With Noma relaunching as a burger joint, what is the future for high-end restaurants? 

Global catastrophes can profoundly change a dining culture. The French Revolution is said to have kickstarted the modern restaurant movement, as chefs, no longer privately cooking for their (guillotined or exiled) masters, began to open public dining spots. The Great Depression helped usher in an age of fast food, while the 2008 recession is partly responsible for the rise of supper clubs and, in this country at least, the proliferation of small plates and street food.

What shift will Covid-19 bring? Because, though too early to tell, it will be seismic effect. Hard times force creativity, and creativity leads to change.

Does this mean that every high-end, fine dining, haute cuisine, expensive restaurant will start serving burgers? Probably not. Yet that is what Noma began to do last month, relaunching as a wine bar/burger joint.

René Redzepi’s new-look Noma has attracted attention for several reasons. The two-starred Copenhagen restaurant was a paragon of ultra-local, ultra-seasonal, experimental, scientific gastronomy (it has an attached laboratory) and became a byword for global food tourism, with its six-month waiting lists. That it has now resorted to serving burgers, the most ubiquitous of comfort foods going – though with Noma-esque flourishes like “beef ferment” and smoked beef fat – is surely significant.

Some view the move as a marketing gimmick. Others see it as a restaurant adapting to survive.

So what does the future hold for the wider high-end restaurant scene? The short term is straightforward. They’ll have to enforce social distancing. With, on the whole, less densely packed dining rooms, this may be less of a problem than for a small bistro. Yet many will have to cut up to 50 per cent of seating, an existential threat. There will be a raft of other safety measures, too, perhaps including PPE for staff or screens between tables.

Hiking prices could help mitigate the ffects of lockdown, but will customers still happily spend £100 and upwards on a meal during a recession? Many seem likely to lose their jobs.

But, as Vaughn Tan, a UCL professor and author of the upcoming The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food, points out, joblessness – or lower salaries – “eventually, not immediately, would creep up.” Unemployment and depressed incomes, whether today, tomorrow or in 2021, will not be good for restaurants.

Then there is tourism, and Sweden presents a glimpse of how things may play out. The country has followed its own course during the pandemic, opting to keep the economy open.

Last month, Magnus Ek, chef-owner of the two-Michelin-starred Oaxen Krog in Stockholm, told Vanity Fair that “international guests” make up 70-90 per cent of the clientele. Since the pandemic, with no tourists arriving, sales have dropped by 80 per cent. Who knows when foreign tourists will be back?

Internal tourism may define 2020, and could help countryside restaurants weather the storm. Paul Ainsworth, who runs several spots in Cornwall, including the Michelin-starred Paul Ainsworth at Number 6 in Padstow, recognises the importance of holidaymakers, but admits to being “nervous about an influx” in an area that has been comparatively lightly hit. “But also, I’ve got 132 people on furlough, relying on me. And I multiply that by four, because a lot of them provide the sole income for their family.”

Tourism may return to normal once – if – a vaccine is found. But will workers return to offices? That is not a given. The lockdown has proved that working from home isn’t necessarily a negative, for companies and employees. There are potential mental health benefits, not to mention reductions on extortionate city-centre rents.

Fewer officer workers means less demand for long networking lunches. Will restaurants in Soho or the City be able to replace that income? “In Zone 1 [city centres], it will be very challenging to get back to the kinds of foot traffic and willingness-to-spend levels that characterised pre-coronavirus times,” Tan warns.

Kristian Brask Thomsen, a Danish restaurateur, expects menus to be shorter, with an ever-greater emphasis on local food. David Moore of London’s Pied à Terre agrees. “The thing that will be a casualty in fine dining will be choice. We will not be able to give customers the same breadth as we used to.”

Moore’s Michelin-starred restaurant in Fitzrovia offered a core menu of around 36 dishes, from starter to dessert. He expects that to be reduced to around 12, perhaps focused on tasting menus rather than multiple-choice à la carte. This could help reduce waste, particularly important if fewer guests than expected come in, or there are recurring waves of infection. Opening hours may also be altered – either longer, to stagger guests, or shorter, to allow for a fewer staff.

In the past few years, many top restaurants have eschewed the traditional three-course dining model in favour of sharing plates. It is easy to envisage this practice being temporarily banned, but Tom Brown of east London's Cornerstone isn’t convinced. “If you’re sitting on a table of two, even if you order separate plates, you’re not going to not share food. We won’t say to people ‘no sharing’. Will we have someone watching them? A bouncer to chuck them out?” Yet Brown recognises that, if government guidelines prevent it, he may have no choice but to alter the restaurant’s sharing ethos. The Chinese government has already advised against sharing food.

One result of lockdown has been diversification. Our concept of what a high-end restaurant is could change for good: grab a bite, a drink, and take home some produce. Or what about ordering a Michelin-starred meal at home? Or you could buy from someone like celebrated chef Jackson Boxer, whose current delivery model requires a little simple finishing at home. Tan thinks delivery or takeaway may well become a permanent feature for many restaurants.

While the present is outlook seems bleak, positives may emerge. Brown reckons that in the long term, restaurants could benefit. “The market is saturated, and there is a huge skills shortage, so fewer restaurants will mean a bigger focus on doing things right, rather than just churning out restaurant after restaurant that is nothing special.” Moore believes that rents, business rates and overheads could come down.

Tan hopes the “dominant business model for restaurants in big cities – lots of PR, a central location, going after office workers, tourists, the Instagram-famous,” will be rebalanced towards serving the local community. “The ideal local neighbourhood restaurant has been given short shrift by the media because it’s not sexy, there are no stars, people aren’t splashing thousands.”

Expensive restaurants are routinely pilloried. But while many inflate prices, high prices often reflect better salaries and high-quality ingredients. Ethically aware customers are often prepared to pay the proper price for quality ingredients, where possible, rather than expect commodities. As Ainsworth insists, “when you’re buying the best produce, all ethically sourced, there has to be a price for that.”

The future of high-end dining is largely predicated on a vaccine. Until then, everything is precarious.

As Noma is showing, there is still an appetite to be fed well. But is the Noma burger here to stay? Here is what its creator says: “We have become this place where you book, plan your travels six months ahead of time, and I guess the spontaneity of going to a restaurant has completely disappeared for us,” Redzepi has declared. “Who knows, maybe it is a part of our future.”

High-end restaurants may look very different in 2021, but that may not be a bad thing.