The famous Noma closes its doors at the end of 2024

Named the best restaurant in the world for several years now, Noma, which has three Michelin stars, announced Monday that it will close its doors at the end of 2024 to reinvent itself as a culinary laboratory.

“To continue to be Noma, we must change (…). Winter 2024 will be the last season of Noma as we know it,” said the Copenhagen restaurant in a statement posted on Instagram.

Short for the Danish words “Nordisk” (Nordic) and “mad” (food), Noma (with a lowercase “n”) opened on a pier in central Copenhagen in 2003, before closing in 2016 to reopen two years later. Later in a remote tree-lined area of ​​the Danish capital.

“In the year 2025, our restaurant will be transformed into a giant laboratory – a leading test kitchen dedicated to the business of food innovation and the development of new flavors,” he explained on his site.

The champion of fermentation, which, for example, allows pine cones to become edible, René Redzepi, lauded in the gastronomy world for his creations, has always managed to reshuffle the cards.

During the pandemic, he turned his restaurant into a wine and hamburger bar for a month in the summer of 2020.

If the focus is now on creativity, it will still be possible, from time to time, to dine at Noma, in Copenhagen, or in ephemeral restaurants elsewhere in the world.

“Customer service will always be part of who we are, but being a restaurant will no longer define us,” Noma wrote to describe his project, Noma 3.0.

“We will spend a lot of our time exploring new projects and developing many other ideas and products,” he continued, without elaborating.

In the spring, Numa will temporarily open in Kyoto for two months, between March 15th and May 20th.