Why the accounts of the best restaurant in the world do not close

When the Michelin Guide gives three red stars to a restaurant, it denotes “exceptional cuisine, worth a special trip”. Anyone planning a trip to Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant run by René Redzepi that’s considered the best in the world, better get your act together: it’s closing at the end of next year.

Dishes carved from natural Redzepi ingredients, such as reindeer ragu with cooked grains and seeds, have created a New Nordic food cult and attracted global tourists to Denmark. At £630 ($1,000) a head, with wine pairings, their dinner menu features “all berries, mushrooms galore – everything we can find in the woods”.

But all that searching has taken a toll on Redzepi and his team of 95 chefs, waiters and other employees. “This is just too difficult, and we have to work in a different way,” he told the New York Times this week, announcing that he will transition from a full-time restaurant to a “pioneering test kitchen” and e-commerce operation, which will occasionally appear as a restaurant.

This in part reflects the pressure on all restaurants as they recover from the pandemic: ingredient costs have risen dramatically and it has become harder to recruit staff. It also signals a crisis for those at the top, whose business model has put immense pressure on chefs and apprentices alike for often low (and sometimes none) rewards.

Redzepi describes the work as “hard, tiring and poorly paid, under poor management conditions that wear people down”, and Noma only started paying its interns in October. Before that, the “interns” who flocked to Denmark to add the prestigious name to their professional résumés worked for nothing, plucking duck feathers and picking herbs.

It seems unlikely that a restaurant could charge that much and remain financially fragile, and Redzepi says adding $50,000 to its monthly payroll didn’t force it to change course. But Ruth Rogers, owner of the River Café in London, said that when she visited Noma last year, “they were concerned about the sustainability of having so many employees and such an expensive scheme.”

A third Michelin star demands culinary and service standards so high that they can be a burden for a “restaurateur” (Noma also has an extra star: the green one, for sustainability). When the Spanish restaurant elBulli closed a decade ago, it had a team of 48 chefs and 28 waiters delivering 40 dishes a night to 50 customers and, as a result, was making losses of €500,000 a year.

Pressure is passed on from demanding (and sometimes abusive) chefs throughout the kitchen brigade to junior chefs and apprentices at the bottom. Redzepi once confessed that the perfectionist rage against mistakes began to bubble up inside him when “I had my own restaurant, with my own money invested, with the weight of all the expectations in the world.”

The formula, however, has worked for the last 30 years, not just for celebrity chefs, but also for the cities and regions they have given mythical effect. A study in Spain found that Michelin-starred restaurants, particularly those with three stars, are a huge draw for tourists. Despite the price, Noma’s “hunting and forest season” is already sold out through mid-February.

But chefs like Redzepi aren’t the only ones getting bored. Noma is widely praised for its use of natural ingredients, but its employment model doesn’t seem as sustainable. Even customers who can afford it also think twice before flying long distances to be served elaborate meals by underpaid chefs who work long hours in pursuit of perfection.

Rogers says he respects and admires Redzepi, but thinks “there’s a doubt about Michelin-starred restaurants and good experiences. To me it seems quite old-fashioned.” She remembers visiting Parisian restaurants where “you dressed up, you were intimidated by the chef and the sommelier and you didn’t feel well enough to be there. You ate really well, but it was scary.”

His response was to co-found a restaurant that, while expensive and beloved by celebrities, eschews formality and only has one Michelin star (“high-quality cuisine, worth a visit”). She says the Michelin guide once suggested she could earn a second star if she ditched paper tablecloths, but she ignored the advice.

Redzepi’s new idea is even more democratic: reorganizing chefs to create “new flavors and ideas” for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects. It is already selling items such as “forage vinaigrette” at £25 (£155) a bottle, as well as membership to a private tasting club for £475 (£2,954). He needs to move 25 bottles of vinaigrette to match the revenue of a wine-drinking customer.

A test kitchen doesn’t have the mythical effect of a famous restaurant, so Noma will continue to appear in public, in Denmark and elsewhere. If he manages to pull off the trick of maintaining prestige and pricing power without having to constantly serve, he will be envied by others who remain stuck in a rut.

Redzepi has always been an innovator, and this is his most interesting experience: not with the food itself, but in making an elite sustainable institution for the chefs as well as the customers. It’s time for a change.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves