A High Price To Pay For Gangrenous Genitals

By Rupert Truscott-Hughes on December 15, 2015 in Other

This is not the first time I’ve put pen to paper to pillory Sydney’s food ‘scene’ and I’m quite sure it won’t be the last. So long as Sydneysiders obsess over celebrity chefs and ‘snow eggs’ there will be room in this column for a dash or two of ridicule.

I was alerted to the latest foodie phenomenon to ruffle my feathers by a press release the lovely editors of this little rag forwarded on to me during the month, with the accompanying email text reading something along the lines of: “This twat is charging $485 for a three-course lunch and he’s probably going to get away with it. Someone must call bullshit on this ridiculous flaunting of wealth. I’ll leave it to you good sir. If you’re not in the mood to call them out, you’re probably the only bloke I know who could afford to make a booking, so you should find it useful regardless. Good luck and godspeed.”

The ‘twat’ in question is none other than culinary maestro Rene Redzepi, owner of the famed Noma restaurant in Denmark. Any foodie worth their Himalayan rock salt would be well aware that Mr Redzepi has moved out to the land down under and will open a restaurant (for a limited time only) down at Barangaroo.

To give some further background to those not in the know, the name ‘Noma’ is apparently a portmanteau of the two Danish words ‘nordisk’ (Nordic) and ‘mad’ (food), but when I did a Google image search for the term, the result was quite shocking. It turns out that ‘Noma’ is also “a rapidly progressive, polymicrobial, often gangrenous infection of the mouth or genitals.” Sounds pretty appetising, right? You should check it out. I can guarantee that no amount of kitchen wizardry will remove that taste from your mouth.

As it happens, despite the $485 price tag, tickets for Noma’s ten-week stint in the harbour city sold out in a flash. Demand for seats at the swanky restaurant, of which there were 5,600 over the two-month residency, was so strong that the booking system, Tock, apparently processed over one million US dollars in two minutes. According to the ticketing firm that owns ‘Tock’, as the tickets went on sale, Noma received 84,000 page views a minute – it’s amazing what affect low interest rates have on consumers’ purchasing decisions. The world has clearly gone mad.

While I must admit that I’m a tad bitter that I won’t get a chance to shoot some incredibly illustrious ‘food porn’ to post to my social media accounts, I’m sure I can find some way to put the $485 that remains in my pocket to good use. It’ll probably buy me around 50 chicken burgers down at Plumer Road or feed a family of starving Africans for a year. Heck, I may even be able to cure a few of those Africans of that terrible affliction that I mentioned earlier while I’m at it. Either way, it’ll save me a trip to that eyesore that is Barangaroo, and I can certainly be thankful for that.