[Soup] The reason why the world's best restaurant for '630,000 won per meal' closed down

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A few days ago, I went to an Italian restaurant in Seoul with Eunsa.

It was a small restaurant with only four tables, and books on cooking and gastronomy were lined up on one side of the bookshelf.

Among the books side by side, the book that occupied the center was "Noma Fermentation Guide," which caught my eye from the title.

Noma is a restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark that has been contending for the top spot in the world's best restaurant rankings for years.

It has maintained three stars in the Michelin Guide for a long time, and if you are interested in gastronomy, you have probably heard the name well, even if you have not been there, and it is probably on your wish list.

Noma's head chef, René Redzepi, is an unrivaled star chef in his "avant-garde interpretation of Nordic cuisine."

What on earth is avant-garde cuisine?

Actually, I don't know exactly either.

Borrowing a public explanation and putting it back into my own language, I think it would be something like "Cooking newly interpreted in a creative way."

New ingredients, new recipes and new plating will be the building blocks of avant-garde cuisine.

To do that, Norma's kitchen shouldn't be just a place to cook.

So, Red Zephyr made Norma's kitchen a kind of lab.

I don't know much about food, but 'No, isn't K fermentation the best when it comes to fermentation?

We are the people of kimchi, so why bother with the Noma fermentation guide?

Norma and Red Zephyr, who are representative of all kinds of experimental cuisine, including molecular cuisine, must have had some great insights about fermentation.

It's an insight that an ordinary person like me who likes kimchi stew or thick cheese can't come close to.

Noma is a restaurant with that kind of authority.

Possibly the New York Times' best-talked-about article of the month

Then Noma announced it was closing.

Noma's announcement that it will take a break to prepare for Noma 3.0 to manage restaurants in a sustainable way has been covered by many media outlets.

The New York Times article seems to be the most talked-about article among New York Times readers in January in my experience.

There were more than 2,000 comments, ranging from simple reviews to claims pointing out problems in the food service industry as a whole.

When a column about Noma's announcement came up, I thought it would be okay to just deal with the comments while introducing it to Soup.

If you click Readers Picks instead of View All (All) in the New York Times article comments section, there are many articles worth reading. As of the morning of the 27th, the top two comments are as follows.

Serving ice cream in natural beeswax?

A beetle in a crate is an appetizer?

This is not fine dining.

It 's just a bluff to boast about having a lot of money... There must

be people who go first class to eat at a restaurant like this.

The climate catastrophe is getting worse and there are still many people who find it difficult to solve three meals a day... I'm not going to talk about other topics than the article, but the world of so-called high-end gourmet food, and top-notch travel that are full of waste from one to ten are really okay? It's time to think again.

There are two main issues people have about Noma, fine dining and gastronomy.

One is that the price of food is too expensive, and the other is that the people who make the expensive food are not even paid properly.

Chef Vivian Howard, who runs her own restaurant, wrote a column for the New York Times that explores issues prevalent throughout the food service industry.

▶See the New York Times column: Gourmet craze alone cannot fix the problems in the food service industry

A whopping 630,000 won for a meal?

A meal at Noma costs 3,500 Danish kroner.

It is 630,000 won in our money.

It is not possible to order a la carte, and all guests must eat a course meal from the tasting menu prepared by Noma.

That's the price of 70 bowls of meat noodles I ate yesterday.

I wonder how many people in the world would pay that much to eat, but tables at Noma fill up as soon as reservations open each season.

In fact, New York, where I live, has so many high-end restaurants.

Unfortunately, the price is so expensive that I can't even afford it, so I just don't know.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Masa, one of New York's premier sushi restaurants, introduced an $800 bento box.

Literally, the delivery food cost more than 1 million won per meal, and even then, there was a lot of criticism, but anyway, I think I saw an article that said that the lunch box was sold out every day.

In America, you have to pay more for a meal than what is written on a restaurant menu.

The price on the menu board is the price of food, and tax (consumption tax) is added to it on the bill.

And you have to tip.

Tipping is not something you can give or leave depending on your mood.

Unless you have fought or are prepared to fight the server, you have to pay.

Before the pandemic, I used to tip about 15% of my food bill, but recently with prices rising, I'm tipping at least 20%.

As Vivian Howard wrote in her column, American restaurant workers who carry food are not covered by the minimum wage, so their income is absolutely dependent on customer tips.

So servers have no choice but to be sensitive to tips.

The current federal minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour.

In most major cities such as New York, Boston, and Seattle, the minimum wage is $15 an hour, more than twice the federal standard.

Restaurant servers are a representative occupation that is not subject to the minimum wage, and the guaranteed minimum wage for them is $2.13 per hour in the federal standard.

Considering the price of the United States, it's not enough.

That's why New York City and other major cities have been trying to guarantee minimum wages to workers who rely on tips for several years, and from this year, New York City's restaurant servers are guaranteed minimum wages.

Let's go back to the price of food.

If you keep complaining about why a meal is so expensive, most high-end restaurants, including Noma, will probably respond like this.

To be honest, I don't think I'll ignore it without answering because I can't sell it because there's no space anyway.

If they're kind enough to answer, though, they'll say they're not just selling food, they're "bringing together great experiences that can't be found anywhere else."

In the case of food prices, you can objectively evaluate whether they are cheaper or more expensive than the original price by adding labor costs and monthly rent to the raw food price.

'Passion pay' at the industry's finest restaurant

In fact, what's even more shocking is the fact that Norma has been virtually forced to pay extreme passion.

Another chef Rob Anderson's Atlantic column, which Howard introduced as a link to his column, points out this very sharply.

More than half of the researchers (cooks) working in Norma's lab (kitchen) worked without pay.

I don't know how this is possible under Danish labor laws, but it's too expensive for a young chef to have a "Noma Kitchen" line on his resume in Copenhagen, one of the most expensive cities in all of Europe.

The practice of unpaid internship feels even more absurd when you see an interview with a former intern complaining that the dishes did not increase at all as a result of mechanically repeating the plating of putting the beetles in a box for three months.

In 2023, it is difficult to accept that a restaurant that sells food (and experience) for 630,000 won per meal is forced to pay passion to save on labor costs.

Perhaps the decisive reason Norma decided to close the business after deciding that it was difficult to maintain the current way was because, as many people pointed out in articles and comments, unpaid internship applicants disappeared after the pandemic.

Fundamentals needed for a sustainable restaurant

Rob Anderson, in his Atlantic column, strongly criticizes Norma for hypocrisy in announcing that Norma, who extorted the chef's labor without paying her due, announced that she would prepare Noma 3.0 without any sign of remorse.

Vivian Howard also says that restaurants need to be able to focus on fresh ingredients and delicious food to do the most important basics.

Currently, it is difficult to make a profit by selling only food, so it is impossible not to pay attention to selling alcohol, and servers (in the US) have no choice but to be sensitive to tips.

You cannot change the structure of the market by fixing one or two things.

If you think about the situation in New York City right now, labor costs and food ingredients are expensive, but the biggest burden is the huge monthly rent.

It may be different for each neighborhood, but a restaurant that opens in a good place tends to do well, but the monthly rent in such a place is always very expensive.

In this situation, professional investors entering the food service industry pay a burdensome upfront fee to promising chefs and demand that they turn a profit within a few years.

There's really not much room for improvement on the food that's already delicious, so you can spruce up the interior and sell it with a luxurious experience.

As a result, in New York alone, several 'good restaurants with good value for money' have turned into 'houses that are difficult to go to easily'.

If this is the way the market works, then I can't help it, but I also have a bitter feeling that it is a truly American and New York-like change.

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