Not too long ago, René Redzepi sent gourmands into a spin with the announcement of Noma’s imminent closure. Yet the Copenhagen establishment, perhaps the most innovative of this century, remains open. What gives?
Most days, René Redzepi tries to stay in bed until 8 a.m. even though his body wants to wake before, which is both a parable about control and a description of the morning routine of a man revered for his tightly wound discipline. Exactly what time he wakes depends on when he gets home from Noma, the Copenhagen fine-dining restaurant with a comical number of “World’s Best Restaurant” awards, where fine-diners eat cod milt that looks like a tangle of brains but tastes like caviar butter, coated in a dusting of faintly cheesy microplaned walnut. Food that is served in various bits of hollowed out crab shells. Food that is art. Art that is food, even though you cannot tell how it will taste just from looking at it.
It might not be surprising to learn that, once he does get out of bed, the Macedonian-Danish chef is particular about his coffee. (He weighs even the water to the gram.) After a “death-style workout” with other chefs, Redzepi makes his way back to the spindle of land jutting between two stretches of water in Copenhagen, where the restaurant and its test kitchen have been for just over seven years.
All of which is notable only because Noma is supposed to be closed. Since early 2023, when The New York Times announced that the restaurant would be shuttering for regular service at the end of 2024, culinary commentators have been spiraling about the fated implosion of fine dining. At the time, Redzepi cited the costs required to keep a restaurant like Noma running like the Bolshoi Ballet. A restaurant that was, by then, a metonymy for a certain style of innovative cooking and service.
So how did I come to sit down at the pass on a grey spring day, peering at a crab frothing foam out of a hole in its shell, wondering if that hole was its mouth? Sitting in front of this supremely powerful man as he commands a team, I think about how there are often rumors about a certain tier of chef—yelling, that sort of thing—and how Redzepi’s temperament, at least with a reporter, reminds me of my dad’s friend who loves hallucinogenic benders on the beach.
Redzepi wants the next iteration of his legacy to be something future generations can man (which is to say, financially viable) yet still avant-garde. But the details—funding, paperwork—have proved challenging. And so here is another parable about control: A man built something too grand to last, but to reform it for resilience, he must sustain it in its current form, at least for now.
These delays and his eventual plan all make perfect sense while he is talking, but then when he stops and the words linger—“pop-up entity” and “spending crisis” and “tariffs” and “we will use the restaurant as our lab”—it’s like Troxler’s fading, that optical illusion where the dots begin to dissolve away the longer you stare at the center.
Here is what is clear: Redzepi’s eventual goal is to hold a once-ish annual culinary exhibition, less like regular dinner service and more like an art show that takes months of preparation. He’ll fund it through side works, like Noma Projects. For now, though, as he navigates geopolitical and bureaucratic hurdles, it’s business as usual, which means at least until June, ocean season at Noma is underway. There is a “ravioli” of fried shrimp wrapped in seaweed, a malt-flour dough shaped into a crab with roe on the side, and Danish squid that you dress by shaking a poppy-flower bud filled with seeds over the top (each shake smells like a bagel shop). There is a hallway that stretches so long from the dining room, past the test kitchen and beyond, that one cannot see to its end.
Fine dining, the restaurateur says, is “where people experiment for the sake of experimentation.” Places like Noma “aren’t like restaurants—they transcend. They are creative factories where so many things that talk to culture are active.”
Not to say the chef doesn’t appreciate home cooking; in fact, the second of his two Proustian madeleines was a chicken-liver pasta cooked by his wife when he was 26 and she was 20. He had fallen in love with her, and she listened when he said he liked chicken liver. (The first was a tangle of completely see-through noodles at El Bulli, before El Bulli was a thing.) Indeed, the night after I have lunch at the Noma pass, I spot his wife in the casual wine bar of another Noma alum, and it feels like the answer to a question I hadn’t had a chance to fully ask about how people actually eat dinner most of the time.
But I take Chef’s point. There will always be a need for meals that leave you thinking differently about the world and its many molecules.
Redzepi becomes uneasy when things feel too comfortable. “When I’m worried or afraid of something, I feel that’s where I need to go,” he says. He takes protracted hikes (the longest so far: 745.6 miles). “It’s like a magnifying glass to the questions inside of you,” he tells me. By his account, his fears are the same ones you or I might have: “I’m afraid for my kids all the time; I’m afraid when I see Elon Musk Sieg Heiling to the world.”
But he isn’t afraid to keep pushing forward, toward some new, nebulous sort of restaurant that, as of yet, no one can totally grasp. “I want to create a thing that lives and creates value and impact,” he says. “My life’s work will be done if Noma doesn’t need René Redzepi around to be Noma.”
I ask if that—the idea of his obsolescence—could be added to the short list of things that scare him. “Sometimes,” he says, “But deep down, it mostly exhilarates me.”
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