With three Michelin stars, Copenhagen’s noma was established by Danish chef Rene Redzepi and is renowned for its avant-garde approach to Nordic cuisine, with curiosities such as edible pinecones, ragout of reindeer, and crispy marigold with whiskey egg yolk sauce.

“To continue being noma, we must change… winter 2024 will be the last season of noma as we know it”, the restaurant wrote in a post online.

“We are beginning a new chapter. In 2025, our restaurant is transforming into a giant lab – a pioneering test kitchen dedicated to the work of food innovation and the development of new flavours.”

“Our goal is to create a lasting organisation dedicated to groundbreaking work in food,” said noma, whose name – deliberately in lower case – is a play on the Danish words “nordisk mad”, meaning “Nordic food”.

The restaurant opened in central Copenhagen in 2003 before shutting down in 2016. It reopened two years later in a different, leafier neighbourhood of the Danish capital.

noma has regularly ranked among the top 10 on “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list, including No. 2 in 2019 and No. 1 for three years running from 2010 to 2012, as well as in 2021.

Forced to close repeatedly for more than six months during the pandemic, it transformed into a burger and wine bar for a month in the summer of 2020.

Reservations for a table at noma, which is serving its Game and Forest Season menu until Feb 18 at a cost of 3,500 Danish crowns per person, were hard to come by even before the announcement of its latest “noma 3.0” incarnation.

“We will still serve guests in Copenhagen for shorter seasons and through pop-ups, but the details are still to be worked out,” a spokesperson for noma told Reuters.