The project – Before Noma there was practically no Danish cuisine: herring, potatoes and French dishes in the restaurant. Instead, Redzepi forces Danes to use their native ingredients, and with his new Nordic cuisine, turnips, reindeer and lichen have every right to feature on a respectable menu crowned by The Times in 2013 as “The Gods of Food”. But now all this is coming to an end. Or, as Redzepi explained on social media, “it’s about to change radically.” In fact, the restaurant will no longer exist from 2025. It will be “Noma 3.0: a permanent laboratory of experimentation, in search of new flavors and disruptive projects. A factory of nature”. Guest service will continue to operate in Copenhagen, but only occasionally when the staff have found enough innovations for you to try. For the rest, the brigade will travel around the world, studying and looking for ideas, opening pop-ups here and there.
Why close? “During the pandemic – explains the chef in an interview with la Repubblica – the first lockdown of 2020 gave me time to think for the first time in years. Working the way we are going to do in the next ten, twenty years is not a sustainable model. There are fewer and fewer cooks in our world, we have to find a method that works differently. So I decided to create a plan to have a new idea of good food and that’s how Noma Projects was born. Many working hours, at least 60 per week. Redzepi himself has repeatedly admitted that this organization is neither humanly nor economically sustainable. “Paying 100 employees, guaranteeing the standard of food and keeping prices affordable publicly (a dinner today already costs 470 euros per person without wine, editor’s note) is mathematically impossible,” he told the New York Times. In fact, 2021 ended with losses of 230,000 euros. The theme is therefore to rewrite the way restaurants work at a certain level. “So when we close, we will spend time building this new platform.” “Our dream is to create a financial platform that allows those who work for us to earn more. Maybe in the future we will only open three or four months a year and spend the rest of the time working on creativity.”
The search for a new model – A new phase begins for René Redzepi, which gives more space to the quality of time. In the Scandinavian countries, the restaurants are busier than ever, but there are fewer and fewer staff, people choose other places, other sectors to work and this is a problem that will continue to exist unless we find a new model where People, she can work a little less and earn more.” One option would be to raise prices, of course, but that would be too expensive. We risk fine dining becoming like football’s Premier League: it’s owned by people who have a lot of money and that’s what makes it almost a hobby.