On Thursday at Noma, Copenhagen’s Willy Wonka factory of high-brow cuisine, the menu for its anticipated reopening was lusty, brutish, and short: burgers. Like so many things in the COVID-19 era, this was an unexpected turn for the restaurant, which had been on a two-month hiatus as the world laid low. Ordinarily, its multicourse meals have the exacting finesse of a chamber opera. When I ate there a couple summers ago, homemade fruit leather came shaped into a folk-art bow; a puréed soup identified as “potato magma” arrived in the underground well of a flowerpot, to be sipped through a straw hidden among the foliage. A burger joint it was not. And yet, for the next several weeks, a burger joint it is.
“We need to heal,” chef-owner René Redzepi wrote on Instagram last week, announcing the no-reservations café and takeaway operation. “So let’s have a glass and a burger, you’re all invited.” Set against the usual landscape of wholesome foods (green smoothies, grain bowls), the photograph of Noma’s burger had an almost soft-core appeal. A corner of melted cheddar hugged the dry-aged patty. Homemade mayo submitted to the golden bun. Noma has a veggie burger on offer, too, but only the grass-fed beef version gets a name: the Viking. Can this noble savage of a sandwich really be a salve in this time—nourishing us, tempting us, inspiring copycat fare in our own humble kitchens? Redzepi marked the kick-off (which fell on Thor’s Day) with a behind-the-scenes video accompanied by a prose poem of sorts: “Slapping, shaping, molding, caressing, fondling, forming, coaxing, beautifying the beef for today’s opening of the burger season.”
Have mercy.
If quarantine has seen us through a gauntlet of emotions, they could be tracked by what we’ve eaten. The beans of early confinement, soaked in prepper’s anxiety. The sourdough starters, overflowing with can-do spirit. The many moods of shallots. Now, as we cross into the unofficial start of summer, we find ourselves in the New Age of the burger. This subtle rebranding—from a fast-food staple into a means of healing served up by “McNoma” (as Grub Street cheekily dubbed Redzepi’s experiment)—seems to poke at the ever-elastic scope of wellness, a term that is more meaningful and meaningless by the day. But the case for a good burger goes beyond a tastebud high. There’s nutritional heft at the cellular level, and the sensory pleasures of eating with your squeaky-clean hands. There’s the feeling of celebration encoded in a food associated with family barbecues and favorite dive bars, and the privilege of thoughtful sourcing: nice people, meandering cows. And then there’s the collective experience. During a pandemic that doles out miseries in lopsided ways—proof that we’re not exactly all in this together—something as near-universal as a burger is a common denominator, a unifying force.
“It’s the quintessential comfort food,” Chris Kronner, of KronnerBurger fame, says by phone from Los Angeles, where he is settling into a bungalow in Beachwood Canyon. (He lucked into the place in early March, before the coronavirus shuttered the city.) In 2015, after running a breathlessly followed pop-up in the Bay Area, he opened a KronnerBurger location in Oakland. “We were right up the street from a huge Kaiser hospital,” he recalls, describing the special requests from friends who gave birth there. “The first thing that they wanted after they had a baby was burgers.” That strikes me as entirely reasonable. After a marathon’s worth of effort—blood, sweat, and ice chips—these women needed to refuel. “They wanted rare burgers and lots of them.”