Real Travel: I Had to Eat With Strangers to Dine at Noma
Nadine, Erik and their friend await the mystery guests. (Photo: Nadine Jolie Courtney)
In the culinary world, the Copenhagen restaurant Noma is kind of like Beyoncé. Sure, there are other amazing restaurants out there, and some of them even top the charts from time to time. But Noma has been named Best Restaurant in the World four times, has been in the top three every year since 2009, and is considered the hardest reservation to land, period. At the end of the day, Noma is queen bee and everybody knows it.
Getting one of the 45 seats at Noma’s 12 nightly tables is nearly impossible. On the first Monday of each month, at precisely 10 a.m. Central European Time, twenty thousand people take to their phone lines and Internet servers. (When they created a 10-week pop-up restaurant in Tokyo earlier this year, the wait-list had 60,000 people on it.) Tales abound of prospective diners hitting refresh at their computers for up to four hours, only to walk away empty-handed.
Related: Dinner at the World’s Most Expensive Restaurant Will Blow Your Mind
So when I found out I’d be traveling to Copenhagen on a business trip, the idea of getting a reservation at Noma was laughable. Out of curiosity, I looked at their website to see if they had any openings. Because, hey, you never know.
And lo and behold: There it was.
One single 8 p.m. dinner reservation: the only dinner reservation still available between August and November.
The catch? It was for five people. And at that very moment, I had a party of only one: me.
I got out my credit card down and booked the table.
Finding People to Eat With Me
The second diner was a no-brainer: my husband, Erik. Even though he wasn’t supposed to come on the trip, we quickly searched and found a cheap round-trip plane ticket direct to Copenhagen on Norwegian, a new low-cost international carrier.
One down, three more to go.
I logged onto Chowhound, the international food discussion website with forums on every conceivable topic, and posted a notice looking for three diners to join us.
When you confirm your Noma reservation, they send you a lengthy email including their cancellation and no-show policies. If the three strangers we picked to dine with us flaked at the last-minute, we’d be on the hook for their meals at 2500 Danish kroner per person: that’s about $1,120 total. I knew we had a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket and finding eager people probably wouldn’t be impossible—but finding the right people who we trusted and wanted to spend several hours with sharing the meal of a lifetime? Another task entirely.
The next day, a woman in Brooklyn responded to my post, asking if we still had two spots available. I combed through her Chowhound profile, trying to glean as much information about her as possible. She’d also responded to another Chowhound user’s post, asking if they had an opening for their group dinner reservation. This seemed promising. After some extra due diligence (read: copious Internet stalking), I decided she was serious about it and responded. We arranged a Skype session the next day to test the waters.
In the meantime, two other people messaged me on Chowhound about the extra seats. Now we had options!
Our Skype Date
The Skype session felt like a first date. “This is weird, isn’t it?” my husband asked me as we prepared to call them. “Yeah, but it’s Noma,” I replied. We crossed our fingers and hoped they were the ones.
The four of us huddled on screen, smiling nervously at each other as we introduced ourselves to L. and E. My husband and I went first, giving them the rundown on our lives, the spontaneous nature of the trip, and our shock at actually landing such a coveted invitation.
“Yeah, how did you get a reservation?” L. asked. “We tried a couple of months ago and it was completely booked.”
When I told them that I’d inexplicably landed the reservation literally two days earlier, they were gobsmacked. I explained that we obviously would have preferred a romantic dinner for two, but when I saw that lonely reservation for five sitting unclaimed, I had to snag it. After all, when it comes to Noma, you take what you can get.
The four of us chatted for 20 minutes, jumping from topic to topic: our favorite European cities, food allergies, Brooklyn versus Manhattan, and the laid-back beach lifestyle in Santa Monica. At one point, Erik looked over at me and grinned. These two were warm and lovely—and I had a good feeling that they wouldn’t flake on us.
L. and E. told us they already had a reservation booked at Geranium, which has two Michelin stars, was ranked 42nd Best Restaurant in the World list in 2014.
“Would you be willing to cancel your other reservation?” I asked. “We’d love to have you eat with us.”
They looked at each other, nodded in agreement, and then looked back at us. “We’re in.”
The four of us made plans to meet at the restaurant the night of the dinner and agreed that we’d split the fifth seat if we couldn’t find somebody to eat with us. One step closer.
The Last Seat
One of my best friends popped into mind as a possibility for the fifth diner. She’s married to a well-known chef (Perry Pollaci at LA’s The Royce), passionate about food, and spontaneous enough to seize an opportunity like this. I texted her asking if she was game, keeping my fingers crossed. If she said no, I wondered how hard it would be to find a lone diner on Chowhound. At this point, we’d received several inquiries about our reservation, but all parties of two—and we only had one seat left.
Related: The World’s Toughest Restaurant Tables to Book
Two weeks before the meal, my friend said yes and booked a plane ticket.
My husband and I were still a little nervous about spending such an expensive, once-in-a-lifetime meal with total strangers, but the presence of my friend calmed us. “If we don’t get along with them in person,” I reasoned, “she’ll be our buffer. We can pretend they’re not even there.”
I finally responded to the other couples on Chowhound, wishing them good luck and letting them know that we’d completed our table.
Dining With Strangers
The morning of our meal, my friend landed in Copenhagen—flying halfway around the world from LA to Copenhagen for only 36 hours just to eat at Noma.
The chefs prepare. (Photo: Nadine Jolie Courtney)
When the three of us arrived at the restaurant, the entire kitchen staff was waiting in front to greet us. And there in the flesh, sitting in the lounge with excited smiles on their faces, were our Internet friends from Brooklyn. We introduced ourselves, hugged, and then prepared for the meal of our lives: more than twenty innovative courses lasting over four hours.
Related: Inside the Kitchen of NOMA
While the conversation was a little stilted in the beginning (just like on a first date!), a glass or six of expensive wine can loosen the nerves. By midnight and following several glasses of wine pairings, it felt like we’d known each other for years.
Once we were done with our four-course dessert, waiters led us to the library lounge for Akavit, a Scandinvanian flavored-spirit designed to knock you on your bum. There, L. and E. presented us with a miniature Brooklyn t-shirt for our baby daughter, as a gesture of thanks for putting the dinner together.
There’s a saying that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Even though we may never see L. and E. again—there were no fake promises as we hugged goodbye, simply thanks all around—it felt like a fated stroke of luck that everything had fallen into place so perfectly.
With a little bit of creativity, flexibility, and social bravery, a seat at the best restaurant in the world might have your name on it after all.
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