One of the World’s Most Famous Restaurants is Coming to LA — With a $1500 Tasting Menu

Photo Credit: Audrey Ma

For nearly two decades, noma has functioned less like a restaurant and more like a pilgrimage. The Copenhagen institution—routinely cited as one of the most influential restaurants in the world—has redefined how we think about place, seasonality, and the quiet power of obsession. So when René Redzepi and his team announced that noma would spend 16 weeks in Los Angeles, it felt less like a pop-up and more like a cultural moment.

This spring, noma will set up in Silver Lake for a limited residency, bringing with it a $1,500 tasting menu that promises to be both unmistakably noma and entirely new. The price—an all-inclusive experience encompassing food, beverage pairing, hospitality, and tax—reflects the scale of the undertaking: an entire culinary universe temporarily transplanted to the West Coast.

Photo Credit: Audrey Ma

Los Angeles is not a city that asks to be interpreted politely. It’s sprawling, contradictory, endlessly layered—a place where breakfast tacos, late-night kimchi soup, and Oaxacan mole from a strip mall coexist without explanation. It’s precisely this friction that drew Redzepi here. For noma, a restaurant built on the idea that flavor is inseparable from landscape and culture, LA offers a new kind of creative terrain.

Rather than importing dishes from Copenhagen, the team is starting from scratch. Over the course of the residency, noma’s kitchen will be shaped by the Pacific coastline, the Central Valley, the desert, and the long distances between them. Backyard citrus, olive groves in Ojai, vineyards edging toward the sea—everything within reach becomes part of the conversation. For the first time, noma is building its test-kitchen pantry entirely on the ground, developing hundreds of new flavors rooted in Southern California.

Photo Credit: Audrey Ma

The residency will unfold over sixteen weeks, from March 11 to June 26, with evening seatings and limited midday services. Alongside the dining experience, noma will also open a Noma Projects shop in Silver Lake, offering a curated selection of the restaurant’s fermentation-driven pantry items—an extension of the ethos that has long defined its cooking. The stay will be documented as part of a special film project, capturing the team’s immersion into LA’s food culture.

But noma’s presence in Los Angeles extends beyond the dining room. Through its nonprofit arm, MAD, the team is investing directly in the city’s food community—donating a portion of booking revenue to support scratch-cooking programs in local schools, mentoring young culinary professionals, and hosting industry tables for emerging voices in hospitality. It’s a reminder that noma’s influence has never been confined to what happens on the plate.

Photo Credit: Audrey Ma

In many ways, noma’s LA chapter feels like a natural evolution. The restaurant has always thrived at the intersection of rigor and curiosity, discipline and risk. Los Angeles—with its wild landscapes, global influences, and refusal to be neatly categorized—offers a new canvas.

For diners lucky enough to secure a seat, the experience promises to be less about spectacle and more about perspective: a chance to see one of the world’s most famous restaurants encounter a place that is equally impossible to define—and to taste what happens when those worlds collide.

Photo Credit: Audrey Ma