Noma - the Copenhagen restaurant widely regarded as one of the best in the world - will close its doors permanently at the end of 2024, according to founder and chef Rene Redzepi.
In an interview with the New York Times, Redzepi explained that Noma’s business model had become unsustainable. Noma has been hugely influential in creating a modern fine dining model that employs large numbers of chefs to develop and serve highly complex and labour intensive dishes. In his interview, Redzepi admitted that the economics of paying hundreds of staff fairly whilst also operating at a price that customers are willing to pay, didn’t stack up.
‘Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work,’ he said.
He continued: ‘In an ideal restaurant, employees could work four days a week, feel empowered and safe and creative. The problem is how to pay them enough to afford children, a car and a house in the suburbs.’
Instead, Noma will become a food laboratory, which develops products for Noma Projects, a new production facility for ecommerce projects. ‘I hope we can prove to the world that you can grow old and be creative and have fun in the industry – instead of hard, gruelling, low-paid work under poor management conditions that wears people out,’ he says.
Noma rose to prominence two decades ago as a restaurant that became famous for highly intricate dishes that made painstaking use of local ingredients, both farmed and foraged. Redzepi’s innovative cooking style helped to inspire the seasonal, locavore movement that has become popular all over Europe and beyond, and the restaurant subsequently scooped a raft of awards, topping the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list five times over the course of two decades, and winning a coveted third Michelin star in 2021.
Alongside all the success, Noma has also attracted scrutiny, not least in its old philosophy of employing large groups of unpaid interns. Redzepi has also been open about his aggressive behaviour in the kitchen, admitting that he sought therapy after bullying staff.