Friday Five: The week's top news
- René Redzepi will close his Noma restaurant at the end of 2024 and transform it into a food laboratory. The chef-patron at the Copenhagen restaurant, which has been named The World’s Best Restaurant on numerous occasions and which holds three Michelin stars, will close at the end of next year and reopen as a food lab ‘Noma 3.0’. This is not the first time the chef has made the decision to close Noma. Having launched it in 2003 he closed it in 2016, reopening it two years later in a new location.
- Simon Bonwick has left his role at The Princess of Shoreditch to take on a pub and restaurant in Hurley, Berkshire. The former chef-patron of The Crown at Burchetts Green has taken on the Dew Drop Inn with his wife Deborah, where he will once again cook solo. The Pub will reopen later this month with the pair’s familiar hospitality in place and will serve a seasonal menu of dishes that will be ‘instantly recognisable’ to all who follow the chef’s style of cooking.
- The team behind Noble Rot has secured a site in Mayfair’s Shepherd Market for what will be its third London restaurant. Noble Rot Mayfair is slated to launch in Spring this year within the former site of longstanding French brasserie Le Boudin Blanc. Noble Rot co-founder Dan Keeling said that the small square and piazza that make up Shepherd Market is “one of those increasingly rare bubbles of London that manages to still feel like a well-kept secret - even though this one is in the pulsing heart of the city”. The new site will offer the group’s “trademark warmth and fine cooking” and its “most ambitious” wine programme yet.
- Chef and grower Dan Cox will open his long-awaited Cornwall restaurant early next month as he looks to ‘celebrate the connection between food and agriculture’. Five years in the making, Crocadon will serve regularly changing tasting menus based on what has been harvested on Cox’s organic and regenerative farm of the same name that week. The 25-cover restaurant will be set in a restored barn ‘framed by the rolling hills of the Tamar Valley’. The London-born chef took over the 120-acre Crocadon Farm in 2017 having spent seven years working for Simon Rogan Group, which included helping to establish Rogan’s biodynamic farm Our Farm.
- Giggling Squid’s sister brand Lime Squeezy has closed its last remaining restaurant, bringing to an end its high street presence less than two years after it launched. The all-day orientated Thai restaurant brand confirmed that its Chichester restaurant had ceased trading as of 9 January. It comes after the group closed its only other restaurant, located in central Brighton, late last year after fewer than six months of trading. Lime Squeezy was conceived by Giggling Squid co-founder Pranee Laurillard as a faster-paced, all day-orientated sibling to Giggling Squid and launched in Chichester in 2021.
