‘Best restaurant in the world’ Noma closes, ‘high standard not sustainable’

AFP

NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 21:36

Three-star restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, voted the best restaurant in the world five times, will close at the end of 2024. In an interview with The New York Times, chef René Redzepi says the extremely high standards at star restaurants like his “cannot be sustained”.

Noma opened its doors twenty years ago and quickly became a star in the international restaurant world. The kitchen is all about very innovative Scandinavian dishes, with unexpected ingredients that have been picked, caught or bred in the area. The changing menu with up to twenty courses costs about 465 euros per person.

“What Noma has created very sharply is a dining experience based on the place and time of year. It is hyper-local food,” says culinary journalist Hiske Versprille, who reviews restaurants for de Volkskrant. “I think they are by far the most influential restaurant of this century, from their philosophy and way of working to the way their plates look.”

Just some of Noma’s dishes, as previously shared by guests online:

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Special toast in Noma, photo from 2009

cyclonebill | Flickr | Creative Commons by-sa

A rhubarb dish served in 2009

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Asparagus with pine. This was on Noma’s map in 2010

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A dish with vegetables and scallops, served in 2015

Noma has been praised throughout the culinary world, but in recent years there has also been criticism. In 2015, Redzepi wrote in an essay that he verbally and physically intimidated his staff. Danish media and The Financial Times reported on foreign workers and trainees working 16-hour days at Noma while receiving little or no pay.

Last October, Noma was one of the first star restaurants to start paying interns. According to The New York Times, this costs the restaurant at least 45,000 euros per month. That such an amount is easy to afford when menus go for hundreds of euros per person seems to be a misunderstanding.

“Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a person, it just doesn’t work,” Redzepi told the newspaper. “In other words: a restaurant at this level cannot really exist without underpaying people or making them overworked,” says Versprille. “Since 2016, Noma has been very busy changing the working culture in the kitchen. But if you want to put such expensive and laborious dishes on the table, it has to come from the length or the width.”

Versprille, who joined Noma last Tuesday, talks about dishes with ingredients such as ants, live shrimps and reindeer penis. “You don’t eat that every day. But what has impressed me the most is, for example, a very good apple on your plate.”

AFP

Chef and co-owner of Noma René Redzepi

Noma’s influence on large and small catering establishments worldwide will soon come to an end. At least, in part, because Noma will continue in a modified form. It will be a kind of laboratory for culinary innovation, which will sometimes also receive guests.

“Do we have to go somewhere to learn? Then we do a pop-up there. And when we have collected enough new ideas and flavors, we do a season in Copenhagen,” the team writes on its own website.

Chef Redzepi’s decision is reminiscent of that of Dutch chefs. Ron Blaauw stopped his two-star restaurant in 2013 to open a more accessible business. Sergio Herman said he was “literally and figuratively at the ceiling” at his three-star restaurant Oud Sluis and closed the tent that same year, but was then again at the helm of two-star restaurants.

Versprille: “If you have had as much influence as Noma, for example, at a certain point you have to think: do we want to continue in this way?”

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