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In the week he missed out on getting his third Michelin star, chef René Redezepi - from the Noma restaurant in Copenhagen - has become one of the first chefs ever to feature on the cover of Time magazine.
Redzepi, famous for his experimental approach to Nordic cuisine, his strict rules on finding local ingredients and his adventurous missions into his local terrain to forage for new and wild ingredients, joins greats such as: Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela and many more. But Rene is one of only a few chefs to ever be featured on the cover - Julia Childs, French chef Alain Ducasse and Ferran Adria (as part of the top 100 influential people edition) included.
The Danish chef features on all Time Covers in Asia, Europe, the South Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa - all except the U.S. - which instead leads with a story about women earning more money than men in America.
Redzepi has two Michelin stars but missed out receiving his third when the 2012 Michelin Main Cities of Europe Guide was published this week. However, making the cover puts him on a new mantle and one that will rocket his philosophy of local cooking and discovery of new ingredients to the masses.
His Nordic Food Lab, an experimental kitchen for researching and processing foods in new ways and sharing his discoveries with other chefs and people interested in his finds, is something that should now recieve even more attention - which can only be a good thing. He spoke at the chef congress Identita Golose and said, "For every discovery we make there are 300 mistakes" and this line sums up him and his teams' dedication to food, locality, innovation and education.
With a Time Cover, two Michelin stars and being labeled best chef in the world two years in a row at World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards - soon to find out if he wins for a third time consecutively on the 30th April - what will happen next for René Redzepi? Will he now become a household name? Will he become a TV star and start to have a real impact on the way people think about food?
With Noma already receiving one million booking requests a year for only 22,000 places and the Time article, written by Lisa Abend, suggesting the chef still can't afford to buy his own home in Copenhagen. The one sure question has to be - will we see René finally open a second restaurant, one away from Denmark perhaps? Somewhere that spreads his culinary approach even further? It would certainly be a hard philosophy to transport but it could be done and how exciting would it be. Will he do any of this? Only Time will tell.
