Rising to the top of the restaurant world as René Redzepi ponders closure, Rasmus Kofoed announces that he will raise the cost of his tasting menu to 510 euro to allow employees to work only three days a week.
The news
We live in unpredictable times. Until recently, to say the least, the restaurant that has driven trends in the industry has just announced its closure for 2024. An announcement that remains to be understood. But in the same city as Noma, Copenhagen, another three-star restaurant has already been operating with much less fanfare and then surprisingly climbed the 50 Best to the top in 2022: Rasmus Kofoed's Geranium (whose staff includes several Italian talents).
@KirchgasserPhotography
It was René Redzepi who first put Denmark on the gastronomic map. Proving that its hitherto misunderstood and mistreated products, from berries to lichens, could taste better and hold up to a fine dining meal as well as and better than foie gras, with the complicity of ancestral techniques such as fermentation. It was a revolution codified in the Manifesto of the New Nordic Cuisine and actively supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Danish Tourism Board beginning in 2006. The whole world looked to that icy mecca as a must-visit destination. At the same time, the approach found new adherents in the most remote places, as far away as Latin America, where chefs began to cook "locavore" themselves.
@Thomas Lekfeldt
As Redzepi touched the zenith of success, someone began to think differently. Rasmus Kofoed, first on the podium at the 2011 Bocuse d'Or, opened Geranium in 2007 – Denmark's first-ever three-star restaurant, awarded in 2016 – five years before his antagonist. "But I didn't sign the manifesto, I value my freedom," he claims as he continues to buy truffles and caviar around. After all, his training is classical, in the vein of traditional Scandinavian Gallicism; his current cuisine is exclusively vegetable-forward, of rarefied and exquisite elegance, beyond primitivist fashion, at the antipodes of any provocation. "A light, seasonal cuisine, complex in tastes and textures," he sums up.
@ Ivan Boll Riordan
King crab extract with pickled kohlrabi, söl and caviar
The problems faced by the two, however, are not so different. Redzepi has cited financial reasons for the announced closure of Noma. Namely the costs of research and especially labor, with many interns to be paid after the scandal raised in the media, despite the perennial sold-out dining room and a 470-euro menu. For his part, Rasmus Kofoed rejects the idea that haute cuisine could not be sustainable. "You succeed by looking after the balance of the employees. Our philosophy has always been to make sure they want to stay," he says.
The news is that to allow his staff to work just three days a week, the price of the menu will rise to a record 510 euros. But behind the restaurant's success at 50 Best could also be the cunningly woven relationships of the American communications director hired by the owner, Danish billionaire Lars Seier Christensen (who also owns the bombastic Alchemist in town), equipped with every means to invite critics and influencers.
Source: Le Monde
