Noma 2.0 to reduce opening hours and raise prices to reduce staff stress
Rene Redzepi’s famed Copenhagen restaurant will open four days a week instead of five from February 2018.
It is also raising the cost of its menu from approximately £241 to £271.
A note from the team posted on the restaurant’s website says: “Noma’s strength lies in its staff; we’ve come to this decision in an effort to give them a better quality of life, both at work, and outside it.”
Noma, which topped the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list four times from 2010-14, joins a growing number of high-end restaurants taking steps to ease pressure on staff.
Magnus Nilsson, chef at two-Michelin-starred Fäviken in Sweden, has tripled the size of his team to 37 and almost doubled prices from €175 to €300 to cut staff hours from an average of 80 to 40-45 a week.
In the UK chef James Close’s Darlington restaurant The Raby Hunt won a second Michelin star last year after axing weekday lunch service when the excessive hours became ‘demotivating’ for staff.
Le Gavroche and Sat Bains with Rooms have also reduced opening hours in the past two years.
Noma 2.0
Redzepi and his team are returning to Copenhagen after months of recipe development and delayed construction on Noma's new location.
The revised menu, celebrating Scandinavian seafood, will ‘dramatically’ change with the seasons three times a year. A note from Redzepi on Noma’s website lists ‘weird shells, deep water seaweed’ and ‘eyeball of cod’ as potential ingredients.
The chef has also been sharing images of new ingredients on his social media accounts.
The 40-cover restaurant will offer 10% of its seats to students each night at a reduced price of £120.
Noma will begin taking reservations from 16 November for the period 15 February – 29 April 2018.
