What makes the best restaurant in the world?

Cloudberrys. Whey. Wild beach roses. Musk ox. Birch sap. Pike perch. Axelberry shoots. Cowslip. Ransom. Jack-by-the-hedge.

Rene Redzepi is not only better at cooking than anyone in the world, he is also, infuriatingly, better at writing about cooking. When you read his menu, it's not just the flavours of his extraordinary ingredients you long to roll round your tongue, you start to savour their sound, too.

In an elaborate ceremony at London's Guildhall on Monday evening, Redzepi beat the two men flanking him, Ferran Adria and Heston Blumenthal, as his restaurant Noma was declared greatest place to eat on the planet – decent going for a converted whale blubber store in Copenhagen, once dismissed by a sniffy critic as "the stinking whale".

As Redzepi basked with the world's 50 finest chefs collecting his San Pellegrino/ Restaurant magazine award, even detractors – and he has a few – realised they would need to up the quality of their insults. How, they had demanded, could he run a restaurant in a freezing climate only serving locally sourced, seasonal ingredients? Pretty well as it turned out, thanks to ingenuity, pickling and the reading of ancient novels to learn what Danes used to eat. This son of a Muslim taxi driver and "cleaning lady" had dared to reject just about every tenet of Mediterranean cuisine – even olive oil – instead elevating foraging, fishing and farming of Nordic produce into something approaching a movement. The finest food, he has declared, is "all about time and place".

We met yesterday for breakfast in a London hotel and it took approximately thirty seconds to realise this was no ordinary chef.

He couldn't eat toast because the bread was not rye. Pastries produced such an involuntary shudder that he might have been witness to a particularly gruesome crime scene. He would only consent to the yogurt on the strict condition he could add berries. And the (perfectly fine) hotel coffee was rejected, so after much research an assistant was dispatched to a coffee house as "Rene only allows himself caffeine once a day and it has to be the best". If this is breakfast, lunch must be like the hundred year war. This, remember, is the chef who opened Noma not with a menu but a manifesto.

Which could easily get you mistaken for the world's most irritating man. But despite his intensity – worthiness even – Redzepi turns out to be highly engaging. It is just that he is as doctrinaire about gastronomy as 17th-century clerics were about theology. This still allows him enough space to be a nice guy. Collecting his award he wore a T-shirt sporting an image of Noma's human dishwasher; "Ali" from Gambia had been denied a UK visa so Redzepi, on the brink of tears, stressed this had been a "team effort". As well as sending his chefs foraging most mornings ("who doesn't feel energised getting close to nature?"), Redzepi has them serve customers what they cook because food is all about "giving".

So where did his improbable tale begin? "Many chefs have a grandmother story," he smiles "you know 'I only cook what my grandmother taught me'. I don't really have that." Instead, he left Denmark every summer for his father's native Macedonia: "To go anywhere, you got on a horse. If you wanted to eat, you slaughtered a chicken. I would go off for hours gathering wild blackberries. And we would go into the mountains picking chestnuts. We would then have them for breakfast with milk from the cow."

He peers up from under the fringe of his boyishly parted hair and says in near faultless English: "It seemed so backward. In Denmark everyone ate frozen food." He hardly need spell out that now he thinks it was Denmark that needed change.

His summers in Macedonia – curtailed by the outbreak of war in 1992 – informed his values. "We had very little. My mother is still a cleaning lady. My parents come from almost nothing, all they have is family. They are proud about the award but for them it's not about being on TV. Instead they ask 'Are you happy?' or 'Has your daughter been seeing enough of her father?' They keep you pretty grounded."

It must have been disconcerting being brought up by a devout Muslim father and a Nordic, secular mother. "No, my parents made it easy," he says. "I was taken to the mosque and read the Koran but they let us choose. I always saw Islam as a very human religion."

