On the Nonsense of NOMA

    There have been entirely too many recent pieces in food media from people being very loud about "Oh, NOMA's closing and I tooootally don't care because I'd never have gotten to go anyway". Well, yes. But do we care about you? No. Does the world of food? With an approach like that, it certainly shouldn't. Sheesh.

    I'd never have gotten to go either, of course. Factually speaking, I'm dirt-poor, speak about five words of Danish, and am utterly bereft of any connections that might open the appropriate doors, so the notion was essentially impossible. NOMA, to the world at large, has always been more of a nebulous notion than a physical place, and it's no different to me in that respect. Professionally speaking, my perspective is different. Should I ever decide I want to taste NOMA for myself, replicating its food is certainly not beyond my level of skill. But that's neither here nor there.

    Look. NOMA was a restaurant that combined a handful of interesting ideas to create a painstakingly fabricated bit of performance art, where food is conceptually rustic, but buttressed by factually elegant, uncompromising simplicity. It's very French in the level of detail, and extremely Chinese in its execution. The former in reducing things to their fundamental essence, and the latter in concocting or amplifying an ingredient's natural flavor via things that aren't actually that ingredient. It made a lot of solid PR for the world of haute cuisine, and the many people behind it have left their mark all over the world in the manner of Adria, Bocuse, or Escoffier. 

    But really, the rationale behind its closing is more important than anything else: The world of fine dining requires logistics and precision at every level, from planetwide to personal, and it's far too much of an unsustainable resource hog when the rest of the world is even more visibly steeped in staggering inequality. 

    I say 'visibly' because unpaid labor is the backbone of essentially every famous or expensive restaurant, and fixing that requires pervasive operational and philosophical change. Said change isn't complicated, exactly, but it must be looked at from both ends of the spectrum. Ideally, the high end would stop isolating itself, removing its often severe and expensive requirements of product, labor, and methodology, while the low end would stop entirely so the supply chains can catch a break long enough to restructure around not having to constantly produce and move superfluous product of inferior quality.

    NOMA and its ilk are concepts that have expensive uses; they yield tangible long-term benefits to the knowledge bases of food science, agriculture, horticulture, history, even art and design.  But to ameliorate the damage done to the public's psyche vis-a-vis the disparity of quality in industry, said disparity must first be aggressively narrowed from the bottom up and the top down alike.

    The food world at large will always be far better served by serving better. But like many before it, NOMA never quite served enough. 

They will be remembered and referenced. But they will not be missed.

Perhaps that should mean more.