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Mads Refslund's choose-your-own-adventure restaurant
Refslund offers guests an interactive menu created from their own choice of ingredients
One of the fathers of new Nordic cuisine, and co-founder of Noma, the Danish-born Mads Refslund, opened his new project Illis in Brooklyn, New York, a few months ago. A restaurant "that has consumed eight years of my life and is finally a reality", the chef explained.
Illis, Refslund told the audience, is a special project because "it doesn't have the typical menu that we find in other haute cuisine restaurants"; instead, Illis offers the diner "a market where there are baskets of twelve different ingredients from which the customer has to choose the ones he prefers, starting with a minimum of five ingredients". Based on the customer's choice, Mads' team prepares the dishes on the spot. "It's a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure", says the chef. The dishes are prepared "on ice or on fire" and, as the Dane describes it, can even be served raw.
To allow time for the dishes to be prepared, the dining room team - made up of chefs, not waiters - serve a range of snacks, which Refslund demonstrated live on stage at Madrid Fusión. The common denominator was the care taken with the product - "I like the purity of the ingredients", the chef confessed - and mussels, tubers, and fruit, were the protagonists.
Refslund presented a grilled eel, a Maine scallop with seaweed, a potato with caviar cooked in beeswax and chamomile, and a quince also matured in beeswax and then dried. The latter is a dish "that vegans and vegetarians will love, and that you can enjoy even if you are not one".
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