Legendary Noma restaurant in Copenhagen will close next year and rebrand as a “giant lab”

One of the most renowned restaurants in the world, Noma, is scheduled to close next year.

The Copenhagen restaurant that is credited with inventing New Nordic Cuisine has topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list five times since it opened, most recently in 2021.

But chef René Redzepi’s three-Michelin-star restaurant will close at the end of 2024 after years of serving dishes made from locally foraged ingredients, like reindeer brain custard with bee pollen and quince and fermented rice ice cream with oyster caramel. It will resurface the following year as a “giant lab” known as Noma 3.0.

“(It will be) 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,” the restaurant said in a statement on its website.

“Our goal is to create a lasting organization dedicated to groundbreaking work in food, but also to redefine the foundation for a restaurant team, a place where you can learn, you can take risks, and you can grow!” it added.

It stated that the former restaurant will continue to welcome guests at seasonal or pop-up events.

For the past two years, many in the industry have been hard hit, and Noma 3.0 is in the planning stage.

“If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s how fragile our dreams can be, how incredibly grueling and difficult this industry can be,” Redzepi said after receiving the World’s Best Restaurant award in 2021.

He stated that the team had “spent the last year and a half dreaming of something,” hinting at Noma’s shift in direction at the time. “We’re going to go build it now.”