food security is about to become a major issue in JA:
Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors
The Copenhagen chef René Redzepi says fine dining at the highest level, with its grueling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point: “It’s unsustainable.”The chef René Redzepi will close his Copenhagen restaurant, Noma, for regular service at the height of its fame.
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The decision comes as Noma and many other elite restaurants are facing scrutiny of their treatment of the workers, many of them paid poorly or not at all, who produce and serve these exquisite dishes. The style of fine dining that Noma helped create and promote around the globe — wildly innovative, labor-intensive and vastly expensive — may be undergoing a sustainability crisis.
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The chef David Kinch, who last week closed his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Manresa, in Los Gatos, Calif., said, “the last 30 years were a gilded age,” when ambitious restaurants multiplied and became less formal and more exciting. His casual restaurants will remain open, but he said fine dining was no longer something he wanted to do himself, or to inflict on his staff, calling the work “backbreaking.”
