We are Food
For years, a stage at Noma was the culinary equivalent of a golden ticket. The Copenhagen restaurant — repeatedly crowned the world's best — wasn't just a place to cook. It was a pilgrimage. A rite of passage. A line on your CV that opened every door in the industry.
People in our network who staged there between 2010 and 2017 came back with extraordinary knowledge, lifelong skills, and stories they still tell at dinner tables. They also came back exhausted, broke, and having worked 16-hour days with little to no pay. At the time, most considered it a fair trade. That was simply how it worked at the top.
It no longer works that way. And it shouldn't.
Dinner is served - or maybe not
With Noma having effectively closed its doors as a traditional restaurant in 2024 — pivoting to residencies, pop-ups and food innovation — the silence that long protected elite kitchen culture has finally cracked open. Former staff, from chefs to front-of-house to the gardeners tending those celebrated organic plots, are now speaking openly about what life inside Noma actually looked like.
The accounts are strikingly consistent: extreme hours, unpaid or underpaid labor, a culture of discipline that regularly crossed into disrespect, and a system that ran on young people's ambition as its primary fuel.
The exploitation wasn't a secret — it was structural. Noma's obsessive cuisine, built on hyper-seasonal foraging, elaborate fermentation, and painstaking prep, required an enormous amount of human labor. The math only worked because dozens of stagiaires were willing — eager, even — to do it for free.
When Noma finally began paying its interns in 2022, operating costs reportedly jumped sharply. Not long after, the traditional restaurant model was declared unsustainable.
A Generation That Didn't Swallow It
Here's what changed: the next generation of hospitality workers simply isn't willing to repeat that bargain. As we've explored before on our Italian blog, the industry is in the middle of a profound cultural shift. Young professionals are demanding fair pay, reasonable hours, and basic respect — and they're walking away from kitchens that can't offer those things, regardless of how many Michelin stars are on the wall.
Noma's crisis is not just about one restaurant or one chef. It is a mirror held up to an entire industry model built on passion as currency — one where the love of cooking was routinely used to justify conditions that would be unacceptable in any other professional context.
The Bill Arrives
René Redzepi has spoken publicly about working on his leadership style. Whether Noma 3.0 represents genuine transformation or a well-plated reinvention remains to be seen. What is no longer up for debate is that the era in which prestige alone could compensate for exploitation is over.
For those of us who work in, write about, and love food: this reckoning matters. Excellence in hospitality should never be built on the backs of people too starstruck to say no.
The bill has arrived. And this time, everyone has to pay their share.
Pictures in the gallery are from our visit to Noma in 2014 — a memorable dinner.
Did you stage at Noma? Work in fine dining? Or simply love food and care about the people who make it? We want to hear from you. Drop your thoughts in the comments below — this is exactly the kind of conversation the industry needs to be having out loud.
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At WeareFood.agency, we believe great food starts with the people who make it. Let's keep talking.
