The Real Cost of a Meal at Noma
The biggest restaurant opening of 2026 was always going to be Noma L.A., even if it isn’t properly a restaurant at all. It’s a pop-up, albeit a substantial one—a four-month residency by the pioneering Copenhagen restaurant, taking over the Paramour Estate, a California-Gothic manor in Silver Lake, and transforming it into a home for inventive, cerebral, exploratory meals at fifteen hundred dollars a head. When tickets went on sale, in January, the entire run sold out in minutes. Nearly everything Noma does is news; the restaurant’s influence—and that of its head chef, co-owner, and public face, René Redzepi—sends ripples through the culinary world like a rogue moon. This past weekend, on the eve of the L.A. residency, the news was ugly. On Saturday, March 7th, the Times reporter Julia Moskin published a heavily sourced article chronicling a sustained culture of physical and emotional abuse at Noma between 2009 and 2017, most of it at Redzepi’s hands. Moskin describes reports of the chef punching, pinching, and jabbing cooks, verbally assaulting them, slamming them against walls, and subjecting them to humiliating public punishments for seemingly trivial transgressions, such as adjusting the volume of the dining-room sound system, or leaving a tweezer mark on the petal of an edible flower.
Aspects of the conduct outlined in Moskin’s article are old news. In 2015 Redzepi published an essay in the food magazine Lucky Peach in which he admitted to having been “a bully” and “a terrible boss,” and addressed a specific incident in which he viciously berated a young cook. He also professed a newfound commitment to modelling a less volatile, less aggressive kitchen environment. But the new revelations of physical violence make Redzepi’s prior gestures toward amends-making feel like a lie. The stories of abuse have newly come to light thanks largely to Noma’s former head of fermentation, the chef Jason Ignacio White, who last month began posting to Instagram about harrowing acts he had witnessed at the restaurant; this prompted other Noma alumni to reach out to White with their own testimonials, many of which appear to be corroborated by Moskin’s reporting. (A spokesperson for Noma told The New Yorker that the institution has made “meaningful changes to transform our culture” and that it is conducting an “independent audit” to insure that it keeps its “workplace safe.”) In the days since the Times article was published, several corporate sponsors of Noma’s L.A. residency pulled their support. On Wednesday, the residency’s first day of service was picketed by protesters organized by White in conjunction with the hospitality-labor organization One Fair Wage. The same day, Redzepi announced, via social media, that he would “step away.”
What comes out of Noma’s kitchens and laboratories is, to my mind, the closest thing the gastronomic world has to art. So much of ultra-high-end dining is constrained by the need to rationalize itself to diners; a restaurant that charges hundreds (or, increasingly, thousands) of dollars is only persuasively “worth it” if it bombards customers with material justifications for its price tag—luxury ingredients, opulent tableware, militantly choreographed platings and service. Noma, by contrast, is more in tune with the standards applied elsewhere in the arts: the worth of what it sells arises from ingenuity and point of view. I’ve eaten there twice—in 2016, at its original location, in a centuries-old maritime warehouse in Copenhagen’s inner harbor, and again, in 2019, at Noma 2.0, a purpose-built restaurant and culinary campus a few neighborhoods over. Both meals were defined by Noma’s signature devotion to “sense of place”—a culinary cliché now, but only because Noma made it one. The restaurant’s philosophy, built on hyperlocal ingredients, many of them unexpected or bizarre, all prepared in ways that were strikingly evocative of climate and season and terrain, provided an emotive counterpoint to the sterile molecular-gastronomy movement that it drew upon and eclipsed. During my more recent visit, several of the courses were built around a variety of cultivated molds; nearly none of them was delicious (mold, for the most part, tastes like nothing), but I left the meal feeling enlivened by the sheer scope of Noma’s creativity, and somewhat intellectually stunned.
People love to scoff at this sort of high-concept culinary stuff. What’s served at Noma is “food” in the way that couture is clothing–a basic human need spun so far beyond the minimums of physical exigency that it’s almost nonsensical to hold it to similar standards. Did lunch at Noma taste good? Is a shredded, inside-out, three-sleeved garment by Rei Kawakubo a “shirt”? The questions are, to a point, irrelevant; you’re either disposed to accept the potential artistic merits of this type of formal play, or you’re baffled by, and maybe a little contemptuous of, those monied suckers who willingly shell out for it. In January, not long after seats for Noma L.A. went on sale, I was a guest on the KCRW radio program “Press Play,” discussing the rabid reaction to the ticket drop. Asked about the eye-watering cost of the meal, I defended it: people spent that amount or more to go to a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé show, which is just as ephemeral as a tasting-menu dinner. Well-heeled patrons of the opera or the ballet will pay oodles of money for the same sort of see-and-be-seen social jockeying that will certainly be taking place at the Paramour Estate.
Another thing about consuming art is that it is, in essence, a matter of choice. The torn-up shirt, the color-washed canvas, the orchestra stilling its bows for four minutes and thirty-three seconds of room tone, the butterfly-shaped cracker covered in a downy layer of white mold: art is a consensus, an agreement of value between creator and consumer. I don’t think the work of Noma is empty now that Redzepi, the embodiment of its cachet, is being held accountable for a fuller range of abuses; on the contrary, I think the goals that the restaurant pursues, and that its vast and largely anonymous corps of workers achieve—novelty, technique, narrative, surprise—are, in many ways, the only things that matter in restaurants, once the bare physical fact of hunger has been satiated. But as we learn over and over again—and, if we forget, we are forced to relearn—no art exists without the circumstances of its creation. Noma’s influence is essential to the story of the violations that took place there. A stint at Noma is the highlight of any cook’s résumé, the culinary equivalent to singing at the Met or dancing with the Bolshoi or interning at The Paris Review. It’s easy to understand why thousands of people clamored to work there, and why, once a lucky few made it in, they might have found it difficult to complain, or to criticize, or to leave. The institution weaponized its own status. To reject the significance of Noma as an institution now is, in a way, to unfairly shift a portion of blame onto the very people who were hurt—people who were there only because they, too, believed in its value. They weren’t wrong to want to be in that kitchen; what was wrong was the way their adulation and ambition were rewarded with terror and abuse.
It sometimes feels like the restaurant world is in a perpetual state of reckoning, a ceaseless cycle in which prominent chefs are exposed for their misdeeds, then express contrition and promise big adjustments and more humane workplaces. On Saturday, the same day that Moskin’s Times report was published, both Noma and Redzepi posted statements to their social-media accounts addressing the allegations. Redzepi apologized, saying, “To those who have suffered under my leadership, my bad judgment, or my anger, I am deeply sorry and I have worked to change.” Reading the flood of comments that piled up underneath the posts, I was horrified to see how many expressed solidarity with the chef rather than with his victims. Some of the messages of support seemed motivated by a sense of friendship, or at least celebrity-class solidarity. Big-name chefs such as Michael Solomonov and Hajime Yoneda left strings of heart emojis; Pierre Thiam wrote that he admired Redzepi’s humility. More unnerving, though, were similar comments from cooks and fans who haven’t achieved the same levels of fame and success. They applauded Redzepi’s courage. They praised his resilience. They outright asked for jobs at Noma. Some—too many—dismissed Redzepi’s thirty-odd accusers entirely, seemingly out of a belief that enduring violence is just what kitchen life entails, and that those who want to make it as chefs need to suck it up. But not even Redzepi appears interested in that exonerative line of thinking anymore. “When I first started cooking, I worked in kitchens where shouting, humiliation, and fear were simply part of the culture,” he wrote in his statement. As Noma grew, he continued, “I found myself becoming the kind of chef I had once promised myself I would never be.”
Helen, Help Me!
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A new book from Redzepi and his team, “The Noma Guide to Building Flavour,” is scheduled for release in April, presumably timed to capitalize on interest in the Los Angeles residency. Earlier this week, I received an advance copy from the publisher—almost certainly put in the mail before the Times story dropped—along with a handwritten note from a publicist inviting me to spend time with Redzepi when he’s in New York, next month, for the launch. “I love that you can really hear his voice,” the publicist wrote in her note to me, of the new book. “The curiosity, the passion, and focus on moving forward.” The book and the L.A. pop-up come during what was already a transitional period for Noma. Its Copenhagen dining room ostensibly closed forever earlier this year, and Redzepi has been talking for a while about the launch of Noma 3.0, a hazily articulated new concept set to launch in 2027. His statement about “stepping away” was posted to Instagram with a video of him addressing the gathered staff in L.A. It’s worth noting, though, that he doesn’t appear to actually be leaving his role as the head of Noma, or divesting from the brand. You punch an intern in the stomach. You crouch behind a counter so that the dining room can’t see, and stab a line cook in the leg with a barbecue fork. Time passes; time continues to pass. “This is your restaurant now, each and every one of you,” Redzepi tells his staff. “For me, I’m going into planning the next phase, O.K.?” ♦