Noma Copenhagen: World’s best restaurant: Closes its current location!

March 2017 Update:
It is learnt that Noma DK has closed permanently at its current location. The founder Rene Redzepi plans to relaunch Noma is a new location, with new farm theme, pure veg more in summer and sea food specialty centre in winter. 


I was fortunate enough to walk around this building on Feb 24, 2017, 4 days before it shut shop. Above two pics are the recent ones I clicked of Noma DK in its current location. Now it is accessible by the new Inner harbor Bridge as well. Not sure if the owners thought the easy access to public is a compromise to the exclusivity of the restaurant.

Original Post.
Learnt about an interesting fact during our canal tour of Copenhagen.

What you see in this photo is Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen. This restaurant has been consistently winning the award as world’s #1 restaurant. 

However, this year they’ve slipped to 2^nd place, loosing first place to a hotel in Spain. (reportedly Noma had an accident of serving a poisonous food early this year, which resulted in hospitalization of several guests and caused lots of negative publicity)

You can view the list here http://www.theworlds50best.com/list/1-50-winners/

or visit hotel website http://noma.dk/

But the interesting part of the news is this:

As the hotel  became popular, it turned out to be a tourist destination than an eating joint. Lots of people started visiting the restaurant just out of curiosity- to see what it looks like and what they serve, without any real intention of buying food there. Tourist buses sometimes would unload a bus full of tourists in front of the hotel. The restaurant wasn’t prepared to handle this kind of crowd and too many visitors would disturb their customers. Hence restaurant management had to think of a solution. Instead of building fence or compound around the hotel and employing security guards for crowd control, hotel management came up with an innovative idea.

They set up small garden and introduced honey bees. Bees would be flying around the garden and the fear of getting bitten by bees would keep people from coming closer to hotel. Regular customers would be escorted through a bee free path. Restaurant will also get free supply of honey from the bees.

Well, above is what our tour guide told us. I have a feeling that he was exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect. I did an attempt to find out if this is true. In the below link, I found out that restaurant is indeed building a garden with bees. But there’s no proof that motive of having the bee is to wade off crowd. It says restaurant owner is fond of bees., so I leave the interpretation to you.

The term Noma is reportedly derived from Nordic & Mad. The hotel was once a warehouse and serves different kinds of food, which I am not able to make sense of. So I won't go into details of that and stop this post here.

Another view of the Noma Restaurant, from across the canal

More on Copenhagen: Bella Sky * Tivoli Garden * Frederiksberg Garden * Skywatch Friday * Copenhagen-Berlin by bus * Copenhagen Sand Festival *