Noma reopened in Copenhagen on August 5, and the restaurant crowned World’s Best five times between 2010 and 2021 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants made an unusual choice: it gave up its three Michelin stars, on purpose. No new star to show off this year, and that’s not an oversight.
The bigger change is René Redzepi. The chef who built modern Nordic cuisine around fermentation and foraging no longer runs the kitchen. He now holds the title of creative director and says he intends to stay out of it entirely, leaving day-to-day cooking to Mexican chef Pablo Soto. His new project, nicknamed “Noma 3.0” internally, aims to turn the restaurant into a research hub for the food industry, with work on fermentation, seaweed and insects, among other ingredients.
The shift didn’t come out of nowhere. In March, a New York Times investigation gathered accounts from dozens of former employees describing psychological and physical abuse between 2009 and 2017. Redzepi publicly acknowledged that his past behavior had been “harmful” to his staff before stepping back from running the kitchen. Since then, the restaurant says it has introduced paid internships, a human resources team and an external audit of working conditions, carried out this spring, just ahead of the reopening.
The new menu changes every month to follow what the team calls twelve micro-seasons, and costs around 4,500 Danish kroner, close to $700, rising to 6,500 kroner with wine pairings. Annika de Las Heras takes over as CEO, tasked with professionalizing the organization, while Mette Brink Søberg leads a twelve-person research and development team.
Dropping Michelin certification to bet everything on the strength of the name is a real gamble. It was commercial partners, including American Express and booking platform Resy, who pulled out of a Noma residency in Los Angeles at the height of the controversy. Twenty years after building the restaurant’s reputation, the Redzepi name is now both its biggest asset and its biggest risk.