If dining at the world’s top restaurant is on your bucket list, you better book those plane tickets stat. Noma in Copenhagen is closing.
The revered Danish restaurant opened back in 2003 and, in its two-decade run, has received three Michelin stars as well as ranked first in The World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards five times.
Known for fantastical dishes (alongside daring ones like reindeer heart tartare and deep-fried duck brain served in its own skull), Noma is a New Nordic restaurant with a focus on wild, local and seasonal ingredients that uses age-old practices such as fermentation and foraging.
The restaurant and its celebrated chef-owner René Redzepi have hosted international pop-ups, including in Tulum in Mexico, Japan and right here in Australia. In 2018, Noma also underwent quite the reinvention and Noma 2.0 was born. Why? As Redzepi puts it: “because [the original] Noma had become like a couch, a very comfortable couch that was getting more and more difficult to get up from… sometimes you need to uproot everything.”
Chef and Noma co-owner René Redzepi
Now, Redzepi and the Noma team are uprooting again, stating: “to continue Noma, we must change.” Or, as international titles such as The New York Times and The Washington Post cite, due to fine dining being “unsustainable” (read: financial reasons).
Come 2025, Noma as we currently know it will close to make way for Noma 3.0 – a “pioneering test kitchen” to help expand Noma’s work in food innovation. In short, the restaurant is transforming into a giant lab.
“Serving guests will still be a part of who we are, but being a restaurant will no longer define us. Instead, much of our time will be spent on exploring new projects and developing many more ideas and products,” says the restaurant in an online statement.
Alongside the lab work, though, there is promise of another pop-up, as well as a season in Copenhagen once the team have “gathered enough new ideas and flavours”. “When we return to Copenhagen in the spring of 2025, we will open for Ocean Season, the last of the three-season yearly format we have followed since 2018. We’re beginning a new chapter for our restaurant — a time for us to take even bolder creative leaps, share even more widely, and follow our curiosity wherever it may lead us,” adds the Noma team.
If it’s still a non-negotiable bucket list item, there is still time to visit Noma in its current iteration – you’ll just have to join the waitlist for reserving a spot, which you can do via the Noma website.
Noma, Refshalevej 96, 1432, Copenhagen K, Denmark, noma.dk
