Voicemail From: René Redzepi

Noma cofounder René Redzepi called us with an update from Kyoto, now in its full autumn glory. Listen to his voicemail – and see snapshots from the Noma crew – in the video above.

René Redzepi never stops moving. Over the past two decades the Danish chef has managed to push his restaurant, Noma — not to mention the entire city of Copenhagen — to the center of the global culinary conversation. (Noma topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list five times.) But what’s kept Noma there is, paradoxically, Redzepi’s bottomless appetite for change. The menu at Noma can be viewed as the opposite of an algorithmic playlist: You’ll never encounter a dish that you’ve already eaten, because Redzepi and his team insist on erasing each menu at the end of every season and returning to the creative provocation of a blank slate. Even the location of Noma has entered a state of flux. After extended stints of foraging and cooking in Mexico, Australia, and Japan, Noma has shed the old-school space-time confines of being “a restaurant in Copenhagen,” becoming instead a gastronomic experience that happens wherever in the world Redzepi decides to land next. The only predictable part is that he won’t stay put for too long.

We caught up with Redzepi when he called from Kyoto, where he and his team were preparing for the third of Noma’s now-legendary residencies in Japan. There, in a literal sense, Redzepi remains constantly in motion, often embarking on hikes that might stretch as long as 20 miles. But what you hear in his voicemail (listen in the video above) is something rare: stillness. As he talks about the weather and the foliage in Kyoto, you might even pick up an echo of Bashō, the haiku master whose nostalgia for the city inspired one of the most famous short poems in the Japanese canon: “In Kyoto / hearing the cuckoo / I long for Kyoto.”