PFor world cuisine, the year 2023 begins with the announced disappearance of an icon. After twenty years of activity, the Noma restaurant, created by the Dane René Redzepi, in Copenhagen, announced its closure for 2024. Noma had nevertheless won the most prestigious awards: it had obtained three stars in the Michelin guide in 2020 and the title of “best restaurant in the world”, according to the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ranking five times since 2010.
Its closure is such a surprise that it questions the state of gastronomy as a whole, a subject so dear to our French culture. Does this premature end mean the failure of a gastronomic model that we French invented, then structured before distributing it worldwide? René Redzepi evokes, to use his own words, a model ” unsustainable “ which does not allow it to achieve a sustainable balance in the face of the costs required by the practice of gastronomy.
In an article from New York Times published Monday, January 9, it describes its inability to meet the expectations of all the restaurant’s stakeholders and to satisfy as a priority the demands for remuneration and working hours of those who constitute the backbone of this project: the employees in the kitchen and indoors. Lacking profitability, should we resolve to see the great restaurant decline and disappear?
Very high level of performance and personal balance
In the country that saw the birth of gastronomy, such an idea is akin to heresy. France, with its strong history and a strong young guard, seems to us to have a card to play in reinventing this model − especially since the economic situation of the sector in France is satisfactory. Inflation has not slowed down demand from French customers or foreign visitors: gastronomy, its level of excellence and details are still successful here.
But the analysis of the gastronomic model should not be limited to economic conditions. The stakes are higher and raise more important questions that French cuisine cannot ignore. Gastronomy is today looking for a model that not only guarantees healthy economic functioning, but also reconciles excellence and quality of life at work: the difficulty of recruitment encountered by this sector in a global way attests to this.
The profession is slowly extricating itself from an approach that is unfavorable to people: too low remuneration, too long hours, difficult working conditions, often toxic professional relations and inability to make a fair place for women. Although identified, this challenge must be taken up urgently so that these professions manage to remain attractive. As such, turning to the worlds of professional sport or fashion makes it possible to study how others manage to reconcile a very high level of performance and personal balance.
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