'It feels post-apocalyptic': What it was like to eat at Noma 2.0

• 'World's best restaurant' Noma will be no more, so how will fine dining fare from here?

The front door of Noma 2.0 is small and wooden. A hank of dried cod hangs from a peg next to it.

It feels post-apocalyptic, like a house built to shelter the last few survivors on the planet; a place to ferment and preserve, to dry-cure and to smoke; to be self-sufficient.

And so we came to it from all over the globe, looking for a dining experience like no other; of new ways with old foods; of inspiration and ingenuity.

In this final incarnation of Noma, founder and chef Rene Redzepi strictly limited the bounty to the season, and then restricted it again, offering only three dedicated seasons per year, devoted to vegetables, seafood or game.

The experience is nothing if not contrary, with no menu, no bread and butter, no aperitifs, and no wines made by conventional means.

But it has a strange, unearthly beauty. The hand-made plates are all greys and greens, as if seen from under water. Mostly there are no plates at all – just plaited rafts of twigs in the shapes of ancient boats, or shells, or bones.

Dining there in the seafood season, I ate a leg of Arctic king crab in my hand, spraying myself with juices. Given a scallop shell opened just seconds earlier, I used the top shell to scrape the rich white meat from the bottom.

The food is startling, contrary, perverse, almost primal. Pine cones, milk skin, oyster leaves, cod bladder, sea lettuce, mirabelle blossoms.

If you have dined at this level before, you expect richness, sweetness, cream and crunch. Instead, the flavours are sour, spare, astringent, challenging. Adult.

Cod tongue schnitzel, the tongue still attached to the bone, decorated with a moth-storm of wasabi leaves.

Lush fingers of sea urchin, tanning themselves on rafts of malted barley bread.

Chocolate-coated cod skin that crackles like a sea-going Polly Waffle.

Not that it's austere or unluxurious; quite the contrary. It turns the true taste of a deepwater creature into the new luxury; upending the status symbols of the past.

Over the course of 18 dishes (AUD$490), I sometimes wished the food wasn't as weighted with its own significance; that not everything had to be a sacrificial ritual.

There's a sense of being in a commune – a cult, even – and that you are not so much being served, as being initiated.

Noma will live on in various ways, forever redefining its own legacy as Redzepi promises residencies and pop-ups.

But for many who dined there, it had a lasting impact, changing our expectations of high-end dining forever.