Even fine dining’s highest-profile restaurateurs admit that their industry’s business model is broken and needs an injection of creativity.

Hit hard by the pandemic, restaurants have had to re-create themselves over the past few years by accepting takeout orders and reinventing their menus. But the pandemic and ongoing staffing shortages have also revealed that the fine dining business is fragile and may not survive in the post-pandemic age.

One high-profile restaurant that is gambling on reinvention is Copenhagen’s Noma, considered to be among the world’s best. The restaurant announced on Monday that it will close its doors to regular service in 2024, but the closure will not be the end of Noma’s brand.

The restaurant will return in 2025 as a “giant food lab” where the kitchen will be “dedicated to the work of food innovation and the development of new flavors.” The new Noma—dubbed Noma 3.0—will create pop-ups worldwide, while mainly focusing on expanding choices for its e-commerce Noma Projects line, which markets experimental recipes and products to individual buyers. The company said that “being a restaurant will no longer define” the Noma brand.

The Copenhagen location could reopen in the future, however, for seasonal menus and pop-ups.

The reinvention comes as fine dining finds itself at a crossroads, as the industry attempts to shed what Noma co-owner and head chef René Redzepi says has become a working model that tends to bleed employees dry. From long hours to extreme physical demands, working in the kitchen or on the restaurant floor can be one of the most demanding professions.

“We have to completely rethink the industry,” Redzepi said in an interview with the New York Times published Monday. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.”

Reinventing an industry

Since opening in 2003, Noma has revolutionized the culinary world with its exploration of “New Nordic” dining and a focus on local and seasonal products. The three Michelin-starred restaurant that topped the influential World’s 50 Best [hotlink ignore=true]Restaurants list for the fifth time in 2021 has a menu that includes flower-pot-like cakes and ducks that have had the top of their skulls surgically removed.