Executive Briefing
Noma’s evolution, René Redzepi, and the future of restaurants (and chefs)
And: What the Ace Hotel got right on the way to its $85 million acquisition.
By Dan Frommer on Monday, January 23, 2023 at 8:00 am
The big story in the restaurant world so far this year is that Noma — ranked the “world’s best” several times, and a very special experience — will be significantly changing its business model at the end of next year.
Instead of operating as a permanent restaurant, chef and majority owner René Redzepi plans to treat his Copenhagen kitchen as a “giant lab — 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.”
Noma’s r&d efforts, centered around fermentation, will increasingly go toward the Noma Projects packaged food business that it launched last year.
And Redzepi and team will continue to stage pop-ups, both in Noma’s airy, woodgrained dining room that just opened in 2018, and around the world: The next one starts in March in Kyoto, at the newish Ace Hotel there.
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