Noma to shut in Copenhagen after years as top-ranked restaurant

Noma, one of many world’s high fine-dining eating places, will shut its doorways for normal service in Copenhagen on the finish of subsequent 12 months as its head chef sounded a warning concerning the sustainability of the business.

Famous for dishes resembling ants on a shrimp and celeriac shawarma, Noma will turn into a check kitchen from 2025 whereas organising the occasional pop-up kitchen and serving visitors at its Copenhagen restaurant “when we’ve gathered enough new ideas and flavours”, it mentioned on Monday.

René Redzepi, Noma’s founder and chef, mentioned that regardless of visitors paying DKr5,300 ($760) for meals with a wine pairing, it was tough to make ends meet and pay its virtually 100 employees a good wage.

“We have to completely rethink the industry. This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way,” he advised the New York Times.

Noma and Copenhagen’s fine-dining scene was shaken by a FT investigation final 12 months that confirmed widespread abuse of cooks and reliance on unpaid or low-paid labour even because the Danish capital’s eating places garner an increasing number of Michelin stars.

Redzepi advised the NYT that paying interns, one thing Noma has completed since October, has added at the very least $50,000 a month to its wage invoice.

Noma has received the world’s greatest restaurant award 5 occasions, most not too long ago in 2021, when it additionally gained its third Michelin star.

But it has closed as soon as earlier than, in 2016, with Redzepi taking the restaurant on the highway to Mexico, Japan and Australia earlier than opening Noma 2.0 in 2018, as he christened it, primarily based round three “seasons” — seafood, vegetable, and recreation and forest.

Another earlier “world’s best” restaurant, Spain’s El Bulli, closed its doorways in 2011.

Noma 3.0 will begin in 2025 when its restaurant will turn into “a giant lab”, a check kitchen “that will share the fruits of our efforts more widely than ever before”. It would nonetheless organise pop-ups all over the world and later maintain a season in Copenhagen.

The restaurant mentioned all employees could be saved on, and that “one of the main reasons we are making this change is so that we can become a more sustainable workplace for our team and for us to grow together”.

Redzepi mentioned the Covid-19 pandemic had pressured him to re-evaluate your entire fine-dining enterprise mannequin.

“It’s unsustainable. Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work,” he mentioned.