Eating is a necessity and can be a great pleasure. It also has a symbolic dimension in every culture. In the long history of European civilization, going back at least to the Romans, it has been a form of status distinction, allowing the elites at the top to display their separation from the masses below.
For many centuries elite food was set apart by its ingredients, like caviar, choice cuts of meat, difficult to procure spices and rich dairy products. Restaurants in times past would announce their status appeal not only through their prices, but also menus that advertised rarity and bounty.
Today this emphasis on ingredients is not enough. A general increase in prosperity and the rise of a large middle-to-upper class that can afford them means that status distinction must now rest on much greater inputs of human labor, both the highly skilled labor of innovator-chefs and the line labor of dozens of underlings who precisely execute each minute twist of preparation or presentation. Add to this the aura of world-transforming inventiveness claimed by the tech industry, and you have Noma and restaurants like it.
There has always been a tension between elite appeal and nourishment in cuisine. The excessively rich foods of the uppermost stratum are unhealthy, which may be one reason the humbler fare of the peasantry was sometimes gussied up and given a place on the menus of the rich, like gustatory Eliza Doolittle’s. We will see whether the chem lab restaurant ethos can find a middle ground by absorbing some of the foods people used to eat before eating was “disrupted”.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/dining/noma-closing-rene-redzepi.html
January 9, 2023
Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors
The Copenhagen chef René Redzepi says fine dining at the highest level, with its grueling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point: “It’s unsustainable.”
By Julia Moskin
Since opening two decades ago, Noma — the Copenhagen restaurant currently serving grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl — has transformed fine dining. A new global class of gastro tourists schedules first-class flights and entire vacations around the privilege of paying at least $500 per person for its multicourse tasting menu.
Noma has repeatedly topped lists of the world’s best restaurants, and its creator, René Redzepi, has been hailed as his era’s most brilliant and influential chef.
Nevertheless, Mr. Redzepi told The New York Times, the restaurant will close for regular service at the end of 2024.
Noma will become a full-time food laboratory, developing new dishes and products for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects, and the dining rooms will be open only for periodic pop-ups. His role will become something closer to chief creative officer than chef.
This move is likely to send shock waves through the culinary world. To put it in soccer terms: Imagine that Manchester United decided to close Old Trafford stadium to fans, though the team would continue to play.
The decision comes as Noma and many other elite restaurants are facing scrutiny of their treatment of the workers, many of them paid poorly or not at all, who produce and serve these exquisite dishes. The style of fine dining that Noma helped create and promote around the globe — wildly innovative, labor-intensive and vastly expensive — may be undergoing a sustainability crisis....
There has always been a tension between elite appeal and nourishment in cuisine. The excessively rich foods of the uppermost stratum are unhealthy, which may be one reason the humbler fare of the peasantry was sometimes gussied up and given a place on the menus of the rich, like gustatory Eliza Doolittle’s. We will see whether the chem lab restaurant ethos can find a middle ground by absorbing some of the foods people used to eat before eating was “disrupted”.
[ The essay is very interesting and I read it twice but I do not understand where this final paragraph is pointing. Please explain. ]
A couple of times, when I have taken students from Nigeria to dinner, a student has been surprised that I ate wheat bread rather than white. They considered white bread preferrable to wheat, because white was a staple of the well-to-do.
We will see whether the chem lab restaurant ethos can find a middle ground by absorbing some of the foods people used to eat before eating was “disrupted”.
[ This sentence, especially, makes no sense to me. Please explain what I am missing. ]
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