A menu costs more than five hundred euros, for suitable wines you pay more than two hundred euros extra, it is always packed and yet it turns out not to be profitable. That is the story of the five-time best restaurant in the world, the Danish Noma, which made Copenhagen one of the culinary capitals of the world in its twenty years of existence. It will stop as a regular restaurant in 2025, co-founder and chef René Redzepi announced on Monday on the website.
To get as close as possible to culinary perfection, Noma’s almost one hundred employees work long days, sometimes up to 16 hours, with the very best products that Scandinavia has to offer. “If I want to pay them all fairly, it is financially impossible. We need to reinvent the entire restaurant industry,” Redzepi said Monday opposite The New York Times.
The new Noma formula has been renamed Noma 3.0 and focuses on a food laboratory where “new flavors are invented”. Perhaps a foretaste of the new concept is the bottle of Garum that is sold in the webshop. That’s the umami-rich liquid left over from the weeks-long fermentation of smoked cremini mushrooms with salt and koji kin, the Japanese fungus that produces enzymes that convert starch into flavorful amino acids. The price: almost 26 euros for 250 milliliters.
Pop-up restaurants
From 2025, Noma wants to occasionally open pop-up restaurants in various places around the world, where the (wealthy) public can taste the results achieved in the food laboratory. “Guest service will remain part of our identity, but the restaurant will no longer define us,” the statement reads on the website. “Instead, we spend a large part of our time developing new projects and products.”
No restaurant has done what Noma has done since it was founded in 2003. It has received the Oscar of the restaurant world so many times — in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2021 — that after the last time, it became the first restaurant ever to be excluded from the prestigious competition. Noma is one of the 142 restaurants in the world with three Michelin stars. And more importantly, Noma revolutionized a gastronomic landscape that has long been characterized by monotony.
Redzepi, who has been working in professional kitchens since he was fifteen, was the face of that revolution. He popularized the use of local seasonal ingredients and exchanged foie gras and caviar for greenery and game obtained locally: conifer tops, two-year-old carrots, teals. His style became world famous under the name ‘New Nordic’. Books were written and films were made about Noma, and restaurants all over the world tried to copy the success formula.
Working Conditions
But where the time was ahead of Noma in terms of gastronomy, the working conditions of the restaurant lagged behind in the past. As is often the case in restaurants, behind the unique culinary experience it offered less appetizing matters. For years, dozens of interns were not paid for the sometimes 16-hour working days. One of them recalled The New York Times that she had only made decorative beetles from fruit leather during a months-long apprenticeship. Her superiors had forbidden her to laugh.
In a blog post in 2015 Redzepi admitted to regularly engaging in a Gordon Ramsay-esque leadership style in the kitchen. He describes how all his life he witnessed chefs bullying and humiliating chefs to get results, and always vowed never to become one himself. “But then I became a chef myself, in my own restaurant, with my own money in it,” he wrote. “The smallest mistakes made me furious: why do you for God sake the thyme picked wrong?”
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