For more than two decades, it was almost impossible to separate Noma from René Redzepi. The restaurant carried his curiosity, his relationship with the Nordic landscape, his appetite for fermentation, foraging and ingredients that had rarely entered the vocabulary of fine dining. Even when hundreds of cooks, researchers and producers contributed to its evolution, the restaurant remained attached to one name. That makes what is happening in Copenhagen particularly interesting. Noma reopened on August 5 with Pablo Soto as Executive Head Chef, Mette Brink Søberg leading research and development and Annika de Las Heras as CEO, while René Redzepi has stepped away from the daily running of the restaurant and moved into a creative role. The circumstances surrounding that change, including serious allegations concerning René Redzepi’s past treatment of employees and his subsequent acknowledgement that his behaviour had harmed people, cannot be separated from the story. But another question now begins, one that extends beyond Noma itself: when the chef who defined a restaurant is no longer standing at its centre every day, what exactly remains?
The easy answer would be the dishes, yet dishes are probably the least reliable part of a restaurant’s identity. They change, disappear and return in different forms. What made Noma recognizable was never one preparation or one ingredient. It was a way of looking at food. The restaurant taught generations of cooks to examine what was growing around them, to reconsider preservation, acidity, bitterness and fermentation, to look at a coastline, a forest or a vegetable garden as a field of possibilities rather than a catalogue of products. That way of thinking has had years to circulate through the organisation. Cooks who arrived as young members of the brigade became senior figures; research became a permanent part of the restaurant rather than something happening around it. The new Noma is already being organised around twelve micro-seasons, allowing the menu to move continuously with what is available rather than remaining fixed for long periods. Perhaps this is where identity begins to become transferable: not when someone learns how to reproduce the founder’s food, but when enough people understand why certain questions were being asked in the first place.
That distinction matters for Pablo Soto. His task cannot simply be to cook like René Redzepi. If he did, Noma might preserve its style while slowly losing its relevance. The more difficult responsibility is to decide what deserves to continue and what now belongs to another period of the restaurant’s history. Pablo Soto has spoken about trusting people who have spent years inside Noma to carry its essence forward, an unusually revealing choice of words because it suggests that continuity is being placed in a collective memory rather than in one individual. Mette Brink Søberg’s position is equally significant. Research and development remain at the centre of the organisation, while Redzepi intends to explore subjects including fungi, insects and technology that may eventually feed back into future menus. The founder therefore remains present, but differently: less as the person deciding what happens during tomorrow’s service than as one of the people influencing what Noma might investigate next.
There is another identity Noma now has to reconsider, however, and it does not sit on the plate. The restaurant’s renewed leadership has spoken publicly about working hours, staff wellbeing and an industry that too often placed the guest experience and culinary ambition ahead of the people producing them. Noma says it had already begun changing its working model before the current transition, including reducing hours and reconsidering the conditions under which its teams operate. This may ultimately prove as important to the next Noma as any fermentation or new ingredient. A restaurant inherits the methods that created its food, but it also inherits habits, hierarchies and ways of exercising authority. Keeping an identity cannot mean preserving all of them indiscriminately. Some parts need to remain because they contain the intellectual DNA of the place. Others may need to disappear precisely so that the restaurant itself can continue.
Noma therefore offers a rare experiment in what happens when a chef attempts to loosen the connection between his own identity and the restaurant he created. René Redzepi’s influence will not vanish because his position has changed; after more than twenty years and five appearances at the top of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, it is embedded too deeply in the institution for that. The more interesting measure of success will be whether, a few years from now, someone can eat at Noma and immediately recognise the intelligence of the place without searching every dish for the hand of René Redzepi. If Pablo Soto, Mette Brink Søberg and the generation around them can produce work that feels unmistakably connected to Noma while taking it somewhere its founder would not necessarily have imagined himself, the restaurant will have achieved something difficult. It will have shown that a chef can create an identity strong enough to survive his own withdrawal from the centre of it and perhaps that the final proof of influence is not being endlessly imitated, but becoming unnecessary.
In a way that’s part of the success of Paul Bocuse, but he just had more time to organise that transition…
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