The epilogue? (MAD7, Part I)

MAD Symposium, Copenhagen's groundbreaking culinary conference, is approaching its seventh edition tomorrow. I personally have a very particular relation to this event.

As Noma became the world's number one restaurant, there was only a little piece of the puzzle that was missing to consolidate the change of paradigm away from the Spanish postmodern, deconstructionist technofile cuisine and into the era of New Nordic gastronomy, with its focus back to the produce, nature, local first, and a less manipulative approach to cooking.

Before MAD, the conferences that you would attend to in those years would be in the style of Madrid Fusion in Spain or Identità Golose in Italy. Besides a few French events as the Omnivore Festival that already picked up the slightly more rock and roll vibe coming from the Parisian Bistronomie tendencies, most of that was just simply very boring conference spaces and professional hospitality fairs that you would know from all over the world. You would see people selling meat slicers and Joselito ham and then someone would be on stage showing and demoing some cooking techniques. The ascent of the on-stage masterclass made a lot of sense in a world where it was an extremely technical cuisine that was offered. So the Spanish Molecular Cuisine and the Madrid Fusion type of conference were closely connected.

The MAD Symposium established a new era of what the chef was supposed to do. Before, you would have a chef demonstrating cooking, simply demonstrating techniques on how to cook a certain meat. You would have often products that they would demonstrate, so you would have a sous vide cooking technique demoed in a conference where you would sell sous vide machines. MAD brought in another idea. They understood, maybe intuitively or by intention, that "the chef" was on the brink of change.

In a sort of Venn diagram of gastronomic interest, the first year of MAD brought together everything from philosophy, climate change, chemistry, culture, farming, foraging, and entrepreneurship to the small, and intimate stage. The chef suddenly was presented and considered as someone that would no longer demonstrate cooking techniques for large corporations, but actually formulate ideas, thoughts and emotions about what it means to cook. Gone were the enormous conference centers with incredibly bad acoustics and a thousand representatives of different companies. Instead a small circus tent welcomed an intimate community of peers to a premiere of what the celebration of cooking culture should be. It resonated loudly, with so many of us.

I personally fell in love immediately. Since my very first years in cooking, I have been a chef that always looked around for books to read that were not simply about cooking recipes. The likes of Michael Pollan, and Harold McGee were inspiring me as much as the Ferran's and Ducasse's of the world. Suddenly here we were, in COPENHAGEN(!) with a program promising talks about cooking from the likes of Harold McGee, David Chang, Tor Nørretranders, Knud Romer and Michel Bras, all absolute heros of mine.
MAD not only disrupted the food festival format, it also changed the position of the modern chef in society for good. We were all of a sudden people that COULD, and would make a TED talk. When you are told that your voice is important and that you can actually make a change, you understand and perceive yourself in a different way. I believe that chefs all over the world were given a voice by this event.

I was extremely inspired by the first MAD event and I was extremely honored to be invited to present my own story of the opening of relæ in the third edition of MAD. But more than anything, I also somehow found a purpose in what had always been my strangely broad range of interests, tending to go further and further away from the technical aspects of cooking.
To me, this meant that as a chef you could be very ambitious, but you could choose a different path than the one with the high toque dreaming of Bocuse d'Or statuettes or Michelin stars.. You could be extremely ambitious with your cooking and obtain a much broader, and to me, more significant, cultural impact.

Tomorrows 7th edition comes after 7 year-long break for the symposium, that like everything else in the industry has been scrambling to find its path post Covid. Needless to say, my expectations are high. As the first few years of MAD made their mark and Noma established itself as the world's greatest restaurant in the early 2010's, there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Scandinavia and the New Nordic paradigm was completely dominating the gastronomic scene. In the years following, restaurants, chefs, and food festivals globally were inspired by the path set by Redzepi and team.
The world of gastronomy seems to be much more fragmented after COVID and I have found it hard to spot the direction that our world is heading towards. There seems to be much less ambition to discover a new direction that can rekindle a movement as our focus seem to be scattered fleeting social media trends and short-lived culinary fads. The role of "the chef" established in the beginning of MAD seem to have lost some glare through the COVID years that surfaced much different expectations towards the industry leaders of the last decade.
Considering Noma's announced closing and the general detachment from New Nordic, this era, our era, seems to be reaching its end and I am wondering wether MAD7 might be the epilogue. In the coming days I am looking forward to see wether the event will be able to give answers to some of my questions, and while it might be way too much to ask, for a second time, to be capable of pointing towards another new direction.