On the morning of June 10th, an email arrived in my inbox from Jenny Löfgren, Head of Communications at Noma. Noma was reopening in Copenhagen on August 5th, under new leadership. The food world exhaled. Many of us had been hoping for exactly this.
Then the articles started appearing. Suddenly, Noma was not a restaurant coming home. It was a scandal, a symbol of everything wrong with fine dining, a chess piece in someone else’s argument.
Noma is not a thing. It is the dreams, the passions, and the daily bread of more than 100 people.
There is a story being told about Noma right now, and it goes like this: a famous chef pretended to step down, fooled everyone, and is now quietly back in charge of his empire. The restaurant is reopening too soon, before the dust has settled and before justice has been served. The whole thing is a sleight of hand, a PR exercise, a performance of accountability without any of the substance.
I have been covering Noma for some time. I have read many articles, followed the social media pile-ons, and watched with growing frustration as a real and complicated story gets flattened into a simple villain narrative. So I reached out to the people who are actually running Noma now. Over hours of video conversations — some of them still in Los Angeles finishing the residency, some already back in Copenhagen — I spoke with Pablo Soto, Executive Head Chef; Mette Brink Søberg, Head of Research and Development; and Annika de Las Heras, the new CEO. Three human beings with families, dreams, fears and decades of their lives invested in a place they genuinely love.
In the weeks that follow, I will be giving voice to more people from within Noma — not only its leaders, but cooks, servers, stagiers, and anyone else willing to share their story. Real people with real lives, real dreams, and real stakes in what happens next. But first, let me address what is being said about them right now.
“René faked his resignation.”
When the New York Times report was published, Redzepi apologised publicly and said he had worked to change. He then made a wider announcement: after more than two decades of building and leading Noma, he had decided to step away and allow the restaurant’s leaders to guide it into its next chapter.
What that looks like in practice is this. Annika de Las Heras runs the business as CEO. Mette Brink Søberg leads research and development. Pablo Soto leads the kitchen. During service — the high-pressure, high-stakes hours when a restaurant lives or dies by the minute, and historically the moments when tensions in any kitchen run highest — it is Pablo who is in charge, not René. Redzepi is not there. That is not a symbolic change or a reshuffling of titles but the most structurally meaningful change possible, because it removes the very conditions under which the documented problems occurred.
Redzepi remains Creative Director — the founding visionary shaping the broader creative direction of the place he built over 23 years. This is neither unusual nor suspicious. In fashion, you would want the founding creative mind to remain connected to the soul of the house. In music, in art, in design — we understand instinctively that the person who imagined something into existence has a role that cannot simply be handed to someone else. What has changed is where René is and is not present – he is not in the kitchen, he is not leading service, he is not in the room during the moments that matter most in terms of pressure and hierarchy. That is a real and significant change, and it deserves to be recognised as one.
“It is reopening too soon.”
Too soon for whom, exactly? Noma employs more than 100 people. They have mortgages, they have children, they have rent to pay and lives to live. The journalists and commentators calling for a longer closure are not offering to cover the payroll. They are making a moral argument at zero personal cost, while the people who would actually bear the consequences — the chefs, the servers, the researchers, the foragers, the suppliers — wait in uncertainty. There is a deep irony here that nobody seems to want to examine: the very people who claim to care about Noma’s workers are arguing for a course of action that would leave those workers without income. Reopening is not a betrayal of accountability – it is the responsible thing to do by the people whose livelihoods depend on it.
“Noma is elitist.”
A meal at Noma is expensive. So is a painting by a great artist. So is a flight to New York just to spend a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We do not typically respond to expensive things by demanding they cease to exist. We might wish they were more accessible. We might not personally be able to afford them. But we recognise that what makes something truly exceptional is not only what it costs to produce — it is the years of dedication, the accumulated knowledge, the talent, the obsession and the sacrifice that give it its uniqueness and its value. You cannot put a simple price tag on that. And we recognise that when such things exist, they enrich a culture far beyond the people who can directly afford them.
Noma’s influence never stayed behind its price tag. It spread through every restaurant opened by a Noma alumnus across Copenhagen and beyond. It transformed Denmark into a food destination. It kept farmers, fishermen and foragers in business. It gave 42 Michelin-starred restaurants a country to grow in. On the remote island of Fanø, more than 300 kilometres from Copenhagen, oyster expert Jesper Danneberg Voss marvels that his island now has a Michelin-starred restaurant. Before Noma, he says, that would have been impossible. The people who will never eat at Noma have already benefited from its existence, whether they know it or not.
On unpaid interns.
The unpaid internship model at Noma has been treated as self-evident proof of exploitation. But unpaid internships in exchange for mentorship, craft knowledge and access have always been part of creative and artisan traditions in Europe — not only in food, but in art, in jewellery, in fashion, in music, in every discipline where knowledge is passed from one generation to the next through proximity and practice. When you study at university, you do not get paid to learn — you often pay enormous fees for the privilege. A young painter working in an established artist’s studio, a craftsman apprenticing with a maestro — the knowledge and opportunity transferred have long been understood as the compensation. The stagiers who came to Noma came knowingly, hungrily, because what they would learn there could not be learned anywhere else. When Noma started paying its interns — the right evolution, and one that the restaurant moved toward — it added at least $50,000 to monthly costs. Shortly afterwards, Redzepi announced the restaurant would close regular service because it had become financially unsustainable. That connection was reported but rarely examined honestly.
What the coverage is missing.
The articles generating the most outrage quote almost nobody currently working at Noma. Two women with a combined 27 years at the restaurant — Mette and Annika — appear in a couple of pieces only as job titles in a single paragraph (taken from the press release). Pablo Soto is quoted briefly from a conversation during the LA residency, and his honest, precise words are framed to suggest something sinister. The voices of the people who actually live and breathe this place every day are absent.
I gave them the space to speak. What they told me was not the language of a PR exercise but the language of people who have struggled, sacrificed, built families around this work, been genuinely hurt by the coverage, and are still here because they believe in what Noma is.
Noma is not only René Redzepi. It is Pablo, who left Mexico with no savings and no plan and made a commitment to himself that he would make it work. It is Mette, who took her young son to kindergarten in Kyoto because she refused to choose between her work and her family. It is Annika, who walked into a PR coordinator role with no PR experience and never left (but grew into a CEO role), because something about this place was always too alive to step away from. And it is the many people who work at every level of the restaurant every day. Has any of the outraged media coverage spoken to them? Many have been there for more than a decade. That kind of loyalty does not happen in places where people feel mistreated.
It is also the farmer with 60 hectares who is not sure he could have survived without it. The foragers, the suppliers, the stagiers who came from all over the world and left changed.
In the coming weeks, I will let them speak for themselves, because that is the story nobody is telling. This story is the real Noma.
Have you read my other Noma articles?