Instead of this veritable smorgasbord of faiths – his wife is Jewish – he gained his nourishment from food, or rather from nature. He is a pantheist, delighting in every berry and shrimp because it's part of a beautiful mechanism. "We are not much better than most restaurants at poaching salmon," he says disarmingly "but we do have a special way of working with nature."

He understands why so many restaurants in northern Europe still rely on Mediterranean produce "because the supply lines are well established. But if you can't taste the difference between the asparagus you harvest and import from Peru, well ..." And he insists it's only for a fortnight a year that the ground is too frozen to extract food.

His beliefs were met with incredulity, even hostility when he opened Noma. Think of the pub bore jibes aimed at Blumenthal for snail porridge, then multiply. "It's only now our cuisine is recognised by the world that Danes feel it's validated," says Redzepi, who trained in the world's most glamorous restaurants, including Spain's El Bulli and America's French Laundry. "They thought Noma would be finished in 24 hours. Even chefs said 'Why not reproduce a mixture of what you've learned around the world?'"

Instead Redzepi stayed true to himself, becoming a Great Dane. If San Pellegrino's international judging panel is a guide, what we value now is authentic, simple food. It was noticeable, after all, how few French chefs were lauded on the Guildhall stage. "If they are not progressing as they should perhaps they feel a bit trapped. But it is only time before someone breaks out." Already he is encouraged by the French movement of "bistronomy", which cuts through France's hidebound divide between haute and hearty cuisine.

Some felt Britain underperformed in the San Pellegrino list, only boasting three restaurants in the top 50 (Fat Duck, St John and Hibiscus); has our food bubble burst? "No, there are fabulous places in London," he says, even defending Gordon Ramsay who fell out of the top 50. "I've never eaten in one of his restaurants but if you're going to have a chain you may as well have a damn good one." He also says Ramsay has taken the "beatings" for not living in the kitchen, allowing chefs such as Redzepi to explore other projects: "There was a view that a chef had to be a martyr, spending his entire life being poisoned by a deep fat fryer. Now we can lead different lives."

His favourite British chef remains Blumenthal. Redzepi credits him and Adria with revolutionising our understanding of food by exploring its scientific foundations. "The quality of cooking has exploded in the last ten years," he says. "People still think with molecular gastronomy you will have a sauce injected intravenously while some mad chef whips you with burning rosemary. But it's about understanding compounds, knowing what goes with what."

He backs a project run by scientists at Copenhagen University to study which diet might best improve health. He contends that the fruit, fish and game diet of northern Europe can be healthier than more celebrated southern alternatives.

The good news is that Redzepi would like, one day, to open a restaurant here, though he'd have to immerse himself in the life to source all the food in Britain or it would make a mockery of his crusade in Denmark. Meanwhile, he will soon be back in his restaurant, serving customers. "Food is not about becoming famous. It really is about giving."

Oh, and about time and place. The time is now, the place is Copenhagen.

* Frommer's review of Noma

With a certain testosterone-driven enthusiasm, the chefs here celebrate the cuisine of the cold North Atlantic. In fact, the name of the restaurant is short for nordatlantiskl mad, or North Atlantic food. During its relatively short life, this showcase of Nordic cuisine has received greater amounts of favourable press than virtually any other restaurant in Denmark. Positioned within an antique, stone-sided warehouse in Christianshavn, it makes it an almost religious duty to import ultrafresh fish and shellfish three times a week from Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Chef Rene Redzepi concocts platters in which fish is poached, grilled, pickled, smoked, or salted according to old Nordic traditions, then served in ways that are sometimes more elaborately decorated, and more visually flamboyant by far, than the decor of the white, rather Spartan setting in which they are served. Come here for crayfish, lobster, halibut in a foamy wasabi-flavoured cream sauce, and practically any other creature that thrives in the cold waters of Nordic Europe. You expect to see, within the simple, stripped-down decor of this place, celebrities from throughout Northern Europe, including members of the Danish royal family.

www.frommers.com