Noma, one of the World's top-rated restaurants, is closing it's doors

The world’s best restaurant is unsustainable. Owner René Redzepi said the Copenhagen restaurant Noma (the name is a syllabic abbreviation of the two Danish words; nordisk (Nordic) and mad (food), would shut its doors to regular service in 2024. Noma will transform into a test kitchen for Noma Projects thereafter.

Noma is a three-Michelin-star restaurant run by Chef René Redzepi, and co-founded by Claus Meyer, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The restaurant is known for its focus on foraging, invention and interpretation of New Nordic Cuisine. In the years 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014, it was adjudged by Restaurant magazine as the ‘Best Restaurant in the World’. In 2012 it also won the number one spot in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards.

Redzepi, who committed to making Noma “the best in terms of workplace” in a 2021 awards acceptance speech, now says paying Noma’s ~100 employees fairly while maintaining acceptable standards and pricing is “unsustainable” -as is the entire fine-dining model Noma pioneered.

Opened in 2003 by Claus Meyer and René Redzepi, Noma and its culinary team pioneered a style of cooking that came to be known as New Nordic, relying on local ingredients that often have to be painstakingly foraged and prepared. These labor-intensive processes and the punishing schedules needed to execute them simply cannot coexist with fair, equitable, and humane work practices, Redzepi told The New York Times. “It’s unsustainable,” he said. “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”

Last year a 2022 Financial Times article detailed myriad grueling, sometimes abusive, experiences in Copenhagen’s culinary scene. Some of which include;-

• Quoting an intern, who recalls being forbidden from laughing in the kitchen.
• A former Noma intern described his time at the restaurant to the Financial Timesas akin to being “kidnapped from life,” due to the grueling schedule.
• The Financial Timesalso mentions one front-of-house intern who allegedly recalls seeing kitchen interns be made to pluck feathers off of ducks outside, in the freezing rain.
• Another former intern interviewed by the Financial Timesalleged that the restaurant misled interns about the number of hours they would be working before they arrived.
• Until just a few months ago, approximately 30 interns were working unpaid 16 hour days, according to the same Financial Times peice.

Since the expose, the practice of paying Noma interns has added $50,000 in monthly operating expenses to the restaurant’s budget, according to The New York Times. It’s certainly progress for interns in the world of fine dining to make an income, but hard to ignore that the change came amid a flurry of reporting on the unfair working conditions within the world of haute cuisine. If Noma, where diners pay $500 per person, can’t keep its doors open for regular service while paying its workers a wage, then the industry at large has some major restructuring to do. 

Greg Baxtrom, chef-owner of New York City’s Olmsted, Five Acres, Maison Yaki, and Patti Ann’s, had this to say “from afar, it seemed like everything was going well. But I don’t think Noma closing reflects the state of fine dining at large, because the issues Redzepi has pointed to are prevalent throughout the industry, not just in fine dining. I think we’re currently in, and will continue to see, a huge shift in the industry in terms of how we view what a restaurant is, and what the responsibility of the chef is”.

Source: External 

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