Another week, another heatwave. If you’re in London, I hope you found air conditioning. If you’ve escaped the city, I hope this finds you at a hotel breakfast … ideally somewhere on the Med.
I was very much still in London this week, and I must admit it’s quite tough to eat in this heat. I’ve mostly eaten at home this week, simply because I can’t bare to be in a restaurant with a roaring fire and no air conditioning. I’ve been eating some variation of a peach, nectarine and tomato salad all week.
Table for Two turned three months old this week, and I want to give a big thank you to everyone who’s subscribed. In the past month alone, TFT has picked up nearly 200 new subscribers, been invited to its first event, connected with a load of brilliant creators, and has been a really good creative outlet.
Much more to come over the next few months, and thank you again for being here.
In today’s newsletter:
Noma's back at $700 a head, and no stars
A new lunch spot lands in Fulham
Noma re-opens their Copenhagen doors at $700 per head with zero Michelin stars. What does this new era signify?
A closed kitchen. A chef scandal. A $1,500 per head LA residency. A decision to reopen the Copenhagen doors after all.
Noma has had an extraordinarily turbulent year. Last week it reopened as Noma 3.0 under new leadership, chef Pablo Soto, who’s been with Noma since 2013, now runs the kitchen, whilst René Redzepi has stepped back into a creative director role.
Let’s back up though. The closure of Noma 2.0 was years in the making, and happened later than planned. The “end of 2024” deadline announced in January 2023 kept getting pushed back until the restaurant finally closed nearly a full year past its own stated date.
Back in 2023, Redzepi told the New York Times that financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just didn’t work. Noma’s own statement, posted the same day, struck a different note: the plan was to close the restaurant and reopen as Noma Projects, a pioneering test kitchen dedicated to food innovation, sharing the learnings of that work more widely than ever before.
Noma’s influence has shaped the food industry well beyond its own dining room, and the idea was to redirect that toward licensing, an e-commerce line and occasional pop-ups. As the company put it, being a restaurant would no longer define them
Shortly after closing, the Noma team hosted its first residency in LA, at $1,500 a head. But not before the New York Times broke a story detailing abuse allegations against Redzepi from 35 former employees between 2009 and 2017. This included verbal abuse, physical assault, intimidation.
I won’t go into the details here but his behaviour was abhorrent. Days after the story broke, on the opening day of the LA residency, Redzepi posted that he was stepping down, saying he’d take responsibility for his own actions and let Noma’s other leaders guide the restaurant’s next chapter.
The controversy didn’t stop the LA pop-up from opening, but it drew protesters, including Noma’s own former head of fermentation R&D, who’d spent months compiling other former employees’ allegations online.
So why, after finally closing its doors to focus on R&D and innovation, did Noma announce in June that they’d be reopening their doors in Copenhagen, as Noma 3.0 at roughly $700 a head?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Noma didn’t just lose its stars by closing, it asked Michelin to remove their stars, arguing they hadn’t been open long enough under new leadership to have earned them. It didn’t appear among Copenhagen’s three-star restaurants in the 2026 Nordic guide, and says it doesn’t expect to reclaim them in 2027 either. However, they’re still charging $700 a head for a menu with zero Michelin stars attached.
That’s not exactly the humility the ‘please remove our stars’ first comes across as… it seems like a pricing experiment. For twenty years, the stars were the pricing power, they’re the industry’s shorthand for “this justifies the number on the bill.”
If $700 with no stars sells out the way $700 with three stars used to, that tells you what the R&D pivot in isolation cannot… that Noma’s brand has decoupled from Michelin’s rating system entirely, and the restaurant itself has become proof of concept for that decoupling, evidence to license, not just food to sell. In other words, Noma is now testing whether its own name does that job without the stars.
And early evidence suggests that it does. Reservations are currently open through November, with all spots booked (and paid up front) within minutes of becoming available.
Which is why leadership under Pablo Soto matters. He’s the mechanism Noma is using to make the decoupling from a darker time credible. He’s been on staff since 2013, so he’s not an outsider brought in to clean the brand’s reputation.
He was in the kitchen through the years the abuse allegations describe, which can be read two ways… it’s continuity, but it also means Noma is asking the public to trust that someone who witnessed the old culture is now qualified to dismantle it. When Soto says “we’re still here standing,” it’s Noma’s whole business thesis in one sentence. Noma is betting the name survives the man who built it and Soto is the test of whether that’s true.
What I find most interesting is the restaurant is no longer the product. It’s the marketing budget to showcase and build credibility around Noma’s R&D efforts. And at $700 a head with no stars to justify the price, the live test of whether the Noma name can carry its own valuation without either Redzepi or Michelin behind it.
Noma’s influence never worked by being the best restaurant in the world in isolation… it worked because the entire industry copied it. Foraging, fermentation, the tasting menu as narrative format… all of that spread because ambitious kitchens used Noma as a reference point for what serious food could be.
Perhaps this is an idealistic view, but if Noma 3.0 succeeds commercially, it could set up the same mechanism for kitchen culture. A restaurant with this much gravitational pull, if it can make paid interns, real time off, and supportive leadership look like the standard a top kitchen is supposed to meet, without compromising on ambition or quality, could Noma do for the culture in top kitchens, what it already did for fermentation and foraged garnishes?
Let me know what your thoughts are on Noma 3.0’s re-opening?
Stubby's, an Aussie-inspired café, lands in Parsons Green
There’s a lot to love about Fulham, but the food scene isn’t it. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time with friends and neighbours trying to unpack why we don’t have good restaurants here, and why the ones we do get don’t seem to last (RIP Fenn). Pubs, we’ve got on lock. Anything more ambitious, less so.
But the past eighteen months has brought a run of good casual openings, Vincino’s reopening, Common Pizza, Sablé (best cookies in London by a mile), all doing well, and now Parsons Green welcomes Stubby’s, an Aussie-inspired café and wine bar serving artisanal sandwiches for lunch. I’ve been several times since it opened at the end of July, and it’s a fantastic addition to the neighbourhood.
The sandwiches are elevated well beyond typical takeaway lunch. There’s the Tamsin, with koji chicken thigh, chilli crisp, salsa verde and parmesan, and the Barry, with porchetta, katsu and cucumber, amongst several others. I also really like that you can order a whole or a half sandwich.
The coffees and matchas are just as good, I’ve been drinking them iced, with cold foam, and have become fully addicted to the Mont Blanc cold brew.
Every time I’ve been, there’s been a queue out the door and I waited 20 minutes for a sandwich last weekend. I’ve also been told the sandwiches sell out by 1pm on weekends, so get there early. Seating is limited, so plan to take away (it’s right on Parsons Green, so eating on the grass is a great option… although it’s quite beige and crunchy at the moment…).
That’s all for this week. We’re going to see Tony tonight at the Everyman, followed by pizza at Alleycats. Tomorrow we plan on cooking from Santiago Lastra’s new cookbook, Mexican Soul.
Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you next Friday.
Best,
Danielle
Table for Two lives at the intersection of food and culture, not simply recommendations, but a considered point of view on why dining matters, and where to find the best of London’s table culture. If this piece resonated, please support my work by subscribing.
Great read. What are your views on Michelin stars? I must admit I do turn to the Michelin guide for restaurants but have found more and more that the 2 / 3 stars just don’t cut it in the actual food department. Their bib gourmand ( which I like to call the “licky man”) seems to have a much more consistent list of actual “good food” spots. Would love to know your opinion on this.
Justice for Fulham !