What comes out of Noma’s kitchens and laboratories is, to my mind, the closest thing the gastronomic world has to art. So much of ultra-high-end dining is constrained by the need to rationalize itself to diners; a restaurant that charges hundreds (or, increasingly, thousands) of dollars is only persuasively “worth it” if it bombards customers with material justifications for its price tag—luxury ingredients, opulent tableware, militantly choreographed platings and service. Noma, by contrast, is more in tune with the standards applied elsewhere in the arts: the worth of what it sells arises from ingenuity and point of view. I’ve eaten there twice—in 2016, at its original location, in a centuries-old maritime warehouse in Copenhagen’s inner harbor, and again, in 2019, at Noma 2.0, a purpose-built restaurant and culinary campus a few neighborhoods over. Both meals were defined by Noma’s signature devotion to “sense of place”—a culinary cliché now, but only because Noma made it one. The restaurant’s philosophy, built on hyperlocal ingredients, many of them unexpected or bizarre, all prepared in ways that were strikingly evocative of climate and season and terrain, provided an emotive counterpoint to the sterile molecular-gastronomy movement that it drew upon and eclipsed. During my more recent visit, several of the courses were built around a variety of cultivated molds; nearly none of them was delicious (mold, for the most part, tastes like nothing), but I left the meal feeling enlivened by the sheer scope of Noma’s creativity, and somewhat intellectually stunned.