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Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that earned three Michelin stars and the mantle of ‘best restaurant in the world’ for its influential cuisine, will close in 2024.
Executive chef and founder René Redzepi said the intense labor required to create the restaurant’s signature hyper-local and carefully prepared dishes – many of which fell to interns and low-paid workers – is no longer sustainable. “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a person, it just doesn’t work,” he told the New York Times, which first reported on the planned closure.
The restaurant will eventually transform into a “giant laboratory” that will host pop-ups and/or be open temporarily for a season, as well as develop products for the company’s e-commerce division. “Serving guests will still be a part of us, but being a restaurant will no longer define us,” reads a note to customers on the restaurant’s website, celebrating the new incarnation as Noma 3.0. “Instead, much of our time is spent exploring new projects and developing many more ideas and products.”
Sea snail broth and kelp ice cream: the new Noma tastes of the future
Founded in 2003, Noma was initially dismissed by some critics as a ‘bubbly restaurant’ for its reliance on Nordic ingredients, but it quickly gained recognition and was hailed as the creator of frugal but exciting ‘New Nordic’ cuisine. It’s been named the best restaurant in the world five times in the last 11 years, and earned a third Michelin star in 2021 — the province of just a handful of restaurants around the world, reservations are at least $500 a head.
The meal was as much about the experience as it was about the food, which included reindeer and greens. The restaurant is set amidst wild gardens and greenhouses with grill and fermentation rooms. The 40-seat dining room might be decorated with fish skeletons or dried seaweed; Multi-course menus end with the presentation of a menu.
It has changed several times over the years. In 2015 it went dark for a five-week pop-up in Tokyo and again a year later for stops in Sydney and Tulum, Mexico. It reopened in Copenhagen in 2018, with Washington Post restaurant critic Tom Sietsema calling the new iteration “a rare chance to hang out with a true visionary.”
“It quickly becomes clear that we are eating the future, and Redzepi’s train of thought is so influential that at the speed of the internet, his dishes are being copied by chefs around the world,” Sietsema wrote.
Tom Sietsema’s fall restaurant guide
It was closed during the pandemic and temporarily reopened as a place for burgers and wine served at picnic tables.
Redzepi and his operation have come under scrutiny, in part because of their reliance on unpaid ‘stagiaires’ (Noma reportedly started paying them in October). The chef himself admitted in a 2015 essay that he’d been a bully from a boss who yelled at and “shoved people,” and has since said he’s undergone therapy to deal with his anger.