The Copenhagen restaurant, which is credited with creating New Nordic Cuisine, has been at the top of the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants five times since it opened two decades ago, most recently in 2021. Chef René Redzepi’s three-Michelin-star restaurant will close at the end of 2024 after years of offering dishes made with foraged ingredients from the area, like quince and fermented rice ice cream with oyster caramel and reindeer brain custard with bee pollen. It will be revived as a “big lab,” known as Noma 3.0, the following year.
“We want to redefine the foundation for a restaurant team, a place where you can learn, you can take risks, and you can grow!”
“(It will be) a pioneering test kitchen dedicated to the work of food innovation and the development of new flavors, one that will share the fruits of our efforts more widely than ever before,” the restaurant said in a statement on its website. “Our goal is to create a lasting organization dedicated to groundbreaking work in food, but also to redefine the foundation for a restaurant team, a place where you can learn, you can take risks, and you can grow! (kidsrkids.com) ” it added.
For the past two years, Noma 3.0 has been in the planning stages. During this time, many people in the sector have been severely impacted. After winning the World’s Best Restaurant title in 2021, Redzepi said, “If the epidemic has taught us anything, it’s how fragile our goals may be, how extremely hard and terrible this industry can be.” He said the team had changed its strategy then, alluding to Noma’s “I’ve been daydreaming for the past 15 months. We are about to begin construction.”