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Oct 10, 2023

On the Closing of Noma, and the Unbearable Costs of an Extraordinary Meal

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Chef René Redzepi announced he was closing one of the world's most lauded restaurants—again. If luxe dining is no longer sustainable, what will be the culinary world's real loss?

Listen, I get it. You saw the news that Noma, that expensive restaurant in Copenhagen, was planning to close, and you snorted.

Maybe you left a comment on a media platform drawing a comparison between Noma and The Menu, the goth Ralph Fiennes movie about an expensive restaurant. (I salute you, as do the 50,000 other people who left comments referring to The Menu.) Maybe you liked something on Facebook declaring that fine dining has suffered a lethal blow and that no sane person will ever again seek out the bloated, calcified pleasures of a tasting menu. Perhaps you nodded along with the ever-eloquent Frank Bruni as he categorized Noma as one of those "internationally renowned, ardently coveted temples of gastronomy that are forever trying to dazzle self-regarding epicures with new stunts, novel sensations, modes of presentation that we hadn't imagined, flora and fauna rarely pinned down on a plate." And maybe you just thought, whatever, this is a restaurant far away in Denmark that serves weird food to rich people and I cannot pretend to care. Which is a totally sensible response. I get it.

Led by the restless chef René Redzepi, whose mother worked as a housecleaner and whose cab-driving father was a Muslim immigrant from what's now known as the Republic of North Macedonia, Noma opened in a former whale-oil warehouse in Copenhagen almost 20 years ago. Back then the dining room was usually empty. Redzepi's bold attempts to forge a new style of Scandinavian cuisine drew a fair share of mockery ("The Stinky Whale" was one sobriquet that floated around), but eventually European food critics took notice, and the buzz grew, and tables filled up. In 2010 some dubious consortium dubbed Noma the world's best restaurant, and it was off to the races for René Redzepi, who’d soon land on the cover of Time magazine. Noma was named the world's best restaurant (a title as absurd as it is tantalizing) four more times. Along the way it moved into a new space at the edge of Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania neighborhood (yes, the part of town where your friend scored weed back in the ‘90s), although the restaurant has also pulled off high-profile tours of duty in Japan, Mexico, and Australia. Oh, and for a while it served burgers. (Did I mention the restlessness?)

Now, with a splash in The New York Times, Noma has announced its latest phase of chameleonic reinvention. Following another residency in Japan this spring, and a few more seasons of service in Denmark, Noma will close in 2024. Redzepi and company will focus on expanding their array of cooking products, and — having broken free of the cumbersome walls of the space-time continuum — they’ll dash around the world in the guise of pop-ups. (It used to be that ambitious chefs would start out with a pop-up to get attention before advancing into an established restaurant. Apparently now we’re moving in the opposite direction.)

Much of the coverage of Noma's closing has focused on the fact that for most of its years Noma welcomed the presence of unpaid interns, who are known in the restaurant world as stagiaires because that French stuff is hard to shake. (Noma recently began paying them, which is the right thing to do, obviously.) Stagiaires have been part of the restaurant world for a long time. Lisa Abend, a journalist who is based in Copenhagen, has written extensively about the practice on her Substack platform, Bord, and in her 2011 book The Sorcerer's Apprentices, which followed a group of young cooks at elBulli, the famous experimental restaurant in Spain that preceded Noma in the "world's best restaurant" sweepstakes. The Apprentice, a lovely 2003 memoir by Jacques Pépin, also gives us a glimpse of the history of the system, and that's useful because, as Abend writes at Bord, "It has gotten somewhat lost in the ensuing conversation, which sometimes makes it sound like Noma itself invented the stagiaire system. High-end restaurants around the world rely on stagiaires, and there have been periodic exposés of the conditions in which they work." (If those high-end restaurants around the world are about to shut down en masse because they can't bear the budgetary impact of paying their stagiaires, well, 2023 is going to be a wild ride.)

Depending on where you live, there might be stagiaires at a restaurant down the street from you right now. Staging is something that people volunteer to do. Which can seem insane when you start to learn about what the work entails. I remember how the Noma chef and Redzepi ally Thomas Frebel (who is a triathlete, by the way) visibly gulped when I was reporting my 2019 book, Hungry, and we began discussing a painful memory: "For a single clam tart at Noma Japan, a tart topped with what looked like a briny tide of bonsai whitecaps, workers in the kitchen had to spend hours prying open freshwater clams with pins. ‘Too much labor had to go into each dish,’ Frebel said. ‘It was a group of ten people. Four hours in the morning, four hours in the evening.’ Just opening clams." Menial and repetitive tasks are often involved because menial and repetitive tasks remain an unfortunate reality of working in a professional kitchen, but young cooks have been willing to endure those tasks in exchange for a chance to network and learn and spruce up the résumé. As Lisa Abend tells us:

"Many appreciate the education they got from their stage, not only into how specific dishes at specific restaurants get made, but into how professional kitchens work. Others appreciate the camaraderie and bonding among the fellow stagiaires with whom they stood shoulder to shoulder, hour after hour, shucking oysters and cleaning herbs. And with its reputation as a kind of hazing period, some who go through it are glad to have had the experience to test and eventually prove themselves. Just the other day I was texting with a chef who had watched a film about elBulli, where he had staged in 2009. 'It almost made me cry,' he said of the movie. ‘I felt so much nostalgia.’"

