Noma is less sustainable than its reindeer ragout

When the Michelin Guide gives three red stars to a restaurant, it denotes “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”. Those planning a journey to Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant run by René Redzepi that is rated the world’s best, should get a move on: it closes for regular service at the end of next year.

Redzepi’s sculpted dishes of natural ingredients, such as ragout of reindeer with cooked grains and seeds, created the New Nordic food cult and drew global tourists to Denmark. For £630 per head with a wine pairing, its dinner menu features “all the wild berries, the bounty of mushrooms — everything we can find wild in the forest”.

But all that foraging has taken its toll on Redzepi and his team of 95 chefs, waiters and other staff. “This is simply too hard and we have to work in a different way,” he told the New York Times this week, announcing that it will turn from a full-time restaurant into a “pioneering test kitchen” and ecommerce operation, which will occasionally pop up as a restaurant.

This partly reflects the pressure on all dining outlets as they recover from the pandemic: ingredient costs have risen sharply and it has become harder to recruit staff. It also signals a crisis for those at the very top, whose business model has loaded immense strain on junior chefs and apprentices, for often low (and sometimes no) rewards.

Redzepi describes it as “hard, gruelling, low-paid work under poor management conditions that wears people out” and Noma only started paying its own interns in October. Before then, the “stagiaires” who flocked to Denmark to add its prestigious name to their professional CVs worked for free, plucking duck feathers and gathering herbs.

It sounds unlikely that a restaurant can charge quite so much and remain financially fragile, and Redzepi says adding $50,000 to its monthly wage bill did not force the change of course. But Ruth Rogers, owner of the River Café in London, said that when she visited Noma last year, “they were worried about the sustainability of having so many staff and such an expensive set-up”.

A third Michelin star demands such high culinary and service standards that it can be a rod for a restaurateur’s back (Noma also has one extra: a green star for sustainability). When the Spanish restaurant elBulli closed a decade ago, it had a team of 48 chefs and 28 waiting staff delivering 40 dishes a night to 50 customers, and was consequently losing €500,000 annually.

The pressure is passed by demanding (and sometimes abusive) head chefs down the entire brigade de cuisine to the junior chefs and apprentices at the bottom. Redzepi once confessed that perfectionist rage against errors started to bubble up within him when “I had my own restaurant, with my own money invested, with the weight of all the expectation in the world”.

The formula has nonetheless worked for the past 30 years, not only for celebrity chefs but the cities and regions to which they have given a halo effect. One study in Spain found that Michelin-starred restaurants, particularly those with three stars, were a large draw for tourists. Despite the price, Noma’s “game and forest season” is already sold out until mid-February.

But chefs such as Redzepi are not the only ones getting tired. Noma is widely praised for its use of natural ingredients, but its employment model does not feel half as sustainable. Even diners who can afford it may think twice about flying long distances to be served elaborate meals that rely on low-paid chefs working long hours for perfection.

Rogers says she respects and admires Redzepi but thinks that “there is a question about Michelin-starred restaurants and fine dining. To me, it feels quite old-fashioned.” She recalls visiting Paris restaurants where “you would dress up, be intimidated by the head chef and the sommelier and not feel good enough to be there. You would eat very well, but it was terrifying.”

Her response was to co-found a restaurant that, although expensive and beloved by celebrities, shuns formality and only has one Michelin star (“high quality cooking, worth a stop”). She says Michelin once suggested it could gain a second star by ditching paper tablecloths, but she ignored the advice.

Redzepi’s new idea is more democratic still: redeploying chefs to create “new flavours and ideas” for its ecommerce operation Noma Projects. It is already selling items such as “forager’s vinaigrette” at £25 a bottle, as well as membership of a private tasting club for £475. It needs to shift 25 bottles of vinaigrette to match the revenue from one wine-drinking diner.

A test kitchen lacks the halo effect of a famous restaurant, so Noma will keep on popping up in public, in Denmark and elsewhere. If it can pull off the trick of retaining prestige and pricing power without having constantly to serve, it will be envied by others that remain stuck in a harsh rut.

Redzepi has always been an innovator and this is his most interesting experiment: not with the food itself but in making an elite institution sustainable for chefs as well as customers. It is time for a change.

john.gapper@ft.com