What the Critics Are Saying About Tulum’s Pricey Noma Mexico Pop-Up Monica Burton - Eater
go to original May 9, 2017

When world-renown Chef Rene Redzepi opened a pop-up shop in Mexico, he was amazed by the local ingredients such as Corn Pibinal, Guanabana, Jack fruit, and more! (Insider)

René Redzepi’s Noma Mexico pop-up is half way through its seven-week stay in Tulum, and the reviews have started to roll in. The verdict: It’s brilliant. In fact, it may be the “meal of the decade,” according to the Washington Post’s critic Tom Sietsema. Meanwhile, in his LA Times review, Jonathan Gold, who counts himself among the group of people who believe Noma in Copenhagen is the best restaurant in the world, lovingly describes Noma Mexico dishes that he says were the best bites he tasted last month. And over at Food & Wine, Joshua David Stein is rhapsodic, writing, “Noma did as Noma does: It changed everything.”

To be clear, these reviews aren’t meant to sway diners on the fence about visiting the pop-up — the dining room tasting menu sold out a mere two hours after dates became available. Let the FOMO commence:

Noma Mexico is wildly different from — and superior to — any other high-end dining experience, according to Stein. He writes:

Over four hours and fifteen courses, what a restaurant is, what a pop-up restaurant is, what Mexican ingredients are, what is food and what art, what is the point of eating all, also what is Redzepi’s relationship to Mexico, what is delicious and does it matter gradually slough away until at the end of the meal—for me, at 1:30 a.m.—you’re left feeling raw and vulnerable, shaken, stirred and moved in the middle of the jungle with the ocean in earshot.

Gold writes that the food is “transformative.” He praises, “Chocolate, coconut and bananas — flavors as familiar as childhood and as old as time, transformed or detransformed, presented in ways that in retrospect make them seem almost mystically of a time and of a place.” The best dish “may have been a lobe of fresh cacao fruit straight from its pod, a pale, glistening thing whose sweet essence whispered of litchi, vanilla and perhaps guanabana, with a crunchy seed whose rich bittersweetness barely hinted at the flavor of what most of its kind is destined to become.”

According to Sietsema, “This is food that makes you laugh and think and brace yourself for the next course.” He offers superlatives for several of the dishes, writing, “If there’s a more stunning fruit soup on earth than Noma Mexico’s bowl brightened with star fruit, grapefruit, avocado, mango (and more), I have yet to dip into it.”

Gourmet Traveler’s Samantha Teague compiled a list of 54 thoughts on the Noma Mexico experience for the Australian publication. She says the ant eggs are “silky and creamy, and set on crisp tostadas with thin slices of bean,” and a fried tortilla “topped with dried tomatoes and chile de árbol” and grasshoppers that have been “roasted in garlic and mashed into a smooth white paste” is her “favorite dish yet.” Thought No. 54: “Me gustas, René Redzepi.”

Read the rest at Eater

Related: 90% of Noma Mexico's Much Cheaper Bar Menu Goes to Charity (Eater)

Related: No Mas, Noma! None of the Locals Can Afford This Ridiculously Overpriced Menu (New York Post)

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