The Unbearable Costs of an Extraordinary Meal

Noma chef René Redzepi announced he was closing one of the world's most lauded restaurants-again. If luxe dining is no longer sustainable, what will be the culinary world's real loss?

- JEFF GORDINIER

LISTEN, I GET IT. YOU SAW THE NEWS THAT NOMA, THE EXPENSIVE restaurant in Copenhagen, was planning to close, and you snorted. Maybe you left a comment on a media platform drawing a comparison between Noma and The Menu, the goth Ralph Fiennes movie about an expensive restaurant. Maybe you liked a post on Facebook declaring that fine dining has suffered a lethal blow and that no sane person will ever again seek out the bloated, calcified pleasures of a tasting menu. Perhaps you nodded along with Frank Bruni of The New York Times as he categorized Noma as one of those "internationally renowned, ardently coveted temples of gastronomy that are forever trying to dazzle self-regarding epicures with new stunts, novel sensations, modes of presentation that we hadn't imagined, flora and fauna rarely pinned down on a plate." And maybe you just thought: Whatever. This is a restaurant far away in Denmark that serves weird food to rich people, and I cannot pretend to care. Which is a totally sensible response. I get it.

Led by the restless and tempestuous chef René Redzepi, whose mother worked as a house cleaner and whose cab-driving father was a Muslim immigrant from what's now known as the Republic of North Macedonia, Noma opened in a former whale-oil warehouse in Copenhagen almost 20 years ago. Back then, the dining room was usually empty. Redzepi's bold attempts to forge a new style of Scandinavian cuisine drew a fair share of mockery ("The Stinky Whale" was one sobriquet that floated around), but eventually European food critics took notice and the buzz grew. In 2010, some dubious consortium dubbed Noma the world's best restaurant, and it was off to the races for Redzepi, who'd soon land on the cover of Time magazine.