COPENHAGEN — Every now and again nations rebrand themselves. The process can be painstaking, as in Germany, or can occur with the sudden lurch that has turned Denmark, which never made anything more mouthwatering than a Lego set, into a culinary destination.

Denmark was always big on design, and not just of toys. It did form rather than content. It made beautiful china, and chairs with clean lines, and pleasing tables and wine glasses, but its contribution to what is placed in or on these objects was paltry. In frosty Denmark food was about survival, little more; pickled cabbage to get through the winter months.

Then along comes a chef with a Danish mother and Macedonian Muslim father and a Jewish wife, a young man of eclectic interests, and he starts wondering whether Scandinavia has not sold itself short, ignored its ingredients, gone for olive oil when it might have explored the oil of hazelnuts, spurned the potential of scurvy grass, looked afar when the prize was near.

In thinking this way, René Redzepi reflected the zeitgeist. I’m not sure he did this consciously. In the late 1990s, he worked at Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli in Spain, the signature restaurant of a frothy, foamy moment where boundaries, molecular or otherwise, were broken with outrageous exuberance.