Judging by the global column inches, Denmark is famous for three things - design, Princess Mary and its thriving restaurant scene, which likes to boast of having as many Michelin stars as Rome or Madrid. As Arne Jacobsen is to Danish design, so Danish-Macedonian chef René Redzepi is to a re-emerging Scandinavian culinary culture.

 His stark but fast-rising restaurant, Noma, is No 3 in the list. It sits in an old maritime warehouse in Copenhagen, an unadorned space of beams, bare boards and distressed wooden pillars. Some of the wooden chairs are draped with animal pelts, but a meal here is as fresh as the spring breeze off the Køge Bugt. Pickling, icing and just using ingredients fresh ensures a light dining experience, as does Redzepi's strong focus on acidity, whether provided by green strawberries, lemony wood sorrel, tangy berries or vinegars. The ingredients are always king: dishes are less complicated than at the Spanish places, but taste no less complex.

Here, too, there are jokes and theatre. The opening bars of the meal are the presentation of a battered old biscuit tin. What's inside is a million miles from a traditional Danish konditori - a creamy foie gras biscuit topped with a dehydrated berry powder of tart intensity. Yet another OMG moment, of which there are many in this meal.

Lunch starts with that biscuit tin and a selection of more rustic flavours. There's a soft quail's egg smoked with hay, a homage to Danish crispbread with baked chicken skin and equally thin crisp rye bread sandwiching a broad-bean paste, and a little pot of lard crusted with a crumble of potato and pork crackling to spread on your bread. Damn, it's good, in a "rolling in the trough" sort of a way.

Like Aduriz, Redzepi cherishes local flowers or foraged hedgerow and foreshore ingredients. Beet slices are paired with the sourness of gooseberry and some little white flowers that have a heat similar to Sichuan pepper; sweet raw shrimps come under a seaweed veil with beets and wild beachside rhubarb.

There's meat, too: scraped raw beef you scoop up with sprigs of mouth-puckering wood sorrel and a smear of a tarragon emulsion. Pulling a hunting knife from its tight leather scabbard feels like a Jomsviking-like thing to do before falling on a chunk of musk ox (somewhere between gamy venison and roo in texture and taste) garlanded with garlic flowers, sweet mellow roasted garlic purée, milk skin and little bobbly seed clusters that provide acidity. I ask if these are traditional accompaniments to musk ox and the waiter laughs. "I have been here five years and I am still trying to work that out. It could be traditional or a 'René' tradition. He does like to twist tradition!"

There are misses here, too, such as a nondescript crab ball served with a sort of loose head-cold of jellied stock and a peppery foraged green called "sea mustard". 

Noma, Strandgade 93, 1401 Copenhagen K, Denmark; +45 3296 3297; booking@noma.dk. Dinner menus: 995DKK/1295DKK ($226/$294). 

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