Danish chef René Redzepi of Noma in Copenhagen has announced the closure of his restaurant, which is considered one of the best in the world and repeatedly named the best overall in industry rankings, at the end of 2024. Noma, Redzepi told the New York Times, will see the opening of a large cooking laboratory for experimenting with new products and dishes, marketed through an e-commerce site and in “pop-up” — temporary — restaurants in different cities around the world.
The Noma restaurant and its chef have had a major impact on the world of haute cuisine in recent years, being able to introduce many innovations and popularizing a style defined as New Nordic, which is also much imitated in other latitudes and for example in upscale New York restaurants. In September 2021 it was promoted to a third star by the prestigious Michelin guide, a recognition many felt was late, while in 2021 it won the title of Best Restaurant in the World on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for the fifth time.
Like many of the most famous haute cuisine restaurants, Noma has a long waiting list and is prepared to shell out around €500 for a multi-course tasting menu. In the field of luxury tourism, a meal at Noma could be the basis of a whole holiday in Denmark or Scandinavia. Despite this, chef Redzepi said he decided to close the restaurant in the traditional sense because haute cuisine was no longer “economically and emotionally sustainable”.
Redzepi, who opened the restaurant in 2004, has always explained that his cuisine requires “exhausting, hours-long work” and said he believes paying around 100 staff fairly, keeping standards high and prices up is no longer sustainable at a level that is customer-friendly: «Haute cuisine has to rethink its entire branch, it’s just too hard. Financially and emotionally it is not possible: As an entrepreneur and as a person, I feel the need to change.”
Redzepi is known in the world of great chefs for a difficult character, gruff manners and behavior that borders on bullying towards his subordinates. He said he’s worked to improve his leadership over the years, but today it has become too stressful for him to run a restaurant of this level and not just be anti-economy.
Recently, Noma had also been criticized for using a large number of unpaid interns (20-30). They were attracted by the opportunity to learn restaurant techniques and secrets, as well as the opportunity to incorporate work experience at ‘the best restaurant in the world’ into their curriculum, which is obviously highly valued by potential future employers.
However, some had reported a rather complex and somewhat toxic work environment in which they were engaged in a single task for the entire duration of the internship. One said he spent three months composing only artificial fruit-skin insects (a fruit puree from which water has been drained): a complex manufacturing job from which he learned little for his future and which he must carry out in silence. Situations of this kind are also quite common in top restaurants. After the controversy that had involved him, Noma had decided to pay all interns.
Redzepi, 45, who was born into an ethnic Albanian family, will not leave the premises where Noma is now based or fire the staff: he wants to reinvent the restaurant in a new form and demonstrate that “you can grow old and be creative stay, continue to enjoy your work. It’s going to be Noma 3.0: the restaurant was redesigned in 2018 when it was relocated, during which the menu and style were also fundamentally renewed.
Noma has been around since 2004 (Jens Dresling/Polfoto via AP, File)
In its 19-year history, Noma had become a point of reference in world cuisine, first for its choice to use very local ingredients, typical of Scandinavian culture or collected and reworked on site, then often for the way how it presented the dishes “formed” into new forms, with long processes to transform and enhance their taste. Over the years, Redzepi has researched and experimented extensively, using unusual ingredients and plants not normally used in the kitchen, and specializing in fermentation processes that have become the chef’s true specialty.
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