Owner and head chef at Noma, Rene Redzepi, told Danish newspaper Berlingske that he planned to close the establishment and that it would not return in its current form.

The Michelin restaurant will therefore close indefinitely from 2025 to make way for a “food laboratory” where new dishes and products would be developed for an online sale concept called Noma Projects, Redzepi told the newspaper.

“It is important to me that Noma is be an enduring factor within ground-breaking food innovation. We will therefore have to remove the restaurant part for a while,” he said.

“We expect it to take somewhere between two and four years for the transformation to be complete. In what for Noma will open again I don’t yet know. But I doubt it will be as a normal restaurant,” he said.

Noma has previously signalled major changes were likely to be forthcoming.

The “food laboratory” will enable larger scale fermentation of raw products by the company’s sales staff, news wire Ritzau writes.

Redzepi told Berlingske he may consider opening the restaurant for a season each year in Copenhagen or another location, possibly abroad.

He said that it was not certain it would ever operate as a restaurant again after the announced closing, however.

The idea for a food lab first occurred to Redzepi during the 2020 closures of restaurants due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he said. At the time, Noma opened a pop-up takeaway burger bar in Copenhagen.

The Danish restaurant has for many years enjoyed a reputation as one of the world’s best and has on several occasions been named top of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It currently has three Michelin stars.

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