“Even if you haven’t eaten at Noma, you’ve eaten at Noma. Or at least at someplace trying to be a mini-version of the influential Copenhagen restaurant, where tweezer-wielding worker bees obsess over each microgreen so that every morsel of food looks and tastes transcendent,” Rob Anderson writes.
The chef, René Redzepi, announced recently that at the end of next year, Noma will close its doors to guests and transform into “Noma 3.0.” “As a burned-out chef slogging through the challenges of running a restaurant myself, I’m shocked only that Noma—along with many other ultra-high-end restaurants built on the same foundation—has been running for so long,” Anderson writes. The Financial Times has reported that, in its last year of operations before the pandemic, the restaurant typically had 34 paid cooks—and about 30 unpaid interns. Only in October, after nearly two decades in business, did Noma start paying the people who painstakingly prep and stage its food for presentation to customers. “But ever since Noma started racking up Michelin stars and topping world’s-best lists, the rest of the food world has looked to it as the embodiment of what a perfect, modern fine-dining establishment should be … For better and for worse, Noma’s popularity has forced all chefs to grapple with the New Nordic Manifesto on their menus, whether they were serving 15-course tasting menus in cosmopolitan cities or, like me, serving casual fare along the beach in a vacation town,” Anderson continues.
“The truth is that the kind of high-end dining Noma exemplifies is abusive, disingenuous, and unethical. Chefs know it but continue to imitate Redzepi. The food media know it but continue to celebrate his kind of food,” Anderson continues at the link in our bio. “Wealthy diners know it but continue to book tables en masse—if not at Noma, then at comparable destination restaurants around the world.”
Of course, couldn't help but compare recent discussions here about The Willows Inn and Stone Barn. The Willows being, basically, forced out of business because you can't do here what Redzepi gets away with in Denmark. I know Redzepi now condemns his own practices, hence the closing.