Noma, which is slated to close this year, is mostly still open

Nomas René Redzepi
Photo: Thibault Savary/AFP via Getty Images

We were barely a week into 2023 when we were in New York Just The headline caught the attention of the restaurant world: “Noma, named the best restaurant in the world, is closing its doors.” Speaking to reporter Julia Moskin, René Redzepi said he had come to the conclusion that the gourmet cuisine business model “doesn’t work “sustainable” and “we have to completely rethink the industry”. The restaurant, Redzepi said, will “close for regular operations at the end of 2024” and Noma will live on as a food lab with e-commerce operations and regular pop-ups. A flurry of takes followed: The Guardian wondered: “Are we seeing the death of good food?” Wired more clearly it declared “the end of good food.” The Independent blamed the film The menu, in which Ralph Fiennes plays a murderous chef. But at least Fiennes can sleep easy because we are now at the end of 2024 and Noma is open for business and there is no sign of it closing at all.

The first indication that the end was not imminent may have come on the same day Just The story broke as Redzepi & Co. announced on the restaurant’s website a plan for regular pop-ups around the world and “seasons” in Copenhagen once they had “gathered enough new ideas and flavors.” In March 2024, the chef told Bloomberg that Noma would pop up in Kyoto and close in spring 2025 instead. “Really,” the story goes. But in October Redzepi appeared again on Bloomberg for another course correction: Noma “will exist as a pop-up” that will open “once a year” in Copenhagen or elsewhere on Earth. And so it was that Noma released the cards for its next menu, “Ocean Season 2025,” which runs from January 21 to June 27, last month and sold out immediately. This is not typically what a restaurant does when it closes.

A Noma representative says the plan is to “evolve into a new type of restaurant organization” that “operates as a pop-up” and so on. “Apart from the fall pop-up in Kyoto and the postponement, we are working on further development of Noma, with much of this transformation already underway,” the representative writes. At best, this is an interesting take on “graduation.”

What happened? A common theory is that Noma’s formwork was always a distraction. Not long before Just By the time the story was published, the culinary upheaval of the pandemic had brought the restaurant’s treatment under scrutiny Stagiaires – “Steps”, pronounced in French – the unpaid kitchen interns as well as foreign workers bound to job-specific visas. Write in Financial TimesImogen West-Knights reported that Noma’s stages, which the restaurant relied on to put together its complicated, labor-intensive dishes, were misled about their working hours and the type of work they would do. While this story was being reported, Noma announced that it would begin paying its stages for the first time, having previously offered only experience and the opportunity to learn about the restaurant’s reputation on its resumes. (It cost Noma $50,000 a month Just later reported paying his interns.)

Shortly after Financial Times report, the Danish weekly newspaper Weekend allowances published an article by Jeppe Bentzen about the way Noma and other restaurants run by its alumni violate Danish labor law for foreigners with work visas. Companies are required to pay workers from outside the European Union a minimum salary, which at the beginning of 2024 was 487,000 Danish crowns, or about $69,000. As Bentzen noted in his story, this is much higher than what Danish chefs earn, and many restaurants cannot afford these salaries. But this He reported that restaurants used accounting tricks, such as deducting the cost of meals from workers’ salaries, to pay them less than they were legally entitled to. At Noma’s now-closed sister restaurant, Restaurant 108, Bentzen reported that several employees had 5,000 Danish kroner, or $705, deducted from their wages each month. Further details about the workplace were published in the Just story, including an earlier stage who said that she had spent her three months at Noma just making beetles out of fruit leather and that she was forbidden from laughing.

People on both sides of the Atlantic expressed doubts that Noma would ever close. A New York chef who performed there said — sarcastically — that creating hype was “bullshit.” Another chef says his well-connected friends in Copenhagen told him, “It will never end,” but he only agreed to be quoted as long as nothing led back to him. “They probably have hit men,” he joked. Yet another vigorously defended Redzepi, but did so only unofficially. Most didn’t want to chat. (Moskin declined to discuss the reporting process, but acknowledged that it was “so much work every time” to get people to report on Noma “with anything other than full praise.”) Some speculate that Redzepi Was He planned to close his Shrine to Sea Buckthorn because he felt the pressure or panicked because of the negative press and public outrage over the restaurant’s labor practices. But then nothing happened with the charges, said an observer.

Of course, a lot more has happened since then. This summer, Apple TV+ premiered The Redzepi Show. omnivoreand Noma launched its e-commerce operation, which includes a “Taste Buds Membership,” a $680 subscription that promises “early access” to products from Noma’s test kitchen. Heartland Festival organizers have hosted talks at the restaurant, including one between Jeremy Strong and Karl Knausgård. Right now, Redzepi and his team are in Japan for their pop-up; They will return home later this month to prepare next year’s menu. Even though it’s only open in the first half of the year, it’s still open. It also means fewer dinners, which of course increases the exclusivity of the restaurant. At least until the next menu is inevitably announced.