Last month, Copenhagen-based influencer restaurant Noma announced it would close its "traditional restaurant" and transform it into a "food lab" after 2024.
Image source: NOMA's official website
How did a "Nordic food" restaurant that was supposed to do its job get so much sought-after? In fact, Noma's "history of ascendancy" can be called the "youngest son of a chaebol" in the restaurant industry.
The restaurant itself is "born" with a golden spoon: Chef & founder Rezhepi, who originally studied under the legendary chef Ferran Adrea of Barcelona (whose Matador molecular gourmet restaurant is also world-famous for its difficult waiting), was already famous at the age of 25, becoming a high-profile future star in the industry.
Chef Rene Rezeppi (Credit: Bon Appetit)
In 2003, Remzepi founded Noma, a restaurant converted from an old seaside warehouse in Copenhagen, and the food is also insistent on finding local Danish ingredients, and its mellow Nordic style from the inside out quickly made it famous.
In 2004, Rezhepi organized Nordic cooking workshops and drafted and signed the "New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto" with a dozen Scandinavian chefs. The manifesto calls for a return to simplicity in cooking and emphasises the use of more local ingredients.
After the Nordic Council of Ministers adopted this declaration, "New Nordic" cooking gradually became a full-fledged culinary movement, and the Jyllands-Post commented that it was not only a concept, but also a philosophy that allowed diners to experience "the fantasy and craftsmanship of making a particularly delicious taste even with the simplest ingredients".
This local food movement upended the Nordic food culture scene, with Rezhepi becoming a pioneer in Nordic dining and Noma going from a restaurant to a way of life. At the same time, Noma became a Danish pride – before that, the most famous Nordic food was the (notorious) canned herring, and Rezhepi and Noma rebranded the unpopular Nordic cuisine with practical actions.
Image source: NOMA's official website
On the way to Top, Noma used Nordic as the main ingredients, coupled with the chef's whimsical creativity, innovative pioneering concepts, and some subtle national feelings, and finally successfully cooked the world's first Internet celebrity restaurant.
Of course, the recognition of Noma is not only from the public, but also from the professional field: in 2005, Noma received its first Michelin star, many well-known media around the world reported it, and in 2007, the restaurant was included in the world's 50 best restaurants - a list that began in 2002 and was voted by thousands of people in the global restaurant industry. Since then, Noma has continued to rise in the ranking of the world's top 50 restaurants until it reached number one in 2010 and remained the top spot in the following three years.
As of this year, Noma has been named Best Restaurant in the World five times.
Due to its popularity, Rezhepi himself has published books to satisfy the needs of diners. Even so, Rezhepi himself has always had an "unsustainable" mindset about Noma's business, initially thinking that Noma would be open for ten years at most — he felt that his creativity would dry up, and Noma would cease to exist.
In fact, this isn't the first time Noma has gone out of business. In 2015, Lei Zhepi announced that the restaurant would be closed for a year in 2016, and Lei Zhepi said in an interview that it was related to his depleted creativity.
But he didn't sit idle, and during the whole year of closing, he and his team thought about how to make new breakthroughs in cooking, opened pop-up stores in Japan, Mexico and other places, constantly sought inspiration, and finally reopened in 2017 with a new menu and new concept, and due to the accumulation and anticipation of the previous accumulation, Noma 2.0 won the second place in the world's 50 best restaurants as soon as it opened.
Rezepi is still focused on seasonal food, "what to eat," but more focused on how to make the humble food that people take for granted into amazing flavors. "From focusing on what diners like, evolving to focusing on what they want to express", no longer catering to guests' preferences, focusing on expressing their Nordic philosophy.
Image source: The New York Times
While this performance is inevitably controversial and with mixed reviews from diners, they all acknowledge that they have tasted the best ingredients at Noma and the chef's ambitions.
In the 20 years since its founding, Noma has gone through many ups and downs and is still one of the hardest restaurants in the world to book, although the number of diners has decreased significantly due to the pandemic, but the waiting time has only been reduced from one year to half a year. Now it has announced that it is closed again, and it is said that due to financial factors, three months ago, Noma had to pay nearly $50,000 more per month for interns.
However, creative guru Rezhepi said that this closure was not without warning, after all, he said many years ago that Noma would not keep going. Restaurants affected by the epidemic have also been forced to close several times, for a total period of more than 6 months.
Rezhepi himself believes that this closure stems from the unsustainable nature of the global fine dining industry, which, combined with Noma's perfectionism in kitchen work, has led him to hold dishes to a higher standard – and if he doesn't, he simply gives up.
But that doesn't mean that diners around the world can't taste the geek's handiwork, in fact, as early as the beginning of the pandemic, he began to think: if people can't eat in restaurants, how can they all taste it?
This idea of great love has led Rezhepi to try it again in the Noma Lab, which plans to sell products through e-commerce in the future and continue to open pop-up stores around the world. As for whether it will be reopened, no one can say.
It is worth mentioning that the economic factors that are widely believed to "break" Noma actually contain the cruel exploitation of the Nordic catering industry: Noma only started paying interns 3 months ago, and before that, these interns were unpaid labor.
This is the "unpaid internship" stage unique to Noma.
Candidates who dream of becoming chefs come from all over the world, but need a three-month free trial and overload the probationary period before wanting to work for them: The New York Times interviewed dozens of Noma employees/former employees who said that working 16-hour days has always been commonplace, even for unpaid interns.
A former Noma employee mentioned that he had seen trainee chefs pluck ducks in the cold rain and their hands stiffened. But in fact, this work can be done in the indoor preparation room, and she does not understand why she tortures interns like this. Another Indian intern named Namrata Hegde didn't learn cooking skills during his three-month internship and basically did only one thing – make fruit puree beetles.
Some interns spent three months plucking pigeons (Credit: New York Times).
In Lei Zhepi's own transformation, there are some dragon slayer teenagers who turn into dragons. He has written about workplace violence in the catering industry, saying that chefs will be beaten for small mistakes, slower movements will be directly smashed with plates by their superiors, and verbal humiliation is even more commonplace.
Rezhepi has tried to change this, such as using therapy and walking meditation to control his temper. But in the end, it was clear that little had been achieved, as Noma employees said hearing the chef's roar was a daily routine. In the eyes of the staff, the chef is not only harsh, but also very irritable, in addition to frequent verbal and angry words, and even calls the employees back to the restaurant at midnight to clean the back kitchen again.
Rezhepi himself acknowledges this phenomenon, "Every kitchen I've stayed in has a grumpy chef, and I don't know why," but argues that "when you become a chef yourself and are fully committed, it's hard to handle."
Despite the fact that the attitude towards employees has been called workplace violence, Noma's employees usually do not leave and rarely refute it, because "the bastard who yelled at you in the first place is a role model for you to respect, and worse, he is always right, he scolds you just in the hope that you can learn and get better".
There is too much dark history in Copenhagen's dining scene. A former catering apprentice took to social media to confide in his abuses and launched an anonymous solicitation from all his peers – complaints flew in like snowflakes. Racism, sexism, homophobia, workplace bullying, and long working hours are all egregious behaviors. The apprentices had to swallow their breath, because there was also a "blacklist culture" in Copenhagen's catering scene: if a migrant worker was caught saying bad things about the chef, he could hardly work in the Copenhagen catering industry anymore.
Noma, on the other hand, did not pay interns until late 2022, and said it would close its shop three months after the salary.
Written by: TT
Edited by Echo