You reach Noma by bicycle or ferry through Refshaleøen — Copenhagen's post-industrial harbor island. A sticker-covered bicycle holds a "noma" sign at the entrance. The garden is dense with wild grasses, echinacea, ornamental kale, foxtail, aster. A path leads to greenhouses and a pavilion kitchen that is barely enclosed — vines climb the glass panels and hang from the ceiling, and the kitchen operates inside and outside simultaneously. Terracotta pots of herbs line every counter. The chefs work in blue. The floor is terrazzo. The kitchen smells like garden.

This was Vegetable Season 2024. René Redzepi had announced in January 2023 that Noma would close as a restaurant at the end of 2024. August 9, 2024 was one of the last services of the last Vegetable Season. No meat. No seafood. The menu was Denmark's summer: kohlrabi, sorrel, koji, ramson, new potato, artichoke, padrón, grilled peas, magnolia, woodruff, flowers.

The koji wrapped in ramson arrived still growing in a living pot. The artichoke heart was nested in the center of a full sunflower. The new potato soup was a whole potato standing upright in a woven basket of dark soil — a chive stalk rising from it as a straw. Today's crudité was a bowl you wanted to photograph slowly: strawberries, cucumber rounds, yellow squash, purple basil, radish, tiny zucchini — all of it arranged in something between a painting and a garden. The grilled peas arrived as an entire bowlful of pods, scorched and fragrant. The magnolia popsicle was the color of early evening. The last course was woodruff and flowers.

The wines were from Patrick Meyer in Alsace, Matej Skerlj in Friuli, Julien Courtois in the Loire, Pascal Clairet in Jura, Franz Strohmeier in Styria, Hiroaki Oku in Osaka — and a 2023 La Luna Rosé from Bruno Duchêne in Banyuls. Across seven glasses, seven different understandings of what wine made without intervention tastes like. The Osaka sake stood apart the way the artichoke in the sunflower stood apart: the same logic, an entirely different flower.