of Noma's success, with some of their alumni responsible for some of the best.

Due to Noma's success the philosophy has travelled the world with chefs trying, and more often than not failing, to copy it. An ethos copied, but not understood, can sometimes be comically bad - around the world there has been chefs inappropriately throwing any foraged ingredients they can find all over dishes. This can be an unfortunate by-product of a hugely influential restaurant - after El Bulli there were chefs putting foams, airs, emulsions on everything they could find. But a lot of positives have come out of Noma's influence. Chefs are now thinking more about the sourcing of their ingredients, using local produce and exploring their own region. Also chefs are now dealing more with the producers instead of the middle man and that can only be positive. 

In a way Redzepi has been a victim of his own success and has to strive hard to stay ahead of the pack of very good chefs who are following in his footsteps and copying his methods. It is a constant battle to push innovation, keep developing new dishes and looking for new tastes. The food is constantly evolving and even looking back at previous Noma cookbooks you can see how the food has changed. To do this they must have to put with a lot of failed attempts and frustration, before getting the eureka moment of a complete dish.

Denmark isn't the obvious place to push boundaries, stand out from the herd and become the biggest restaurant in the world since El Bulli. Standing out, attention seeking or any shred of arrogance is not acceptable under Jante Law (social etiquette in which Scandinavians still adhere to, which basically states that 'you are nothing special'). But this mentality and outlook can be seen in a meal in Noma, as despite being the most sought after restaurant on the planet (they have thousands of people on the waiting list every day for a table), Noma still has humbleness and humility. The welcome is warm and there is a real appreciation that you have travelled to try their food. When the chefs ask did you like a dish they are not just seeking compliments, but instead seem genuinely interested and happy if you liked it. At times they appear unaware of the importance of the restaurant and what they are doing.

All this is irrelevant if the food they serve isn't absolutely delicious though and of course it is. This time we were better prepared and knew what was coming - the dishes come very fast at the beginning and can be slightly overwhelming on the first visit. Maybe what is most remarkable about what we ate in Noma was that there are highly skilled techniques on most dishes, but that isn't what you first notice as dishes are presented beautifully naturally and it is the taste that is the most striking. It is only after eating do you think about the techniques and processes that went into the dish. 

Sometimes it is hard to describe something you ate in a restaurant and get across just how good it was. There were times during this meal that while eating we looked at each other and words were not necessary as we both knew we were experiencing something special, something unique. When you love and are passionate about something, as we are with food, and you are experiencing the best it can make you emotional and we certainly felt that with some of the dishes on our meal.

The food manages at times to have a delicate, yet powerful taste in the same mouthful and the balance between the different elements is remarkable. There is also purity in the food, you never feel like you are being tricked, each dish tastes of what it is. Some of the excellent dishes on our meal were: beef tartare with ants; cucumber with a scallop fudge; white cabbage and samphire; sea urchin with crispy duck stock; milk and monkfish liver. However that list doesn't include the best dishes, the ones that had us shaking our head in wonder: burnt onion and walnut oil was sweet with a pure onion taste without the sharpness; shrimp, nasturtium with a broth made from rhubarb root was possibly the best dish of the meal, the rhubarb root nearly having a feint lemongrass taste; an egg yolk that had a wonderful texture served with potato; roast bone marrow that you roll in cabbage leaves was just luxuriously delightful. The sweet offerings were also great: an ice cream with crispy milk and gammel dansk (a Danish bitter) was superb; Aronia berries with söl was rich with a tea and slight tobacco taste.

The service was hospitable, friendly and professional with just the right level of formality. Copenhagen is an expensive city, but when you consider there are as many chefs as diners and the work that goes into the food then Noma is actually very well priced, although the wine menu is quite pricey. In fact they could increase the price of their dinner menu significantly and still easily fill every table. Some people say eating in Noma is a once in a lifetime experience, but we will be back, after all there are still two seasons to try.

We don't know how someone can say one restaurant is the best in the world, but if there is a better meal out there, if there is a restaurant developing and serving better dishes, then we will keep trying to find it, because it will need to be quite something to top this meal in Noma.

