Fine Dining Will Still Be Just Fine
Checking in on the state of fine dining in Charleston and beyond
On June 10, Priya Krishna of the New York Times reported that Noma, the acclaimed restaurant in Copenhagen founded by chef René Redzepi, will reopen August 5. If you’re familiar with Redzepi and Noma, this announcement might have struck you as a little curious.
The original Noma closed at the end of 2024 so that Redzepi and team could, as the Times put it then, devote their attention to “its empire of innovations: its test kitchen, biotech collaborations and global pop-ups, which have become bucket-list destinations for wealthy diners from around the world.” One of those pop-ups launched in Los Angeles this March, and the venture sparked a flurry of controversy over Redzepi’s alleged abusive behavior, both psychological and physical, toward his employees over the years. In response to the allegations, corporate sponsors American Express and Blackbird backed out of the venture, and Redzepi announced he would “step away” from daily Noma operations.
That the stepping away lasted just a few months isn’t the curious part. These days, it seems, whenever someone gets caught up in a PR maelstrom, they “step away” for a bit until the storms pass over . . . then jump right back into whatever they were doing before. As the saying goes, I’m surprised but not shocked that Noma is coming back.
My reading the news, though, did stir a hazy recollection of all the sky-is-falling jeremiads that the original Noma announcement sparked back in January 2023. I ended up writing a Charleston Menu newsletter column about the reaction entitled, “Fine Dining Will Be Just Fine.” I went back and re-read the piece recently, and I have to say its conclusions have held up pretty well.
The End of Fine Dining is Near
In that newsletter column three years ago, I described the response among America’s foodwriters as “a collective rending of garments . . . as they tried to tease out what this means for The Big Picture and the Future of Fine Dining.”
Bryan Walsh of Vox linked Noma’s pending closure to the century-long decline of “high culture” institutions like opera, arguing that the restaurant “collapsed under its own contradictions.” Joe Ray dove in for Wired with a piece headlined, “Noma Is Closing. Welcome to the End of Fine Dining.” Bon Appétit had “18 Renowned Chefs, Food Critics, and Writers Weigh in on Noma Closing Its Doors.” They interpreted the news as everything from “a flashing warning sign for the end of global fine dining” to “a realignment of values going on at all levels.”
One notable thing about that 2023 announcement was that Redzepi wasn’t shutting the doors immediately, as one would do if their restaurant were bleeding cash and the bank just called in a loan. Instead, Noma would be closing at the end of 2024, two full years in the future. That alone should have been a hint that the fine dining market might not exactly be careening off a cliff. (I imagine it also helped ensure reservations were fully booked for the next two years.)
Nominally, Noma was closing because its model, which had long depended upon a huge brigade of unpaid stagieres (interns) working grueling hours, was no longer economically viable once the restaurant started paying them an actual wage. Most of the commentators, though, pivoted quickly from the fate of Noma specifically to assessing the state of fine dining in general. By “fine dining,” they weren’t just talking about rarified $800-a-head tasting menu experiences but also about more ordinary upscale establishments where guests order a la carte and pay around $100 a person. As Bon Appétit put it, “If Noma, buoyed by prestige and $800 tasting menus, couldn’t make it, where does that leave regular restaurants?”
In an essay for the New York Times, chef/restaurateur Vivian Howard used the Noma news as a hook to explore the challenges of the fine dining business model and her then-recent decision to suspend full service at The Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, and pivot to a cafeteria-style counter service format. Howard’s assessment of “the rotting state of the restaurant business” was bleak, invoking “the inefficiencies, stress and fatigue brought by an unsustainable business.” Her prescription? “Our industry needs to evolve” and “do more with less.”
I was more optimistic, noting conversations with various Charleston restaurateurs who talked in great depth about their strategies for navigating the labor and cost challenges that the industry was facing in early 2023. I noted the new restaurants that had just opened their doors, led by chefs and restaurateurs passionate about ingredients, technique, and, especially, good wine, as well as the shifting of restaurant geography away from the old Upper King and East Bay corridors to more affordable neighborhoods.
Ultimately, I concluded, “fine dining is going to be just fine.”
Well, here we are a little more than three years later. Did the weight of cultural, economic, and political trends, as Bryan Walsh put it in his Vox piece, prove “ultimately unbearable” for high-end restaurants? Now that we’ve seen “how the sausage is made” was it really “impossible to look at our meals the same ever again?”
Survey Says . . .
Here in 2026, we seem to be stomaching the sausage just fine.
So many of the discussions of fine dining’s viability seemed to conflate the toxic cultures of many high-end kitchens in the early 2000s (and many of them were indeed awful) with the concept of fine dining itself, as if chefs have to throw frying pans and berate junior staff in order to produce finely-crafted meals.
Today’s restaurant kitchens, if not perfect, are by all accounts much more respectful and professional places to work, and if there’s been any fall-off in technique and quality, I certainly haven’t noticed it as a diner.
Kitchen culture aside, did Noma’s “failure” prove a leading indicator that “fine dining is about to drastically change?” Again, if it did, I can’t see it.
Certainly the willingness of the well-heeled to spend conspicuously on food hasn’t subsided. All this month, a PR flack has been emailing me breathless announcements that, “As brands across the country prepare to celebrate America’s 250th birthday this Fourth of July, Bowie House, Auberge Collection in Fort Worth is taking a luxury approach . . .” And what exactly is this luxury approach?
Behold, the $250 Declaration Dog, a Texas Wagyu beef frank layered with smoked mustard crème fraîche, baby pickle and onion relish, plus a full ounce of Osetra Reserve caviar, all on a buttery brioche roll. I am sure this is a metaphor for something, but I don’t want to think about it long enough to come up with one.
