Post-boat

  by Josh Evans.

It has been one year to the day since we moved house.

From the beginning of 2009, the lab was in a houseboat, a grey one with a black curved roof and a handsome wooden deck, moored just outside Restaurant Noma at Wilders Plads on the main Copenhagen harbour.

We were there for almost six years.

Last November, we packed up our pantry and all our equipment and moved a ten-minute bike-ride across town to the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen. Along with research, field work, talks and presentations and cooking around the world, our last year has been full of the adventure of building up our new space and figuring out how to make it all work in a very new environment.

by Magnus Møller, for Børsen

the rest by Chris Tonnesen

There has been an interesting reversal: on the boat, we sometimes felt like the nerdy tinkerers in the culture of the kitchen; now, we feel like the git-‘er-done cooks in the methodical world of the academy. Both have their benefits; we still don’t quite belong to either.

While those of us who worked on the boat sometimes pine for those nautical days where we couldn’t weigh anything with greater precision than 10 grams and the bilge pump broke what felt like every week, overall the move feels like growing up and entering a new phase of NFL’s life. Our projects are developing, as are our collaborations in Copenhagen, the region, and the world.

We want to give a special thank-you to our friends and colleagues at Noma and MAD, our first-of-kin. We may not get to see them quite as often as we used to, but we love seeing them around town and will always feel like a part of the extended family.

We indulged in one sentimental keepsake—the porthole from the boat’s back door. We have used it as a backdrop for photos, a plate, a paperweight; currently it resides in our bookshelf, the guardian and soul of our library.