Written by Erin M. Schadt
Nordic Kultur, 2013
In 2003, Meyer with fellow chefs Rene Redzepi and Mads Refslund, set out on a journey to study and discover the unique ingredients of Norden.
They had decided to create a restaurant, Noma, located at the Nordatlantens Brygge in Denmark, the building that housed the cultural and administrative facilities for the North Atlantic countries. The mission for the restaurant was to create a cuisine that would focus on elevating traditional and non-traditional Nordic ingredients.
The “gastronomic explorers” as Meyer describes them, traveled to Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, “where we became very enthusiastic about the cultured dairy product, skyr, which is made with an age-old bacteria culture from the milk of the Icelandic cows, a race whose line has continued in an unbroken chain since the time of the Vikings. We tasted the local lamb and the wildly growing Scotch thyme, biodynamic pearl barley, fi sh — including arctic char — and seaweed of an extremely choice quality. Iceland’s dark rye bread, which is baked in steam down below the ground, was also fantastic.”
In the end, Refslund went his own way, and Redzepi and Meyer opened Noma in late 2003. Meyer says, “Our colleagues doubted that we could run a restaurant relying entirely on local produce — what would we do in the winter time when nothing could be harvested in our region?”
Despite skepticism, the restaurant would go on to earn two Michelin stars and was voted Best Restaurant in the World by Restaurant magazine in 2010, 2011, and 2012. A feat that seemed, at best, improbable for what were once considered humble ingredients of the far north.
However, even before the accolades began rolling in, just a mere 10 months after Noma opened, something even more monumental came about.
“You can actually leave out the word Nordic from the Nordic cuisine manifesto. The manifesto we formulated may be a weapon against the McDonaldization of indigenous food cultures.” — Claus Meyer
Inspired by their own Nordic cuisine quest, in September 2004, Redzepi and Meyer organized The Nordic Cuisine Symposium. At the symposium, some of the top chefs in the region met and created the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto (see below). “The basic idea,” says Meyer, “was to unite chefs and farmers in all Nordic countries, small and big companies, politicians, and private people around a common mission: to define the contours of a new Nordic cuisine that one day would be counted as one of the most admirable ones in the world.”
The Nordic Council of Ministers adopted the manifesto as the ideology of the New Nordic Food program in 2005, with the goal to set a new direction for everything from the food industry to school lunches. Meyer says one thing that drove the manifesto was “that we, also, had the dream of one day handing over a great cuisine to our children.”
Now, nine years later, the manifesto has fundamentally changed how the region approaches its foods: how ingredients are grown, transported, and prepared; and how the world views the cuisine of Norden.
“Today, cabbage is worshipped and rye is the new black. Wild herbs are collected and sold in supermarkets, and festivals celebrating our food emerge all over Scandinavia,” says Meyer. “Nutritionists and top chefs are turning the new ideas into everyday meals.”
Of course, in any movement, there are continual changes and new challenges. According to Meyer, the next step for Nordic cuisine is “to share our experience with the rest of the world. To make sure that everyone understands that Noma is not an end and that the Nordic cuisine is not about promoting ourselves or our region.”
“We have found out that we, initially, underestimated the scope of the project,” says Meyer. You can actually leave out the word Nordic from the Nordic cuisine manifesto. The manifesto we formulated may be a weapon against McDonaldization of indigenous food cultures.”
This relentless enthusiasm and drive that Meyer possesses has led him to tackle many initiatives since the manifesto was created, including founding a vinegar brewery, establishing a flour company (with farmer Per Grupe, using 100% organic grain grown on three farms in Denmark), running Meyer’s Bakeries, and opening additional restaurants.
The uniting factors for all these projects? Meyer says, “before pursuing a new idea I have always made sure there is a something imperfect to repair or improve, a potential win-win-win-win scenario, in brief, a greater cause. For 25 years I have been investing myself in projects that were not just fun and beneficial for me here and now but some that could also promote my community, the industry, my country, and, why not, in the long run, make the world a better place in which to live?”
His latest endeavor, indeed, reaches far beyond Denmark. “We are setting up in the capital of Bolivia, la Paz, a non-profit organization: a bakery, a café, a restaurant, including a cooking school for underprivileged indigenous future chefs. The idea is to turn these marginalized young people into culinary entrepreneurs and together with all relevant stakeholders in the country to create a Bolivian food movement.”
The work also presents a true test to the theory that all of the principles in the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto are translatable to any region. That food’s connection to the territory, whatever that territory may be, is what should make the cuisine of the region distinct and what should be celebrated by the region’s chefs and citizens.
Ever the gastronomic explorer, this concept is what keeps Meyer excited about food and drives him to push cuisine forward: “The taste, its connection to the territory; its capacity for communicating love and compassion; its power as an instrument to improve life.”
New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto
What exactly is the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto? As established in 2004 by influential chefs of Norden, the aims of New Nordic Cuisine are:
1. To express the purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics we wish to associate with our region.
2. To reflect the changing of the seasons in the meals we make.
3. To base our cooking on ingredients and produce whose characteristics are particularly excellent in our climates, landscapes, and waters.
4. To combine the demand for good taste with modern knowledge of health and well-being.
5. To promote Nordic products and the variety of Nordic producers — and to spread the word about their underlying cultures.
6. To promote animal welfare and a sound production process in our seas, on our farmland, and in the wild.
7. To develop potentially new applications of traditional Nordic food products.
8. To combine the best in Nordic cookery and culinary traditions with impulses from abroad.
9. To combine local self-sufficiency with regional sharing of high quality products.
10. To join forces with consumer representatives, other cooking craftsmen, agriculture, the fishing, food, retail, and wholesale industries; researchers, teachers, politicians, and authorities on this project for the benefit and advantage of everyone in the Nordic countries.
New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place
November 15, 2025 - March 8, 2026
Food is more than nutrition – it is culture, identity and history. Discover how a new Nordic food movement has sparked interest in local ingredients and natural materials across borders and artistic disciplines.
Photo Credit: Photo: Frode Larsen / The National Museum, Norway
