Food-obsessed filmmaker Maurice Dekkers decided to follow him there and the result is new feature doc Ants on a Shrimp, a world premiere in Berlin’s Culinary Cinema strand and sold internationally by Fortissimo.

Dekkers had originally intended to make a TV series about “cooking techniques” with the celebrated chef. They’d already started writing the series together when Redzepi mentioned his plans to head to Tokyo. Immediately, the director decided to change tack and make a film in Japan instead. He realised that this would be a unique opportunity to spend time with the chef when he was devising a completely new menu.

The director likens his subject to an artist. “Obviously, this wasn’t real art…but I guess this was the art of food. With that in my mind, I thought it would be fantastic to make a film about the creation of a piece of art.”

Dekkers acknowledges that there have been many recent films about chefs. “Most of the time, they’re about the struggles in their personal life.” That wasn’t the direction that he wanted to go. Instead, in Ants on a Shrimp, the focus is on the process. The aim was to give the audience the illusion that they were part of Redzepi’s team as they raced against time to create 14 new dishes. (The film stops on the day the restaurant opens.) Their work is filmed in sweaty, realist fashion. There are lots of setbacks along the way.

“To be honest, I didn’t want to make pornography of food,” the director declares. “I know that when you are in a kitchen, it is hard work…I wanted to film it very raw. When you get the food on the table, it always looks fancy but you’ve got no clue what is going on behind the scenes.”

Redzepi and his close-knit kitchen crew worked punishing hours in the lead-up to the opening of the Tokyo restaurant, “testing, testing, tasting, tasting” as the director puts it. The chef went on trips all over Japan to check ingredients and develop ideas. Dekkers accompanied him on several of these trips and also spent three months filming in Tokyo.

There are some surprising insights into the lives of the cooks. For example, the head chef is shown ordering himself a pizza in the middle of the night. “I wanted to show that, also. These (the kitchen staff) are just normal guys and they are working very hard to achieve something. They’re eating pizza and they’re drinking Red Bull.”

For all his Michelin stars, Redzepi is renowned for dishes that are “quite simple.” Sometimes, customers who’ve flown all the way around the world to arrive at Noma experience a sense of anti-climax that the cooking isn’t more elaborate. Even so, as Dekkers points out, an immense amount of work will have gone into anything the chef serves up. “Sometimes, people will be disappointed. They’ll say what is this? It is just a potato. There is a lot of thinking and a lot of effort that has gone into that potato. Not every dish is comfort food…the dishes he creates, you’ll think of 4 weeks after you eat it. It stays with you, like good art.”

Yes, Dekkers sees similarities between the process of cooking and his own struggles as a filmmaker. That was one reason why he was able to strike up such an easy rapport with Redzepi. The chef was generally easy-going and friendly to everyone but he could also become tense and frustrated when at work. “I could recognise that in him and he could recognise that in me as well,” the director reflects on the anguish of creation.

Ants on a Shrimp, Maurice Dekkers. Script: Maurice Dekkers. Production: BlazHoffski. Sales: Fortissimo.