To look at what more sustainable restaurants look like, look at high end French restaurants. Unpaid internships are all but illegal in France (can't last longer than 2 months, can't do duties that paid staff would otherwise do), worker protections are much stronger and as a result you've got higher prices for less courses and far fewer staff per cover.
I guess that's what I don't quite understand about these restaurants - apparently Noma was $500/plate, and still couldn't make it work financially even with free labor. So are these types of restaurants just horribly mismanaged or is there more to the story as to how a $15/sandwich place can stay open for years but $500/plate you go broke?
1) Noma relies on 30 unpaid interns.
2) René Redzepi "started cooking in a time when it was common to see my fellow cooks get slapped across the face for making simple mistakes, to see plates fly across a room." and asked "How can we rectify the screaming and shouting and physical abuse we’ve visited on our young cooks?"
The rest of the essay is just random conjecture or anecdotes about the restaurant industry at-large. No substantial insight into the workings of Noma is given.
In the old days, a few years at the high end then a year at a Noma-esque place and investors would line up for you to recreate it in your hometown.
Nowadays that's not the case. While the remaining fine dining restaurants are busy enough, it's still not the same as before and prices aren't high enough, considering inflation.
That's why Noma is closing, Manresa closed, Faviken closed (before COVID even, but the writing was on the wall then too), a bunch of David Chang's restaurants closed, and countless other less famous spots.
Of course, people still need to eat and odds are the economics are still good enough for plenty of restaurant concepts. But you need to find efficiency and Noma was anything but efficient (30 interns SMH).
