Closing of world’s best restaurant highlights that today’s fine dining culture is unsustainable

Closing of world’s best restaurant highlights that today’s fine dining culture is unsustainable

Until now the devotion that celebrity chefs inspire tended to undercut issues like poor pay, long hours; but Redzepi finally admits that something in the system is profoundly broke.

Chef René Redzepi, the globally influential chef behind the New Nordic food revolution, has stated what was obvious enough to inspire a satirical thriller, The Menu, last year: The current fine dining culture is unsustainable. Citing this as the reason, Redzepi has also announced the closure of Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant long considered the best in the world, in 2024.

Noma’s closure is yet another instance of the tension between haute cuisine as art and as a viable industry. Redzepi’s recent admission to the New York Times that Noma cannot afford to pay its wage bill even as it charges $500 per diner speaks volumes about the shaky foundations on which today’s fine dining industry — driven by cult-like devotion to individual “geniuses” and their demanding, labour-intensive “artistic vision” — is built. But the sheen, frankly, had started to wear off before, starting with Redzepi’s own admission of bad behaviour in the kitchen in a 2015 essay and culminating in revelations about Noma being staffed by unpaid interns and volunteers pulling gruelling shifts (interns finally began to be paid in October last year).

Long hours, poor pay and toxic work environment have long plagued restaurants, from the high to the low end. Last year, Barber faced allegations of fostering a poor work culture at his restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barn. Until now, however, the devotion that celebrity chefs and their restaurants inspire tended to undercut these problems. With Redzepi finally admitting that something in the system is profoundly broken, perhaps a fix can be found.