We were barely a week into 2023 when a New York Times headline caught the restaurant-world’s attention: “Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors.” Speaking with reporter Julia Moskin, René Redzepi said that he had come to the conclusion that the fine-dining business model is “unsustainable” and “we have to completely rethink the industry.” The restaurant, Redzepi said, would “close for regular service at the end of 2024” and Noma would live on as a food lab with an e-commerce operation and periodic pop-ups. A flurry of takes followed: TheGuardian wondered, “Are we seeing the death of fine dining?” Wired more emphatically declared it to be “the end of fine dining.” The Independent blamed the movie The Menu, in which Ralph Fiennes plays a murderous chef. But Fiennes, at least, can sleep easy, because we are now at the end of 2024 and Noma is open for business with no signs that it will close at all.
The first indicator that the end was not imminent may have come the same day theTimes story was published, when Redzepi & Co. shared a plan on the restaurant’s website for regular pop-ups around the world and “seasons” in Copenhagen once they’ve “gathered enough new ideas and flavors.” By March 2024, the chef explained to Bloomberg that Noma was going to pop up in Kyoto and would instead close in the spring of 2025. “For real,” the story emphasized. But in October, Redzepi was back on Bloomberg for another course correction: Noma “will exist as a pop-up entity” that will “open once a year” in Copenhagen or elsewhere on earth. And so it went that last month, Noma released and immediately sold out of tickets for its next menu, “Ocean Season 2025,” which will run January 21 to June 27. This is not typically what a restaurant does when it closes.
A rep for Noma says the plan is to still “evolve into a new type of restaurant organization” that will “operate as a pop-up entity” and so on. “Aside from the autumn pop-up in Kyoto and the shift in timing, we are working toward an evolution of Noma with much of this transformation already being under way,” the rep writes. That is, at best, an interesting interpretation of “closing.”
What happened? One going theory is that Noma’s shuttering was always a deflection. Not long before the Times story was published, the pandemic’s culinary revolt had brought scrutiny to the restaurant’s treatment of stagiaires — “stages,” pronounced the French way — the unpaid kitchen interns, as well as foreign workers tied to workplace-specific visas. Writing in the Financial Times, Imogen West-Knights reported that Noma’s stages, on which the restaurant depended to assemble its intricate, labor-intensive food, were misled about their hours and the type of work they’d be doing. While that story was being reported, Noma announced that it would start paying its stages for the first time, having previously only offered experience and the chance to glean a bit of the restaurant’s reputation on their résumés. (It cost Noma $50,000 a month, the Times later reported, to pay its interns.)
Shortly after the Financial Times report, the Danish weekly Weekendavisen published an article, by Jeppe Bentzen, about the ways that Noma and other restaurants run by its alums were violating Danish labor law for foreigners on work visas. The businesses are required to pay workers from outside the European Union a minimum salary, which at the start of 2024 was 487,000 Danish krone, or about $69,000. As Bentzen noted in his story, this is much higher than what Danish cooks are paid, and many restaurants can’t afford these salaries. But these restaurants were using accounting tricks like deducting the cost of meals, he reported, from the workers’ salaries to pay them less than they were legally owed. At Noma’s now-closed sister restaurant, Restaurant 108, Bentzen reported that several employees had 5,000 Danish krone, or $705, a month deducted from their pay every month. More details about the workplace came out in the Times story, including one former stage who said that she’d spent her three months at Noma only making beetles out of fruit leather and was forbidden from laughing.
People on both sides of the Atlantic express their doubts that Noma was ever going to close at all. One New York chef who staged there said — sarcastically — it was “bullshit” to create hype. A different chef says that his well-connected friends in Copenhagen tell him “it’s never gonna close,” but agreed to be quoted only as long as nothing led back to him. “They probably have hit men,” he joked. Yet another defended Redzepi spiritedly, but would only do so off the record. Most didn’t want to chat. (Moskin declined to talk about the reporting process, but acknowledged that getting people to go on the record about Noma “with anything but full-throated praise” is “so much work, every time.”) Some speculate that Redzepi was planning to shut down his shrine to sea buckthorn because he was feeling the pressure, or that he panicked about the negative press and public outrage surrounding the restaurant’s labor practices. But then, one observer said, nothing happened with the charges.
Of course, plenty else has happened since. This summer, Apple TV+ premiered Redzepi’s show, Omnivore, and 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. The organizers of the Heartland Festival have hosted conversations at the restaurant, including one between Jeremy Strong and Karl Knausgård. Right now, Redzepi and his team are in Japan for their pop-up; later this month, they’ll return home to prepare for next year’s menu. Even if it’s only open for the first half of the year, it’s still open. It also means fewer dinners, which naturally increases the restaurant’s exclusivity, at least until the next menu is inevitably announced.
by Chris Crowley, senior writer at Grub Street | GRUB STREET | New York Magazine