Is it easy to be sceptical about The World's 50 Best Restaurants - a list that is published annually and ultimately crowns the best restaurant in the world. It is easy to be sceptical because there is a lot to be sceptical about.

It seems puerile to state that any restaurant is the best in the world - it is sort of like the school yard argument of who would win a fight between Batman and Spiderman. Just as it is hard to compare two super heroes with different super powers, it is just as hard to compare great restaurants with different styles, different approaches, cooking different ingredients in different regions around the world. It is very subjective and it must be impossible to correlate opinions from judges in regions around the globe with any parity and come up with an accurate and fair top 50 list.

Some of the results would raise an eyebrow too - it is hard for us to imagine there are forty-six better restaurants in the world than The Fat Duck - a restaurant that was top in 2005 and Heston Blumenthal says is better now. Our recent meal there was amazing and we would put it ahead of a restaurant like The Ledbury, good as it is, which is now in 10th place. But the menu in The Fat Duck rarely changes and that may be why it is not higher up the list which seems to award restaurants who are constantly looking to innovate. Some may be surprised that Simon Rogan's L'Enclume has never graced the top 50 since it is the only other restaurant besides The Fat Duck to get 10 out of 10 in the UK Good Food Guide. We haven't eaten Rogan's food yet so cannot comment.

I'm sure most of the world's top chefs attending the awards in London would know that it isn't really possible to title any restaurant the best in the world. But they probably feel the ceremony is reward for all the work that they have put in. Not to mention the reservations that comes with the publicity.

Despite the silliness, there is a lot to applaud about the World's Best 50 list. Most importantly is that it rewards the industry's truly great chefs, the innovators of the culinary industry, the chefs that stand out from the crowd.

Rene Redzepi, chef patron of the 2014 best restaurant Noma, is one such innovator. There aren't many chefs in history who have revolutionised the food industry; the way chefs think about food, the way chefs cook food and the way chefs present food.
Over the years there has been Escoffier (the founding-father of modern French food), Paul Bocuse (the 'Nouvelle Cuisine' movement) Pierre Gagniare (fusion cuisine), Ferran Adria (molecular gastronomy) to name a few. 

Most recently there is Redzepi. His approach is to look at the local environment for inspiration. He takes the terrior of his region and presents it an innovative way. The foraged foods on so many menus around the world can be traced back to his influence. But he doesn't just take ingredients from his doorstep and substitute them in classical dishes or add them in some de-constructed concoction of some well known recipe. Instead he prepares them in a new way using modern techniques but still trying to present them in as clean and as pure a form as possible.

What has this got to the World's Best 50 List, since he was doing this before he got the award? Being garnished the title of best restaurant rewarded Redzepi for his innovation and for the courage to take the risk of trying something completely new, something that was probably more likely to fail than to succeed and that by itself must surely be a positive for the list. But there is more. Noma may not even be in business now if it wasn't for the publicity that came with winning this title. It guaranteed them a full restaurant for lunch and dinner every day, giving them some financial stability to keep pushing their innovation to see how far they can take it. 
It helped spread the influence of Redzepi's approach and now chefs the world over are looking closer to home for their produce and considering seasonality more than ever. There is also the effect it has had on the Nordic region. We were in Copenhagen recently and the plethora of excellent restaurants is remarkable. 

The next Redzepi could come from anywhere and will bring another fresh outlook and new approach to cookery. The World's 50 Best Restaurants list may help this person be uncovered, spread their name and influence to chefs and food enthusiasts around the world. Could it even be Ireland? Only once has Ireland had a restaurant in the list, Thorntons at number 25 in 2003. None of the current stock are good enough to make the list sadly. But, ten years ago, not many people would have thought the next best restaurant was going to come out of Denmark, a country not known for its fine food culture, so you never know.

The top of the list contains many restaurants that are doing something different, that are innovative, that are setting trends and that stand out from the crowd. It must be a good thing that these restaurants are given the recognition they deserve.

