With Noma set to close its doors at the end of 2024, you might expect René Redzepi to be heads-down in Copenhagen, overseeing the last days of his much-lauded restaurant, available only to the few who have managed to secure those final coveted reservations. Instead, the chef has also been busy appearing on our television screens (perhaps a hint of what’s to come in his post-Noma era). First, he cameoed on The Bear, and now he’s the star of his very own show, the new Apple TV+ series Omnivore.
Omnivore sets out to shine a light on the purest artisanal forms of eight ingredients: salt, pork, corn, tuna, coffee, rice, banana, and chile. Across eight episodes, each focused on one of these items, Redzepi and his crew traverse the globe, visiting salt collectors in France and Japan’s busiest fish markets. In an interview with Food & Wine, Redzepi said that the series was influenced heavily by Planet Earth, the beloved David Attenborough-voiced nature series. That influence is obvious from the jump: With Redzepi’s calming voiceover, the frequent shots of coastlines and foggy tree canopies, the series might’ve been called Planet Earth But for Food. There is also a significant amount of Chef’s Table DNA in the show, especially in terms of its sweeping cinematography and cinematic soundtrack, but where Chef’s Table highlighted the world’s best chefs, Omnivore turns its attention to the materials they work with.
As he has made clear at his restaurant, Redzepi is eternally in search of culinary gems — rare banana cultivars or well-tended Spanish pigs among them — and Omnivore is a continuation of that pursuit. The show makes the case that these foods, and the people who make them, are well worth attention. It’s impressive to watch how exactly Serbian pepper farmer Suzana Ilic and her family raise hundreds of tons of peppers to make the world’s best paprika. When rice cultivator Jayakrishnan Thazhathuveetil talks about the ways in which climate change is affecting his crops, and his family, the fear in his voice is both palpable and moving.
But ultimately, in Omnivore, all roads lead back to Noma. The ingredients are not showcased for their inherent value — nor for how cooks might use them in their homes — but for how they can be transformed into dishes that most people will never eat. With its Redzepi-voiced voiceovers and Noma scenes, Omnivore casts the chef as the world’s ultimate authority on these products, not the people who make them happen: In comparison, they get limited airtime to showcase both their wares and provide insight into the existential threat that climate change poses. To that point, the series also never really takes a critical look at the sustainability issues around transporting these world-class foods from Spain or Japan or Peru all the way to Copenhagen, especially considering Noma’s local-first ethos.
Fans of Noma will likely love this show, and so will people who appreciate beautiful visuals. Perhaps the scenes of Redzepi in the restaurant’s kitchen and dining room, serving whole reaper chiles to a room full of sweaty diners, will remind them of their own transcendent experiences at the restaurant. And for the cinematography buffs, there is no denying that Omnivore is a gorgeous show.
For the rest of us, though, the Redzepi connection is almost entirely irrelevant. And while the pretty shots of salt, chiles, and Spanish pig festivals are nice, the narrative suffers in service of those scenes. Time that could be otherwise spent interviewing farmers and producers is dedicated to many meaningless glamour shots that linger just a little too long. What matters are these ingredients, the people who make them, and the impact that they have on the culinary world. Instead of deeply examining these contributions, Omnivore places them within the context of a meal at Noma, a particularly unattainable pedestal.
The subject matter that Omnivore explores deserves — demands, even — a stronger sense of urgency. But that’s a depth the show does not have. Culinarily speaking, Omnivore is like one of those restaurant dishes that looks beautiful on the plate, but is too small, too narrowly focused, to actually satisfy.
