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(CNN) --
Noma, one of the world's most awarded restaurants, will close its doors next year.
Since it opened two decades ago, the Copenhagen restaurant, credited with inventing New Nordic Cuisine, has topped the World's 50 Best Restaurants list five times, most recently in 2021.
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But after years of serving dishes based on local ingredients, from reindeer brain custard with bee pollen to quince ice cream and fermented rice with oyster caramel, the company of three-Michelin-starred chef René Redzepi is closing its chapter on restaurants at the end of 2024. The following year it will be reborn as a "giant laboratory", baptized as Noma 3.0.
Noma saucer
"It will be a pioneering experimental kitchen dedicated to food innovation and the development of new flavors, sharing the fruits of our efforts more widely than ever before," the restaurant explained in a statement posted on its website.
Creator, chef and owner René Redzepi and his team have been working on Noma's new path for two years.
Credit: Thibault Savary/AFP/Getty Images
"Our goal is to create an enduring organization dedicated to pioneering work in food, but also to redefine the foundation of a restaurant team, a place where you can learn, take risks and grow," he added.
The old restaurant will continue to welcome customers in the occasional sporadic or seasonal opening.
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Noma 3.0 has been in the planning phase for the past two years, a period in which the industry has been hit hard.
"If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's how fragile our dreams can be, how incredibly exhausting and difficult this industry can be," Redzepi said after receiving the World's Best Restaurant award in 2021.
Hinting then at Noma's turnaround, he said the team had "spent the last year and a half dreaming of something. Now we're going to build it."
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