Elected five times best restaurant in the world for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants Award, Chef René Redzepi’s Noma has announced that it will cease its regular activities in early 2024.
The owner of the facility, which is located in the Danish city of Copenhagen, told the New York Times this Tuesday (9) that the facility will no longer operate as a restaurant but as a laboratory that will focus on developing new flavors and creation of products to be sold in the virtual store Surname.
In an open letter on social media, René and the Noma team explained that the goal of “Noma 3.0”, as the project was called, is to create a space dedicated to innovation in the food market.
“Serving customers will still be a part of who we are, but being a restaurant will no longer define us,” the publication reads.
Despite the change, the idea of opening the restaurant seasonally and at different locations was not a rejected idea, the owner explained. With three Michelin stars, the current Noma invests in local ingredients, serving grilled reindeer hearts on a pine bed.
Compared to the New York Times, Redzepi classified the current operation as “financially unsustainable” for both himself and the more than 100 employees of the company.
In 2021, the restaurant lost money, even with help from the local government, when it sold dishes that cost US$500, about R$2,640 at the current exchange rate.