Activists and restaurant workers gather in front of Danish chef Rene Redzepi’s Noma Restaurant’s $1,500-per-seat pop-up in Los Angeles, on March 11, 2026 – Copyright AFP Apu GOMES<\/p>\n
The co-founder of\u00a0Noma, several times crowned the best restaurant in the world, Danish\u00a0chef Rene Redzepi said Thursday that he was stepping down, following reports of past abuse at his fabled restaurant.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter more than two decades of building and leading this restaurant, I\u2019ve decided to step away,\u201d Redzepi said in an Instagram post.<\/p>\n
Over the weekend, newspaper The New York Times published a story detailing witness testimony about stories of past abuse at Noma, including physical violence and episodes of public shaming.<\/p>\n
The newspaper said it had interviewed 35 former employees about the period between 2009 and 2017.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have worked to be a better leader and Noma has taken big steps to transform the culture over many years. I recognize these changes do not repair the past,\u201d Redzepi said.<\/p>\n
He added that \u201can apology is not enough; I take responsibility for my own actions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Redzepi has previously admitted to losing his cool, including in 2015, when he said in an essay that \u201cI\u2019ve been a bully for a large part of my career\u201d.<\/p>\n
In February, former head of Noma\u2019s fermentation lab, Jason Ignacio White, started posting about abuse he had witnessed while working at Noma and relayed stories sent to him by other former employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cNoma is not a story of innovation. It is a story of a maniac that would breed culture of fear, abuse & exploitation,\u201d White said in an Instagram\u00a0post in early February.<\/p>\n
An acronym formed from the Danish words \u201cnordisk\u201d (Nordic) and \u201cmad\u201d (food), Noma first opened on a quay in central Copenhagen in 2003.<\/p>\n
It closed in 2016 and reopened two years later in a slightly more remote neighbourhood of the Danish capital.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Noma opened a pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles, but the opening was marked by a protest led by former employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Activists and restaurant workers gather in front of Danish chef Rene Redzepi’s Noma Restaurant’s $1,500-per-seat pop-up in Los…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6],"tags":[108,26,21081,20472,652],"class_list":["post-38309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-copenhagen","tag-copenhagen","tag-denmark","tag-noma","tag-redzepi","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116214414885582434","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}