Another example: In the Washington Post this week Michael Rafidi, the chef at Albi (one of Esquire's Best New Restaurants in 2020), says that he sold his car and the rest of his belongings in 2011 so that he would have $15,000 to fund his own stint as a stagiaire at Noma. In the same piece, Noma veteran David Zilber says that his six years of paid work at Noma should probably be counted as 18 years because of the relentless hours he poured into the job. But as Abend reminds us about having embedded herself at elBulli, this sort of workplace environment (and its attendant exploitations) began long before Noma grabbed the spotlight: "Fourteen to sixteen-hour days, five or six days a week. One 30-minute break per day, and no chatting in the kitchen outside of that. Stagiaires who couldn't afford to buy food for themselves on their days off. Staff who were encouraged in ways subtle and not to work through sickness and injury. And all this, for a bed in a shitty apartment and exactly no pay. In fact, at elBulli, the stagiaires even had to pay to attend the staff Christmas dinner that the restaurant held to celebrate the end of the season. And yet, young cooks from around the world applied for stages there in droves."

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why Redzepi has said that the fine dining model at Noma is "unsustainable." If that system is on the cusp of change, and if the Noma announcement nudges that change forward, that's all for the better. As far back as 2014, in fact, Redzepi has been talking about trying to change himself and find a remedy for the toxicity of kitchen culture. "The future is not any more of that screaming," he told chef Danny Bowien in Mexico that year as I traveled along with them. "I used to be so angry in the kitchen. Insanely angry. A monster. I made a decision: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’" As we’ve seen in episodes of The Bear, long hours and low pay and cramped quarters and menial tasks and fraying tempers do not foster esprit de corps. Even when there happens to be a sauna on the property.

First-person testimonials such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones & Butter, and Eric Ripert's 32 Yolks have taught us that kitchen life can be brutal, but recent reports from the front — such as Shaina Loew-Banayan's Elegy for an Appetite, which features a food temple that sounds a whole lot like Eleven Madison Park, and this Bon Appétit essay by Genevieve Yam — take those lessons to a new level. "I left the fine dining world at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic," Yam writes. "A year before, I had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a stress-induced pain disorder. Though I desperately tried to continue cooking professionally, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it simply wasn't feasible. Even for completely healthy people, restaurants of the highest caliber are incredibly tough places to work, and the long hours and high-pressure environment were too much for my nerves. No medication in the world, my doctor said, would ease my pain if I continued to live such a stressful life."

Anyhow, your skepticism about Noma might have something to do with a growing rejection of such systems, or it could be that you just think that patronizing restaurants like Noma and elBulli (which closed in 2011) sounds like a silly, bizarre way to eat dinner. Either way, I get it. When I started to reckon with Noma, I was getting my feet wet as a food writer at The New York Times, and I thought the whole thing sounded nuts. I mean, this was a restaurant that had a New Nordic manifesto attached to it, like some shaggy Scandinavian performance art commune in the ‘70s. This was a place that would, as the years passed and the menu evolved, serve spears of asparagus intentionally coated in white mold, and duck brains, and reindeer penis, and live shrimp that wriggled down your throat, and scatterings of a bracing spice that turned out to be ants. I get it — you read that and you think, no thanks. In February of 2014 I produced a piece for the Times in which I fessed up that until then I had avoided — on purpose — the various Noma-inflected restaurants that had sprouted up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Here's how I felt back then:

"For months, I dodged the question. Now and then someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask for an opinion on the latest New York restaurant that embodied the spirit of the New Nordic movement. Had I nibbled on any lichen lately? Had I dunked my spoon into a brimming bowl of barley porridge speckled with globules of pig's blood, sea buckthorn and the fermented scales of a creature found in the deepest crevasses of a fjord?"

