If what tickles your tastebuds for supper is duck brain served in the skull, edible pine cones, sweetbreads in reindeer moss and dried plum and pheasant heart followed by a berry-leather and black-garlic beetle, you’d better get a move on.
Noma, the fine-dining restaurant in Copenhagen on whose winter “game and forest” menu (it also does vegetable and seafood seasons) those delicacies feature, is closing at the end of next year, and the waiting list for tables is very long.
Opened in 2003 and judged the world’s best restaurant in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014 and – after reopening in a new building – in 2021, the year it also won its third Michelin star, chef René Redzepi’s temple of Nordic gastronomy is to become a food lab.
Exactly what that means in practice no one knows, but the move has sent shock waves through the world of haute cuisine and raised questions about the future of the wildly innovative – and hugely expensive – style of gourmet dining exemplified by Noma.
“We want to focus more on creativity,” Redzepi, 45, told Denmark’s Berlingske newspaper. “I love our guests at Noma,” he said – as well he might, at 3,500 Danish kroner (£420) a head, plus 1,800 kroner more for the wine pairing. “But it hinders us to spend so much time on producing dishes for them.”
Hailed as one of the world’s most influential and visionary chefs, Redzepi said he and Noma’s nearly 100 staff spent “10% of our time on innovation, and 90% on production”, adding: “I’d like to reverse that, so we spend most of our time challenging ourselves and the food, thinking new thoughts.”
To achieve that, Redzepi said, Noma 3.0 – as the new project will be known – needed “a new financial foundation”. That is to be Noma Projects, a Noma product line launched last year with smoked mushroom garum, described as a versatile, umami-rich sauce of organic mushrooms fermented with Koji rice.
At €25.95 for a 250ml bottle, it reportedly flew off the shelves, to be swiftly followed by a wild rose vinegar (“Danish summer in a bottle” at €30.95 for 250ml) and forager’s vinaigrette (the same wild rose vinegar combined with an innovative blackcurrant wood oil, €32.95).
Redzepi has spoken of the lab’s potential as a “mini-factory”, saying he sees “almost unlimited possibilities” for Noma-branded products from more than two decades of experimentation in fermenting and foraging.
A Noma spokesperson said the move was aimed at building “a lasting organisation” in which “our team can thrive”. Noma Projects would expand with “many more products and larger volumes over the coming years”, she said, backed up by “a pioneering test kitchen and lab dedicated to groundbreaking work in food”.
If there is little certainty yet about what products will be forthcoming, or how many of them may be sold, one thing is clear: apart from the occasional limited season and sporadic pop-ups, in Copenhagen or elsewhere around the world, Noma will close indefinitely as a restaurant at the end of 2024.
The unexpected move comes amid growing awareness of the immense stresses and strains – financial and human – of running an ultra-fine-dining restaurant, highlighted by recent films and series such as Boiling Point, The Menu and The Bear.
Food critics, too, have begun to question the model, which Frank Bruni, the New York Times’ former restaurant writer, described as “forever trying to dazzle self-regarding epicures with new stunts, novel sensations, modes of presentation we hadn’t imagined, flora and fauna rarely pinned down on a plate”.
Had the world’s leading establishments, Bruni wondered, gone so far beyond “the fundamentals of dining … that they’ve ceased to be restaurants in any conventional and sustainable sense? Are they performing such a rococo act, for such a rarefied audience, that they’re on borrowed time?”
Noma’s spokesperson insisted Redzepi’s decision was not financially motivated. But exacting standards, constant innovation, long working hours and more staff than diners – after media criticism, Noma recently started paying its 20 interns a €2,600 monthly salary, further increasing its already sky-high running costs – all added up to an unappetising recipe, the chef told the New York Times.
“We have to completely rethink the industry,” Redzepi said. “This is simply too hard; we have to work in a different way … It’s unsustainable. As an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.”
That, he insisted, was what Noma 3.0 was about. “If we succeed, it might also become a restaurant model that is more sustainable in the longer term,” he told Berlingske, comparing running a fine dining restaurant to a high-performance sport.
“Otherwise, I think more and more gourmet restaurants will be taken over by people who have so much money that they can afford to run them like premier league football clubs … Personally, I prefer my independence.”