Let’s put that one aside. It’s gaudy stunt food, and it’s from Texas. What about fine dining here in Charleston?
You still can’t get a reservation at FIG any earlier than 9:15 PM any night in the next month, and it’s even tighter at Vern’s. At $60 on weeknights and $80 on weekends, the paid line-waiters for Chubby Fish are doing a land office business. I recently interviewed the executive chefs at two of Charleston’s higher-end restaurants, Elliott Howells at the Establishment and Nick Dugan at Sorelle, for an upcoming Charleston Magazine feature. They both report that traffic is strong. “We’re coming into year five after being reopened from Covid,” Howells told me, “and we’re watching business grow every year.”
Indeed, Dugan is now the executive chef at not one but two of Charleston’s top-end restaurants, for in April the Beemok Hospitality Collection opened The Crossing at its new luxury waterfront hotel, The Cooper. The menu offers Petrossian caviar service and shellfish towers from the raw bar, which you can follow with whole grilled branzino for two ($105), a Mediterranean grill of loukaniko sausage, octopus, shrimp, and hanger steak ($135), or a 24-ounce bone-in wood-fired ribeye ($155), each carved table-side from a rolling wooden trolley.
Personally, I was far more impressed by the puck of fried halloumi ($15) topped with warm blistered grapes in honeyed verjus and by the bowl of ancient grains ($19), with freekeh, bulgur, and farro dressed in a sparkling herb-laced tomato water and draped in squash blossoms, with tiny grapes adding lovely pops of sweetness. Whether you’re judging based on big, showy presentations and their price tags or on the subtle intensity of flavor, fine dining certainly seems alive and well at the Crossing.
Yes, the dining landscape has continued to evolve, as it has for decades. With the continued influx of tourists and the arrival of new luxury hotels like The Cooper and, before long, the Four Seasons on Meeting Street, the character of fine dining in Charleston will likely be quite different in the future, but I don’t think the category is going anywhere.
Scanning Holy City Sinner’s invaluable lists of Charleston restaurants closures from 2023 to 2026 really drives home the fact that, amid the supposed “rotting state of the restaurant business,” very few fine dining restaurants in Charleston actually closed in the last three years. (Breweries are another matter, a trend I discussed in a recent feature for Charleston Magazine.)
The most notable closure in recent years, hands down, was that of Charleston Grill in August of last year, which I memorialized in an early Charleston Notebook dispatch. Its space in the Charleston Place hotel, of course, was promptly filled by an even higher-flying fine dining concept, Chef Daniel Humm x Charleston Place Presented By Resy, about which I had a few thoughts back in November.
We did lose a handful of restaurants that were perhaps one tier down in the “casual fine dining” category: Butcher & Bee and Goulette in 2023, Chasing Sage, Laurel, and Maya in 2024. The buildings occupied by all five, I should note, have since been taken over by restaurants of a similar caliber: Pelato, Rivayat, Kultura, Volpe, and Shokudo, respectively. The only two fine dining-ish restaurants I’ve noted that closed and were not replaced were Crú Cafe in 2024 and Stars Grill Room in 2025, though the Stars Rooftop Bar is still open.
Add to that a long list of openings in new spaces, including Beautiful South, Costa, Honeysuckle Rose, Lowland, Ma’am Saab, Sorelle, and Southbound in 2023; the Archer, La Cave, Legami, Marbled & Fin, and XO Brasserie in 2024; Allora, Merci, Sushi Bar, Bellerose Hotel Bar, and the Two-Bit Club in 2025; and, the Crossing, Le Bistro, Terra, and V Modern Italian in 2026.
This tally includes only downtown restaurants, and I’m sure I missed a few. We can quibble over which side of the fine dining vs. casual dining divide some of them belong, but no matter how you cut it, it’s not exactly been a fine dining apocalypse.
The Takeaway
The more I think about the handwringing and dire predictions that Noma’s closure produced back in 2023, the more I suspect it was mostly a case of wishful thinking. The commentators were understandably queasy about the many contradictions of fine dining — the eye-popping prices, the obvious disparities in wealth between customers and the people serving them, the lofty claims about “environmental sustainability” juxtaposed against the sheer amount of resources that went into preparing such meals (not to mention guests flying around the world to eat them.)
Making sense of those contradictions and finding ways to bring things more in balance is difficult. Perhaps it was just easier to declare the whole thing rotten to the core and hope it would all just collapse and disappear.
But it hasn’t collapsed, at least not yet.
In its press release, the Noma’s management announced that the “new Noma” will be back in its old space in Copenhagen and will offer a seasonal menu priced at 4,500 Danish krone (about $700.) It will be “shaped by ingredients, landscapes and ideas that inspire us in that moment.” They have not, as far as I am aware, explained how the financial model that was economically unviable back in 2023 is now sustainable again.
So, greet the new Noma, same as the old Noma. However that one Danish restaurant fares in the future, I still think fine dining is going to be just fine.
A great commentary. The restaurant industry seems quite hard to succeed in even with high prices and poorly paid workers. I’ve often wondered how so many very small restaurants in Europe serve great food with happy workers and stay in business. Wish more in the U.S. could have this model. Thanks for writing this piece.
I’ve dreamed of eating at Noma for a decade but once I understood the details of the abuse, I put that dream to bed.
To pay $700 knowing someone in that kitchen is getting stabbed with a fork within the same walls where I’m dining, all because they may not have handled some aspect of my plate perfectly? It’s sickening. Contributing to this behavior would feel like I’m paying into modern slavery just to have an experience. No amount of memories, stars or awards are more valuable than those employees. Not a chance.