I had not, and I didn't want to, and that stance puffed me up with defiant confidence. Then I happened to meet René Redzepi for coffee in Greenwich Village shortly after the article came out, and everything changed. I guess I was expecting to chat with someone scolding and morose in the Scandinavian mode, sort of like the figure of Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, but Redzepi turned out to be nothing like that, at least with journalists. And like many journalists before and after me, I found that his charisma and his communication skills managed to chip away at my wall of skeptical resistance. Frank Bruni had a similar response when he met Redzepi in Copenhagen in 2010. "We talked and talked," Bruni wrote this week. "And I was wowed by the amount of thought that he’d put into what he was doing — by his determination to show diners that with a sense of history, a surfeit of imagination and enough enterprise, he could take the finite patch of earth where he found himself and wring a seemingly infinite bounty of food and flavor from it."

Within a few months of our coffee rendezvous, Redzepi and I were traveling through Mexico together. A few years later I decided to write a book about him. And before long I was roaming around like the Grateful Dead fans that I had mocked in college. I ended up eating at Noma seven times — eight times, I guess, if you count Noma's brief pop-up in Brooklyn last year, or maybe nine times if we factor in an under-the-radar dinner that the Noma team delivered in the Mexican city of Mérida in the fall of 2016. I was there. I just kept traveling to Denmark, Australia, Norway, Mexico, and Tennessee (that part didn't make it into the book) on a quest for the Noma contact high. People might say that this is a foolish way for a grown man to behave, and they are not wrong.

Along the way I spent a fair amount of money. My own money. I should point out that I do not qualify as a rich person, and my trips to eat at Noma could not be interpreted as examples of fiscal responsibility. Editors, with their songs of woe about budgets, did not volunteer to subsidize my adventures. Most of the time I paid my own way. Even with bargain flights and cheap hotels, my expenses mounted.

Do I regret it, in retrospect? I do not. "Your body is not a temple," Anthony Bourdain once said. "It's an amusement park. Enjoy the ride." That — the ride part — appealed to me. I have read things lately where professional food writers have flicked away pesky questions about Noma by answering, "I never went to Noma because I could not afford it, and it is a travesty to spend money on things one cannot afford." I commend you, food writers. You are paragons of budgetary prudence. May you never sully your fingers with something as destabilizing as a credit card, because if curiosity somehow got the better of you, my God, just think about what could happen. You might find yourself irresponsibly, impulsively, inquisitively boarding a flight to Japan or Vietnam or Senegal or Turkey or Thailand or Colombia just because you want to eat stuff and learn things and meet people. At which point you might have to part with the quaint notion that Brooklyn is the center of the culinary universe, and then what?

Part of what we’re witnessing right now is (to borrow a phrase from the kids) a vibe shift. Vibe shifts are baked into the natural order of things. (I interviewed David Bowie in 2002 and he was realistic about this. "The young have to kill the old," he said. "The young, if they want to achieve their own platform, have to diminish the reputations of the ones that have gone before. That's how life works.") Styles of music and film and fashion come and go, rise and fall. Old systems break down. New generations lobby for change. It's no different in the world of gastronomy. All you need to do is look at recent lists of our Best New Restaurants here at Esquire to see that prim, precious tasting menus seem to be on the way out and casual, get-your-hands-messy spots like Kalaya and Dhamaka are where the action is. (I happen to be equally into tasting menus and food trucks, just as I happen to believe the world is large enough to accommodate both the Berlin Philharmonic and Bad Bunny.)

The pendulum swings back and forth. Last fall I read Milan Kundera's 1967 novel The Joke, a book about how the most strident years of Czech communism had twisted people's lives, and I was taken aback by a passage on page 180 in which a character expresses her proletarian fondness for "an ordinary little restaurant where truck drivers and mechanics go, with just ordinary things to eat and drink." I hadn't expected to find a commentary on restaurant criticism in The Joke, but there it was. "I didn't for a moment believe that Helena breathed more easily in filthy, badly ventilated dives than in clean, well-ventilated restaurants or that she preferred cheap alcohol and food to haute cuisine," Kundera's narrator says. "However, this declaration of faith wasn't without value for me, because it revealed her predilection for a special pose, a pose long since outdated and out of style, a pose going back to the years when revolutionary enthusiasm delighted in anything that was ‘common,’ ‘plebeian,’ ‘ordinary,’ or ‘rustic,’ just as it loved to despise everything that was ‘refined’ or ‘elegant'..."

Ordinary food is dependable and comforting, and I am very much looking forward to my ordinary lunch of tinned sardines and rice, but is that what we always want? Forgive me for saying something that is no longer fashionable to say, but I kept going back to Noma because Noma was extraordinary.

The menu was constantly evolving, and each time I went I encountered absurdly delicious food that resembled no other food I had ever seen, or have seen since, even though plenty of impersonators have tried. Because of the unusual foundations of the cooking and the rigors that Frank Bruni refers to — experimental ferments that had never been attempted, foraged flora that most of us have never tasted — Noma reminded me again and again that eating food can be a way to open your mind. (Is that particular epiphany worth a lot of money? Well, I have heard of NFL games and Broadway shows that go for thousands per ticket — is that worth the money? Not to me, but can we agree that everyone gets to pay whatever the market will bear for the legal drug of their choice?)