2013 was a great year for us. We ate in some great restaurants, both in Ireland and the world. See our blog post about the best and the most disappointing meals we had. We also improved our cooking skills a little bit and started to play with new ingredients and techniques.

We have had a great 'dining out' start to 2014 already. In Ireland we have had very good meals in Bon Appetit and Mulberry Garden. Bon Appetit was a lot better than the last meal we had there two years ago, both in terms of food and service. In fact both the food and the service were excellent. It actually climbed up to 2nd on our Irish restaurant rating league - previously it would have been just inside the top 10. The menu was very seasonal - pheasant, spices - and warming on a cold winters night. The star of the show was the desert (the same on our previous visit) a skilful play on the humble apple with tangy undertones and perfectly balanced textures.
Mulberry Garden, which was our favourite restaurant of 2013 (as mentioned in a previous blog), was as delightful as ever and the reputation of the restaurant is continuing to grow.

We travelled to Copenhagen and ate in Noma in January. This was an amazing and inspiring experience. There were some stunning dishes - some of the best we have ever eaten in fact. But there were a couple of dishes that we didn't like. The potato and lojrom (which is the row of a bleak fish) was very disappointing and the texture of the near raw potato was a bit unpalatable. Another disappointing dish was the onion and ants. It was a bit boring and the taste of the ants was lost. However, the potato and pear dessert, the monkfish liver, the sea urchin,  the 100 year old clam, the pork skin and blueberries, the burnt leak, the potato and pear; aronia berries and sol were all lovely dishes. 
We desperately want to go back some year in the summer when the menu would be completely different.

Noma is one of the most influential restaurants of recent times. You could argue that every time you see foraged ingredients on a menu or when you see producers listed, it can be traced back to Noma. 

The food is like nothing we have had before, it is not just the taste of a Danish food, but the taste of Danish landscape, of its soil, its forests and of its seas. Very few of the dishes smack you around the face with flavour, but instead give you a delicate taste of Danish terroir. It can appear deceptively simple, but in fact the dishes are complex and a result of a lot of man hours. 

We left Noma feeling inspired to start pottering around our own landscape and see what we can find to cook. Which leads to interesting question. Would a Noma would succeed in Ireland?

Last year Nede was opened in Dublin by two former Noma chefs. Their philosophy was similar to Noma's - to showcase local ingredients in as natural a way as possible. Albeit their dishes were a lot simpler. The food was natural, light, delicious and skilfully prepared, but they did not succeed. We were there twice and, despite one of the times being a Saturday night, the place was nearly empty  on both occasions. Louise Bannon, one of the chefs, told us that people were not really understanding what they were trying to do. We weren't too surprised by this and during our first visit we both feared the restaurant may struggle. 

They were serving dishes that may appear as just vegetables on a plate, or Dublin bay prawns in a wild garlic oil, and I think diners did not appreciate that these dishes were not as simple as they appeared. Whether they were simple or not actually shouldn't matter, because the dishes were delicious They served steak in its own red juices, which may turn some, especially the 'well done' brigade, off. And serving beef heart with cherries may have sent others - who think it is normal to eat a muscle from the backside of an animal, but not the heart - running out the door. They did have some dishes that could appeal to all, the chocolate and barley dessert was one of the best we had last year.
We are not sure what the actual reason Nede only lasted a few months, but it looked like it was struggling from the beginning. It was a sad day when it closed its doors, both for us and the two talented chefs. One reason for the closure of Nede may have been its location. It was in Temple Bar and serving food that would not appeal to the tourist trade and it was not trendy enough, like Cleaver East for example, to attract groups on a night out.  
But we would doubt that a 'Noma Style' restaurant would survive anywhere in Ireland. Would Noma have survived in Copenhagen without international recognition? Maybe not. In an interview Rene Redzepi described how locals did not take to the restaurant at all in the beginning, so if it wasn't for the San Pellegrino best restaurant list, Noma may have been and gone without exerting its influence in kitchens all over the world. Now that would be sad!