Agern + Great Northern Food Hall
Chef Claus Meyer
Place New York City, NY, USA
Agern + Great Northern Food Hall
Place New York City, NY, USA
For over 30 years, Claus Meyer has applied entrepreneurship and careful research to promote the opportunities and qualities of Danish food culture. A prolific restaurateur, he co-founded the restaurant Noma, and he is currently involved in projects in the U.S. and Bolivia that emphasize social entrepreneurship and the importance of local food systems, in addition to his groundbreaking leadership around new Nordic cuisine. At the core, his approach across his businesses has been innately plant-forward.
For more than 30 years, Claus Meyer (52) has been a gastronomic entrepreneur. Besides his countless companies employing more than 800 staff, Meyer is an affiliated professor and distinguished alum at Copenhagen Business School and Social Impact Fellow at University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business. Additionally, believing in food as a driver for social change, Meyer has co-founded the Melting Pot Foundation, with the aim of improving the quality of life and provide new opportunities to vulnerable individuals in Denmark as well as in selected projects abroad. He also initiated a non-for-profit for vulnerable youth in East New York.
He continuously strives to push his dream of unfolding the potential of indigenous food cultures worldwide, exemplified by the co-founding and co-owning of celebrated restaurant Noma, Copenhagen (Denmark) as well as restaurant GUSTU, La Paz (Bolivia). In August 2015 he moved to New York City with his family to steer the 2016 opening of fine dining restaurant Agern and Great Northern Food Hall in the city’s iconic Grand Central Terminal, Manhattan.
1 minutes cook/prep
Fermented Beets
With gloved hands, mix together and ferment at room temperature in a fermentation vessel or in vacuum sealed bags for 1 week. Cool and reserve.
Pickled Beets
Bring vinegar, sugar, and water to a boil.
Pour over beets and cool. Allow one week to fully pickle.
Pickled Huckleberries
Bring water, vinegar and sugar to a boil.
Cool and poor over huckleberries. Allow one week to fully pickle.
Smoked Beet Reduction
Juice the beets. Skim any scum off of the juice and discard.
Reduce the juice by half, or until syrupy.
Smoke for about ten minutes using whatever method you have at hand. Cool and reserve.
Fried Caraway Seeds
Over medium heat, melt butter in a pan and heat until foam subsides.
Add caraway seeds and stir, cooking until aromatic.
Drain on paper towels and reserve the seeds.
Vegetable Ash
In a 450°F (230°C) oven, roast all vegetable waste products (cabbage leaves, onion skins, leek tops, carrot peelings etc.) until completely burnt and dry.
Cool and place in a blender.
Blend until you have a fine powder. Reserve this.
Salt Roasted Beet
Wash beet and remove the root end and any remaining bits of the stems and dry. Whip the egg whites until very stiff peaks. The whites should appear dry.
Mix your salt, ash, and spark together and add a 1/4 of your egg whites. The mixture should resemble wet sand, and should stick to the beet. You may add more egg if it is too dry, but the mix should not be so wet that it starts to slip off in the oven before the egg has set. There may be a bit of trial and error here to get the mixture just right.
Bake on parchment paper at 199°C for 90 minutes, or until you do not feel any resistance when a cake tester is inserted. To do this, you must chip away a tiny hole in the salt crust with the end of the cake tester. Reserve in a warm Place.
The Bitter Salad: Fermented Blackberries
With gloved hands, mix blackberries and salt. Place in a fermentation vessel or vaccum sealed bags and ferment at room temperature for 1 week. Cool and reserve.
The Bitter Salad: Almond Cream
Fry raw almonds in 200 g almond oil at low heat until the almonds are toasted. Cool and strain, reserving oil.
Blend nuts with a tablespoon or so of oil, adding in the cooking oil until you have a smooth paste.
Mix in the creme fraiche, cool and reserve.
For The Plate
1 salt roasted beet
250 g raw beets, peeled and chopped fine in food processor
250 g pickled beets, chopped fine in food processor
250 g fermented beets, chopped fine in food processor
100 g pickled huckleberries
10 g camelina oil
15 g smoked beet reduction
12 g fried caraway seeds
60 g creme fraiche
20 g fresh horseradish
6 g Sumac powder
6 ea Yka Leaves, cut into pieces
3 g micro red amaranth
1) Mix together pickled, fermented, and raw beets. Add huckleberries, camelina oil and smoked beet reduction. Season with sea salt to taste. Spoon mixture onto 6 plates.
2) Add a teaspoon of creme fraiche to each plate. Sprinkle on some fried caraway seeds, sumac powder, and grated fresh horseradish, and arrange some yka leaves and amaranth on top.
3) Tableside, present the beet and crack the salt crust open with a knife. Remove the beet, portion in 6 slices and peel each with a knife and fork. Place one slice on top of creme fraiche and present.
4) To make the bitter salad, remove the root end of the endive, and cut the leaves with the white section attached into 2 cm pieces. Julienne the tops of the endive very finely. Remove the base of the treviso radicchio and cut the leaves with the white section attached into 2 cm pieces. Reserve the tops for another application. Julienne the toasted almonds very finely, shaving them more than chopping them. Mix the large pieces of endive and treviso with the shaved almonds, 6 tbs fermented blackberries, and 20 g almond oil (or to taste) and season with sea salt. Mix the finely julienned endive with 5 g almond oil, 20 g Forum cabernet vinegar.
5) Spoon 1 tbs of the almond cream onto each of 6 plates and spread it out.
6) Heap the treviso and endive mixture on each plate, followed by the julienned endive.
7) Sprinkle freezedried blackberry powder over the top to cover.
His approach
All the restaurants I am involved in are in one way or the other influenced by the New Nordic Cuisine Movement. Even Gustu in La Paz though the food which is Bolivian.
With the new Nordic cuisine, we wanted to explore if it was possible to create a food culture/system that was able to balance ultimate deliciousness with a deep commitment to healthiness and sustainability.
One of the key values of the project was to reconnect the restaurants with their own territory. Another was to emphasize the role of the vegetable, cultivated as well as wild, in the menu, in our food. From a deliciousness perspective meat and fish can be kind of uniform in terms of texture and flavor. The plant Kingdom represents a much wider diversity of flavours, taste, colours and textures.
Within the 100 mio DKK Opus project I started in 2008, I lead two work packages that aimed at defining a new Nordic diet. An everyday meal system that was affordable, accessible, delicious and healthy for the planet as well as for each individual.
Where do you look for inspiration?
I never look for inspiration but I am often inspired when I travel, eat out, exercise or do nothing.
What are your best tips to make vegetables enticing?
Chop those vegetables very finely. Slow baking and charring bring out amazing flavours in vegetables. You don’t need fish in a ceviche. One day our kids will say “meat…. that was something our parents ate”.