I am aware that this type of reaction makes me sound like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, but there were moments when eating something at Noma was like hearing a new note in the musical scale. Ping — a form of beauty I had never imagined before. A brief antidote to the ordinary. Imagine. This is the other side of the coin that we catch a glimpse of in The Bear. Marcus, the Chicago pastry chef in the show who is played by Lionel Boyce, cradles his copy of The Noma Guide to Fermentation and takes inspiration from what he has heard about beautiful, strange, impossible things being created in the fairy-tale city of Copenhagen.

By the way, the food at Noma was not always weird, even though it's the weird ingredients that rev up the comments section. I do not wake up in the middle of the night with a craving for moldy asparagus, no, but fixating on the freaky stuff at Noma is like assuming that the entirety of Prince's creative output can be summed up by "Darling Nikki" and "Head." There were also plenty of dishes at Noma that were juicy and carnal and simple. I still remember a platter of fresh langoustines, dripping from a quick sear on an outdoor grill and a basting of funky butter. I remember a meal that briskly began with cubes of cold fruit on ice, and another that gently ended with a tangle of sun-warmed berries from the forest. I remember looking down at strips of beef tartare on which ants appeared to be stunned in the middle of a frenzy, and I thought the attempt at culinary humor was hokey. Then I tasted the dish and I had to concede that the damn ants gave it a peppery flourish. I have eaten ants numerous times since then. I am no longer squeamish about them. I even crave them.

That has been part of the mission at Noma for 20 years: challenging our preconceptions of not only what can be described as "yummy" but also what can be viewed as luxurious. (This line of thinking held sway at elBulli, too, because of chef Ferran Adrià's determination to shake up the hierarchy of ingredients. As Lisa Abend writes, "one of his most important contributions was to argue, both verbally and on the plate, that a tomato or a lentil had the same culinary value as lobster or foie gras.") What happens when a restaurant serves ants instead of caviar and bee larvae instead of truffles? What happens when you discover that a barbecued cod's head is way better than a lobster tail? Don't believe me? Maybe you’ll believe critic Pete Wells, who did a deft job of describing that dish in The New York Times back in 2018: "Just before the finale of desserts, when you may be second-guessing Mr. Redzepi's decision not to serve any bread with this menu, something close to perfect happens. It is a dish called ‘head of the cod.’ It is not an entire head, but the meatiest chunks on sharp blades of bone that have been as carefully trimmed as any Frenched rack of lamb. The fish has been brushed with seaweed and mushroom glazes reminiscent of soy and miso and then grilled, something like the way yellowtail collar is cooked in an izakaya. There are four cuts and three garnishes, so you have the option of, say, dipping the cheek in horseradish oil and dredging the tongue in a tart pesto made from ground Danish wood ants. The fish is soft, extravagantly rich, and by the time you have found the last shred of flesh you are ready for something sweet."

Doesn't that entice you? And doesn't it unravel your knot of fixed ideas, seeing as how the cod dish at Noma was made from the parts of a fish that restaurants used to toss in the trash heap? And doesn't that waste-nothing approach to cooking seem like something that might benefit a world in environmental peril? "The New Nordic mission is unquestionably a noble one, with its runic emphasis on observing the seasons and using products from the local environment," I wrote back in 2014. "But there are moments when you read about, say, a scorched beet elegantly resting on a bed of wet, whey-soaked hay, and it just doesn't spur the same Pavlovian reflex as a juicy cheeseburger." Okay, but what if it could? What if a chef could be virtuosic enough to make you yearn for a scorched beet? It's totally understandable to think, "People shouldn't spend money to eat at restaurants like Noma when there is so much starvation around the world," and I’ve noticed legions of comments like that in the past week, but what if the R&D departments of restaurants like Noma are at the forefront of figuring out better ways to feed people?

Obviously I’m all too susceptible to "what if," but I suspect it won't be long until I’ll start hunting for a coach seat on another bargain flight to carry me to Copenhagen before Noma closes — or maybe to Kyoto for this spring's Noma residency in Japan. Can I justify the costs? No. Will someone else pay? Unless my editors here at Esquire are feeling generous, no. Have I, like many of my comrades who write about what they eat, grown tired of the pomposity and tedium of tasting menus? Absolutely, and for a while now, with a handful of notable exceptions. (Atomix, Pujol, Le Bernardin, Benu…) But Noma has gotten us to think in new ways, and that is a rare thing. And even if you never wind up eating there, I’m guessing you’ll miss it when it's gone. ​

Jeff Gordinier is Esquire's Food & Drinks Editor.

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