Noma Is Back. So Is Its Controversial Celebrity Chef. --- After stepping down from the Copenhagen restaurant, Rene Redzepi returns as its creative director, laying out an ambitious vision even as questions about its culture persist

“Less than five months ago, when chef Rene Redzepi announced that he would step down from Noma, it seemed like the end of a two-decade run at the Copenhagen restaurant that has changed global fine dining.

 

Instead, at age 48, Redzepi is back on the Noma campus, beginning his next chapter in the very place where his leadership recently came under intense scrutiny in the wake of abuse allegations that he says led to years of reflection and therapy. His new plan: to stay out of the kitchen and reinvent Noma as not just a restaurant but also as a research-and-development hub for the food world.

 

Hanging over his vision for the company he co-founded in 2003 is the question of whether one man can rehabilitate not only his own image but also that of a brand he built.

 

Noma reopened this week under new leadership. The tasting menu, around $700 a person, will change monthly.

 

After holding three Michelin stars since 2021, Noma reopened without any.

 

As creative director, a role announced in June, Redzepi says he is focusing on what he calls "Noma 3.0," in which the restaurant "evolves into a kind of brain for the food world."

 

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Redzepi said that goal encompasses a number of projects, such as research into new fermentation methods and how seaweed and insects might take on bigger roles in our diets.

 

(This reporter has eaten discounted meals at Noma while writing for other publications.)

 

The news of Noma's reopening and Redzepi's continued involvement came after a new wave of allegations of physical and psychological abuse at the restaurant. Criticism first surfaced publicly about a decade ago, which led Redzepi to acknowledge a pattern of intimidation in a 2015 essay. "I've been a bully for a large part of my career. I've yelled and pushed people," he wrote in food magazine Lucky Peach. The allegations intensified in recent months after former head of fermentation Jason Ignacio White published testimonies on social media and the website Noma Abuse, including anonymous accounts from between 2009 and 2017 that said employees were punched in the face during service and subjected to sexually degrading language. White declined to comment on Redzepi's new role or his return to Noma.

 

The New York Times published an in-depth investigation into the allegations in March. Following the story, Redzepi announced on Instagram that he'd be stepping down from the company.

 

The latest allegations circulated days before a Los Angeles residency was set to begin, triggering boycott campaigns on social media, protests and the withdrawal of major sponsorships from Blackbird, Resy and American Express. The residency went ahead as scheduled.

 

Mehmet Cekirge, an intern at Noma in 2018, says he didn't think its workplace issues would change just because a new chef was in charge of the kitchen. He said he was made fun of for his Turkish accent and repeatedly insulted, even though Redzepi wasn't running the day-to-day kitchen operations. "I'm a hundred percent sure there are some bullies still there," he said. "That's the culture." In Cekirge's view, any link to the past, combined with habits passed from one generation of cooks to the next, makes lasting change difficult. "You go through that kind of stressful environment, and the way you learn to cope with it gets passed on to the people you train," he said.

 

Pablo Soto, the new executive chef, acknowledges that new scrutiny brings added pressure. "I feel a lot of responsibility to make sure we don't fall into anything from the past, but that's not going to stop us from having a team that works incredibly hard."

 

Redzepi says the allegations have prompted self-examination.

 

"I've done 10 years of therapy and intensive coaching with professionals," he said. While some of the stories were new to him, he accepts that he may not remember certain incidents. "I couldn't recognize them," he said. "But I'm not blind to the fact that these people may have experienced something that I didn't feel at all."

 

In a statement provided to the Journal, a Noma spokesperson said: "When Noma has faced criticism, we have always taken it seriously and acted on it. Over the past decade, we have invested significantly in improving both the working conditions and the culture at Noma." The company says it commissioned an independent audit of working conditions this spring ahead of the reopening.

 

Redzepi speaks of creating "a generational company," citing 2070, when Redzepi would be nearing 100 years old, as a benchmark for a number of loosely defined goals, including to take on challenges "from biodiversity to nutrition to creating entirely new ingredients or perhaps even new tools of eating."

 

He insists he will stay far from the restaurant kitchen. "If you are at Apple headquarters, there are also many divisions that don't actually interact with each other," he said.

 

Redzepi plans to spearhead a division under the working title of Noma UFO. That team is digitizing more than two decades of notebooks filled with recipes, ideas and fermentation logs. When pressed on that, he is elusive: "We have several long-term projects that we're working on. Some of them I don't want to talk about because I'm actually a little bit superstitious about these things."

 

Redzepi's advocates see this as just the latest reinvention for Noma. Between 2010 and 2021, Noma was named the world's best restaurant a record five times by the World's 50 Best Restaurants organization. It helped transform Denmark into one of the world's leading dining destinations.

 

No matter how the new leadership team operates, the Noma name will continue to be tied inextricably with Redzepi's. Danish restaurant critic Ole Troelso, who has covered Copenhagen's food scene for two decades, said the chef reminds him of Napoleon Bonaparte for his "relentless drive to conquer new territory." In that way, Troelso says Redzepi's return shouldn't be all that surprising. When the chef announced that he -- and Noma -- would soon return to Copenhagen, that drew an outpouring of support.

 

"We all make mistakes -- what matters is recognizing them and changing course," said Roberto Solis, chef of Huniik in Merida, Mexico, who flew to the opening and said he knew other chefs who were doing the same. "With Rene's guidance, I think great things are ahead. He's incredibly visionary." Whether that vision can truly untether itself from the restaurant's complicated history, however, remains to be seen.” [1]

 

1. REVIEW --- Noma Is Back. So Is Its Controversial Celebrity Chef. --- After stepping down from the Copenhagen restaurant, Rene Redzepi returns as its creative director, laying out an ambitious vision even as questions about its culture persist. Tonon, Rafael.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 08 Aug 2026: C5.