Noma and the fizzle of too-fine dining

IT WAS at Noma that I ate the most unsettling meal of my life.

The most unsettling dish, I should say, though “dish” doesn’t feel right, given that it wriggled and twitched. “You’ll never taste a fresher shrimp in your life,” the server who presented it to me promised, telling me to plop it in my mouth. But I was as frozen as it was fresh.

When he returned minutes later, it was still moving – more slowly. “It’s going to die soon,” he said, in the tone of a priest administering last rites. “It might as well die for its intended purpose.”