Alchemist

THT The Very Best of Scandinavian Food 3/5

7 Hours, 34 Plates

Alchemist is, in Sinan Hamamsarılar's words, the Disneyland of gastronomy. Across seven hours you are served exactly 50 different “impressions”, meant to be taken in through different senses. Most of them are edible, and the whole spectacle unfolds across five separate areas of the restaurant. Bringing gastronomy together with art, science and technology, Alchemist opens only four days a week for a single service, seating 48 guests a night. Chef Rasmus Munk is personally in the restaurant for every service to keep the experience flawless; if he cannot be there, it does not open. The evening begins as the great door swings open and you step into a space filled with art installations. A short AI-generated film prepares you mentally for the world you are about to enter. Next comes the Lounge, where you can see part of the prep kitchen and the three-storey, 22-metre wine cellar holding more than 10,000 bottles. Their drink pairing is highly personalised: you enter your taste profile on a tablet and it suggests matches for you. Stepping into the Dome, the heart of the experience, the atmosphere changes completely. A single serpentine bar and a visual show thrown by twelve projectors across the ceiling create something genuinely striking. The menu tells a story that travels from the sea to the land. The pairings are one of the strongest parts of the night; beyond the wines, the team travels constantly to develop new recipes. My own surprise of the evening was their own interpretation of şalgam. Later on you move into the kitchen, where after a short interactive stretch in which you paint your own work with edible colours, you witness the discipline of the 40 chefs working the evening service. The finale takes place on the Balcony. Looking down over the Dome, the experience draws to a close with a run of extraordinary desserts. Even leaving is part of it at Alchemist: you exit through a hidden room rather than the door you came in by. After seven hours it is not remotely hard to understand why there is a waiting list of 100,000 people. Alchemist is unforgettable not only for how it looks, but for its flavour, its storytelling and the way it makes you think.

Highlights

• Butterfly: a butterfly plate containing 3.5 times more protein than chicken.
• Space Bread: a crisp, melt-in-the-mouth bread made with air and soy sauce, developed together with MIT.
• Sunburnt Bikini: an extreme frying method using cryo-frying, going from -80 to 200 degrees.
• BioChromatic: a dashi that changes colour depending on the light.
• 1984: egg yolk cured with snow crab and miso.
• Caviar Marble: their take on potato with caviar.
• Plastic Fantastic: a cod dish drawing attention to plastic waste.
• Decellularized Spinach: an experimental plate in which Rasmus Munk breaks spinach down to its atoms and rebuilds it.
• Food for Thought: an unusual plate of lamb brain with truffle and sour cherry.
• Hunger: a rabbit carpaccio built around the theme of sustainability.
• Wiped Out: an experimental course made with a worm-based sauce.
• Burnout Chicken: a dish created to draw attention to chickens raised in confined spaces.
• A Wish For Peace: a peace-themed presentation in which each origami takes around 20 minutes to make.
• Eight Layers of Life: a plate about the importance of organ donation, built from eight different ingredients including black olive and reindeer blood, representing the eight lives that organ donation can save.

A Note

Before it became what it is today, Rasmus Munk ran a more classical restaurant under the same name back in 2015. In 2017, with an investor behind him, he brought this concept to life, and within only two years the magical world we see today had taken shape. With a vision capable of bringing gastronomy, art and technology under one roof, Rasmus Munk really is one of the most creative chefs of our time.