A Tasting Menu with a Bit of Noma in Its DNA

The placelessness that suffuses Ilis is also, I suspect, part of the design. Much has been made of Refslund’s involvement with Noma, the ultra-influential Copenhagen restaurant that became famous for turning hyperlocal, often bizarre ingredients into bite-size, highly specific documents of the natural world outside the restaurant’s doors. There’s a bit of Noma’s DNA at Ilis, in the audacity of its creative ambition, and the reverence it has for cooking as a form of art. But where Noma, at least in those early years, was all about anchoring the ephemerality of food in concrete notions of place and time, Ilis seems to be committed, body and soul, to abstraction. “Mads loves the idea of using part of an animal as the tool to eat it,” a chef-cum-server said, as she laid down a mousse of giant whelk with chive oil and a buttery foam. The mixture had been piped into the whelk’s own shell, and was presented with a spoon whose bowl was made from the whelk’s dried foot. Are there giant whelks swimming around New York? Is there something profound about making a whelk taste, quite pleasingly, like sour-cream-and-onion chips? This isn’t Noma—Refslund seems to be only passingly interested in history, place, or narrative; the restaurant promises, instead, to explore texture, form, and temperature. (Ilis is a portmanteau of ild and is, the Danish words for “fire” and “ice.”)