Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

We have to talk about the elephant in the room — or maybe it’s more of a reindeer: The New York Times broke the story this week that Noma, René Redzepi’s globally influential Copenhagen restaurant, is closing for regular service at the end of 2024. It’s not a complete closure; Noma’s focus will shift to a food laboratory for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects, but will still include pop-ups.

The reason for this change is the “unsustainable” model of modern fine dining, Redzepi told the Times, which notes that Noma itself helped create this model. Notably, in order to execute its highly ambitious food (beetles shaped out of fruit leather, for example), Noma has relied on large numbers of unpaid workers (about 30 unpaid stagiaires to 34 paid chefs in 2019, the Financial Times reported last year). “Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work,” Redzepi said.

And isn’t that a damning indictment of the industry, if the restaurant heralded multiple times as the “world’s best” — and which offers a $188 juice pairing in addition to its $500 menu — can’t make the numbers work without no- to low-wage labor? The common Twitter quip, of course, is that Redzepi had just watched The Menu, the recent “eat the rich”-style thriller that uses a distinctly Noma-esque fictional restaurant to skewer the chef-auteur approach, the militaristic kitchen, and cerebral, tweezered, inaccessible-to-most dining.

Still, it remains undeniable that Noma has changed food as we now know it, providing inspiration that lives on in restaurants everywhere. “The ‘New Nordic’ is reshaping the food world,” the Guardian wrote in 2020. Accepting that she’ll likely never eat at Noma, Eater’s Jaya Saxena ruminates on Noma’s effects: “It’s in every instance a fine dining restaurant cites locally foraged ingredients as the inspiration for a dish, in every goth bird we’re still seeing on tables today, and every high-end restaurant’s experiments with [direct-to-consumer] fermented sauces.”

So no, Noma isn’t exactly closing, but it’s admitting what’s not working. The knee-jerk reaction is to say “Is fine dining over?” Well, that’s unlikely to be the case — but with an industry leader this big taking a step back, it is a welcome opportunity to consider who we, as the dining public, see as leading meaningful change in this industry and for what reasons. It’s clear that clever food alone can only go so far.

— Bettina Makalintal

Follow Bettina on Instagram at @crispyegg420

More on this:

In Bon Appétit, 18 industry experts share their take on the Noma news, from the positive (“the pinnacle of a cook’s dreams”) to the negative (“the tastes of the public are swinging away from extravagances that dehumanize the labor force.”)
Last month, The Daily Beast covered how Noma alums have changed Copenhagen.
This 2019 Eater piece explores how Noma changed how the world saw Nordic food, for better and for worse.
The BBC’s The Food Chain podcast features former fine dining chefs who changed course because of the pressures of the profession.
From 2022, the New York Times’ Ligaya Mishan ponders the ethics of extravagant dining.
On Reddit, restaurant workers unpack their feelings on The Menu: What did it get right, and what could have been better?

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