“Edibles & Potables” is F&D’s Sunday slot for food and dining explorations outside our customary metro Louisville coverage area.
Across the ocean blue in Europa, there’s a reinvention underway.
At Noma, there’ll be “no mo” reindeer brain custard with bee pollen. CNN helpfully examines the world-renowned Copenhagen restaurant’s approaching end game.
Noma, one of the most feted restaurants in the world, is set to close its doors to diners next year. Since opening two decades ago, the Copenhagen restaurant – credited with the invention of New Nordic Cuisine – topped the list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants five times, most recently in 2021.
But after years of serving dishes based on locally foraged ingredients – from reindeer brain custard with bee pollen to a quince and fermented rice ice cream with an oyster caramel – chef René Redzepi’s three-Michelin-star venture will bring its restaurant chapter to a close at the end of 2024. The following year it will be reborn as a “giant lab,” dubbed Noma 3.0.
“(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.
At the New York Times, Frank Bruni duly considered Noma and the “Fizzle of Too-Fine Dining,” but a more interesting “opinion” submission to the newspaper followed shortly thereafter, as written by chef and restaurateur Vivian Howard.
Howard’s most important overarching point: “Extremist fine dining’s challenges are just the amuse-bouche in a multicourse menu of the rotting state of the restaurant business.”
Foodie Fever Dreams Can’t Keep Restaurants Afloat
A large part of the hospitality industry is ravaged, thanks to the pandemic and its fallout. Even spots that pivoted through the initial crisis were soon suffocated by labor shortages or a mucked-up supply chain. But restaurants were struggling with losses in staffing, momentum and revenue long before 2020. The pandemic merely made obvious the archaic and limited nature of our gerbil wheel of a business model.
Howard knows of which she writes, having recently closed Chef & the Farmer, her farm-to-table restaurant in Kinston, NC.
We did not bury, dehydrate or reconcentrate things in our kitchen, but everyone — even the interns — got paid. Even so, Chef & the Farmer closed, in...Read more
