Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/dining/noma-closing-rene-redzepi.html
The decision comes as Noma and many other elite restaurants are facing scrutiny of their treatment of the workers, many of them paid poorly or not at all, who produce and serve these exquisite dishes. The style of fine dining that Noma helped create and promote around the globe — wildly innovative, labor-intensive and vastly expensive — may be undergoing a sustainability crisis.
ImageTwo chefs cooking in an open-air kitchen, decorated with leaves.
A signature of Noma and its cuisine is its luxurious, modern-rustic aesthetic.Credit...Ditte Isager for The New York Times
Two chefs cooking in an open-air kitchen, decorated with leaves.
Mr. Redzepi, who has long acknowledged that grueling hours are required to produce the restaurant’s cuisine, said that the math of compensating nearly 100 employees fairly, while maintaining high standards, at prices that the market will bear, is not workable.
“We have to completely rethink the industry,” he said. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.”
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The chef David Kinch, who last week closed his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Manresa, in Los Gatos, Calif., said, “the last 30 years were a gilded age,” when ambitious restaurants multiplied and became less formal and more exciting. His casual restaurants will remain open, but he said fine dining was no longer something he wanted to do himself, or to inflict on his staff, calling the work “backbreaking.”
“Fine dining is at a crossroads, and there have to be huge changes,” he said. “The whole industry realizes that, but they do not know how it’s going to come out.”
The Finnish chef Kim Mikkola, who worked at Noma for four years, said that fine dining, like diamonds, ballet and other elite pursuits, often has abuse built into it.
“Everything luxetarian is built on somebody’s back; somebody has to pay,” he said.
A newly empowered generation of workers has begun pushing back against that model, often using social media to call out employers. The Willows Inn, in Washington State, run by the Noma-trained chef Blaine Wetzel, closed in November, after a 2021 Times report on systemic abuse and harassment; top destinations like Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Eleven Madison Park have faced media investigations into working conditions. Recent films and TV series like “The Menu,” “Boiling Point” and “The Bear” have brought the image of armies of harried young chefs, silently wielding tweezers in service to a chef-auteur, into popular culture.
In a 2015 essay, Mr. Redzepi admitted to bullying his staff verbally and physically, and has often acknowledged that his efforts to be a calmer, kinder leader have not been fully successful.
“In an ideal restaurant, employees could work four days a week, feel empowered and safe and creative,” Mr. Redzepi said. “The problem is how to pay them enough to afford children, a car and a house in the suburbs.”
Noma’s internship program has also served as a way for Noma to shore up its labor force, supplying 20 to 30 full-time workers (“stagiaires” is the traditional French term) who do much of the painstaking labor — hand-peeling walnuts and separating lavender leaves from stems — that defines Noma’s food and aesthetic.
Until last October, the program provided only a work visa. However, being able to say, “I staged at Noma” is a priceless culinary credential. For that reason alone, most of the alumni interviewed said that an internship at Noma is worth the expense, the exhaustion and the stress.
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