A Look Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Menu

This rare onion variety grows in very particular soil conditions in the Yucatán Peninsula. Sweet and easy to chop (it’s soft like a shallot and doesn’t make your eyes water), Mayans mainly use it to build flavor as a condiment or as part of a sauce. At Noma, Redzepi uses the delicate onion to create a play on a traditional dzikilpak—a pumpkin seed–and-tomato sauce made in many Mayan households—using the root vegetable’s stem and bright purple head and pepitas (see more below). The silky brown concoction is topped with a single octopus tendril so tender you can cut it with a spoon. Families in Yaxunah, a village deep in the Yucatán (about a two-hour drive from Mérida), are growing this ingredient for Noma Mexico in their homes’ gardens.

I went with Traspatio Maya, the gourmet food division of Fondación Haciendas del Mundo Maya, to visit Yaxunah and dine at Los Compadres—the one-table restaurant when Redzepi tried the tortillas he’d declare the best he ever tasted.  These fluffy handmade creations are made of freshly milled Naal Teel Corn, the heritage corn from the village. (Corn is the basis of the Mayan diet and seeds are passed from generation to generation.) Women from the village make the tortillas by hand each night (groups rotate so all the women from the village get a chance), and they come filled with Cerdo Pelón (roasted suckling pig) with a side of local banana that tasted like sweet plantain. Our server instructed us to slice up the banana and add it to the taco for one sublime combination of sweet, smoky, and salty.

To visit Los Compadres contact the travel agency Catherwood Travel (catherwoodtravels.com), or call Los Compadres directly at 521-985/858-1189.

This fruit native to the Yucatán is closely related to a pineapple plant. It’s so acidic, if you eat too much of it your mouth will blister. (At Noma Mexico it is blanched until the interior is white and sweet.) As a wild ingredient that grows in the bush (wild animals enjoy it too), Piñuelas can be scarce. Traspatio Maya has helped supply Noma Mexico with the ingredient from the villages of San Antonio Chun and Tixcacaltuyub. At Noma, the fruit arrived at the table splayed and topped with grasshopper paste and cilantro flowers. We did as we were told and ate it with our hands. It made my mouth pucker, but I enjoyed the earthy sweetness.

Many Mayan’s grow this hearty green leafy vegetable in their backyards and with the help of Traspatio Maya, that’s exactly where Noma is sourcing it from. Many traditional Mayan dishes use chaya, including Brazo de Reina, tamales made with pumpkins seeds, eggs, and masa, or as a popular taco filling when chopped and cooked with egg. At Noma Mexico, chefs are flipping the script, serving the chaya leaf as a tortilla filled with plump Bahia Falsa oysters served alongside a kelp bulb injected with a mussel-flavored michelada.

One of the most memorable dishes at Noma in Copenhagen is the Mahogony clam, a chewy and slightly sweet shellfish in a reddish-brown shell that can live to be over a hundred years old. The giant clams from the Sea of Cortez are not as old, but they are similar in size and have a sweet flavor and chewy texture. For the pop-up’s Melon Clam dish, the raw clam is dusted with powder made of different beach greens foraged in the Yucatán and garnished with a very rare little orange called Naranjita de San José. It’s sour but has enough sweetness that it can be eaten whole, skin included. Only a few families in Yaxunah and Tixcacaltuyub still grow them.

Melipona honey comes from the stingless Xunan Kab bee of the Yucatán Peninsula. Richer in nutrients than any other type of honey in the area and full of medicinal properties, it’s traditionally used in Mayan medicine. The bees have nearly become extinct due to disease and predation. At Noma Mexico, honey—obtained from a town in the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site eight hours from Tulum—is used in the cold brew coffee sourced from the hills of Chiapas. It’s served with a chili filled with chocolate from native Jaguar cacao.

Noma is using Espuma de Sal, an artisanal and mineral rich salt harvested along the beaches of Celustun in the Yucatán, to flavor its dishes. It’s still extracted the same way Mayans began cultivating it 1,500 years ago: running sea foam through a sieve to harvest very fine salt crystals. "To put a pinch of salt finally on your dish is like adding the place you are in," says Redzepi.

The first time I tried Mexican chapulines (grasshoppers) was in Oaxaca, a region in Southwestern Mexico famous for molé. I remember marveling at how they were piled high in barrels at the market and shoveled into a paper bag and enjoyed as a snack, much like popcorn. Here they get the Noma treatment by being fermented and turned into a dark paste that is salty like soy sauce. A dollop of this is served on the piñuela, but chapulines are also mixed into a cream sauce served with salbute, a puffed, deep fried tortilla typical of the Yucatán. Oaxacan chapulines are also served as a garnish along with dried tomatoes.

Pepita is the local name for the seeds of the xtop pumpkin, a large and strong flavored variety. Producers generally eat the pumpkins themselves and grind the pepitas for selling. At Noma Mexico, they’re being used along with Ixil onions in the dzikilpak sauce with octopus. (Dzikil means pepita and pak means tomato in Mayan.)

After dinner, I was welcomed into the kitchen for a close up look at the Noma process. My eyes were immediately drawn to two young chefs cutting young green coconuts in the back with a saw, a labor-intensive job. The coconuts were sourced from Ozkuxcab in the Yucatán and when the stunning dish was brought to us during dinner we were instructed to spoon out, and eat the delicate inner membrane that was topped with lime zest, a dollop of Russian caviar, and sprinkled with “kelp salt” made from seaweed collected at the nearby beaches, dried and broken into little bits.

Wispy coriander plants (also known as cilantro) with white flowers seem to thrive in the backyards of Yaxunah. The flowers, sourced from growers in the area, were used to top the piñuelas at the beginning of the meal.

Corn, pumpkin, and beans are the basis for the Mayan diet because these ingredients grow symbiotically in the milpa (Mayan field). Noma cooks and layers Ibes, a white bean variety, with other ingredients on the tostada with escamoles, a stunning dish that looks like a tiled mosaic. Escamoles, often referred to as Mexican caviar, are edible ant larvae that are harvested from the roots of agave plants in Central Mexico. The light and crispy tostada is made with corn from Yaxunah.

In Yaxunah, villagers are doing more than just growing ingredients for Noma—they’re also producing handcrafts like cutlery and flatware. When I visited, local women were busy producing an order for place settings made out of black bull horn. The pieces were being cut and polished until they had a marble-like sheen.