Noma announces closure
Noma—widely regarded as one of the world’s best restaurants—has announced its closure, with Head Chef Rene Redzepi decrying the model that made him so wildly successful as unsustainable.
The Copenhagen restaurant opened in 2003. While slowly developing a reputation as a provider of unique and unusual dishes, it initially went unnoticed. This changed in 2010 when Noma achieved pole position for the World’s 50 Best Restaurants. It did so an unprecedented five times over the next twelve years, solidifying it as a culinary powerhouse and one of the pioneers of the ‘New Nordic’ food movement.
The spectacular tasting menus—including such delicacies as grilled reindeer heart and monkfish liver—don’t come cheap, with bills regularly exceeding $500 per person. So why close?
“Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work,” said Redzepi.
Despite the eye-watering prices, fine dining is not always profitable. Noma did not make Redzapi wealthy, with his focus on top ingredients and seamless service eating away at profits. While always on a knife's edge, Noma saw its first loss in 2021 as, like many other restaurants, it struggled from the fallout of Covid.
Noma was served another financial blow last year, perhaps for a less sympathetic reason. A key factor in staying afloat was its use of unpaid interns, for whom working at the restaurant was a shortcut into the cutthroat world of luxury gastronomy.
Interns were described as performing straightforward tasks (no doubt to justify their lack of salary). This is highly subjective. For example, the assembly of edible stag beetles out of fruit leather is unlikely to fit most people’s definition of rudimentary. When interns were finally added to the payroll in October 2022, it added $50,000 a month to the restaurant's wage bill, Redzepi told the New York Times.
Finances aside, fine-dining work culture has faced significant criticism over the past decade. Unscrupulous employers have been called out, with many high-end restaurants regularly skewered for their gruelling hours, bullying behavior and low, or non-existent pay. Noma has faced its fair share of these accusations, and Redzepi eventually decided he could no longer balance his staff’s needs against the restaurant’s impeccably high standards.
If you never managed to get a reservation, there’s still hope. Noma is taking bookings until the end of next year, although the news of its closure will undoubtedly result in a flurry of interest. When regular service ends, it will live on as a food laboratory, pushing boundaries via its Noma Projects online store.