As the sun lowered over Copenhagen’s frigid harbor on February 9, Noma’s senior staff huddled outdoors in one of their still-unheated greenhouses for an emergency meeting. It was less than a week before the new restaurant was slated to open, and, for the umpteenth time, key parts of the kitchen had not arrived as scheduled. Without counter tops and induction burners, there could be no cooking. A few of the head chefs—mindful of their team’s experience in pushing through the most extreme challenges—argued they could still pull things off. But the man whose dream this all was, reminded them that this was different.

“If it were just up to us, I know we could do it,” Noma chef and co-owner René Redzepi said. “But it’s not in our hands. And we can’t practice on our guests.”

With that, one of the best restaurants in the world made the most painful decision of its history: it would call the 80 or so guests who held bookings for the first day, and tell them that the new Noma would not be open in time to receive them.

In 2014, Noma was the darling of the food world, holding the top spot on the World’s 50 Best list and a full reservation book to prove it. By showcasing wild foods and the region’s pristine products, it had redefined Nordic cuisine, launched a style of cooking that restaurants from New York to Bangkok imitated, and put Copenhagen on the culinary map. But for Redzepi, it wasn’t enough. When he found an abandoned bunker that year, burnt out and coated in graffiti, on an isthmus of land on Copenhagen’s edge, he determined it would become the new Noma. He and his partners hired renowned Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to build the new structure, which was eventually inspired by the layout of a classic Danish farm. Rather than taming nature, as farms tend to do, the new Noma would let it in. There would be gardens all around, including on the roof, and huge windows and connecting glass ceilings that would make guests and staff feel like they were outdoors. The dining room and kitchen would nearly meld with the surrounding woods, the waters, the birds that nested on shore.

The new menu would reflect this emphasis. Noma would offer three distinct menus over the course of the year, each focused exclusively on the season’s bounty: seafood in winter, vegetables in summer, game in fall. But it would guard against any kind of nostalgia-inducing rusticity with cutting-edge kitchens (four in all), state-of-the-art fermentation rooms, and facilities that privileged the staff’s well-being. “We want to build the most creative space in the restaurant world,” Redzepi said last week.

In its imagination, scope, and sheer audacity, Noma 2.0 sometimes resembles the mythic Iquitos opera house, with Redzepi as its Fitzcarraldo. How else to consider the decision to take a groundbreaking, successful restaurant—one at the very peak of its Michelin-starred powers—and close it in order to rebuild less than a mile away? The project promised a more inspiring work environment, new accolades, and opportunities for creativity for years to come, but it would also strain to the breaking point his restaurant’s finances, require extreme sacrifices from his 90-person staff, and threaten to jeopardize the reputation Redzepi had spent a lifetime building. But on that afternoon six days before the restaurant was scheduled to open, no one had time to weigh whether the project represented ambition or folly. They were too busy worrying if they would make even the newly delayed opening.

The plan was visionary, but also intensely risky. In order to achieve it, Redzepi shut down the original Noma in February 2017, though that itself was a delay. In fact, in September 2016, the chef had warned that if the new restaurant didn’t open by December of that year, it would go bankrupt. Stopgap measures prevented such a disaster, but between the costs of outfitting the space and keeping the staff on payroll during the ever-lengthening period when there was no revenue coming in, Noma has exceeded its original construction budget twice over.

“We’re about as financially pressured as we could be,” Redzepi said. Extraordinarily high rent on the new space and the cost of a research trip through the Nordic region haven’t helped. The new restaurant’s prices, though high, aren’t going to make anyone rich; the tasting menu alone, without drinks, comes to $375 per person-but a full quarter of that simply covers food costs. To make ends meet, the new Noma must sell every seat. Bookings were released in a several-week block, and must be paid for in advance. So far, they have sold through twice.

Yet there is a bigger risk than mere financial failure. Redzepi’s reputation is at stake. More than mere chef, he has positioned himself as a leader within the field who continuously strives to innovate. He launched the chefs’ symposium MAD, which seeks to better the profession as a whole, in 2011. Between 2015 and 2017, Noma held popups in Japan, Australia, and Mexico expressly designed to keep the juices of invention flowing. But they were only temporary. Reimagining Noma promises a sustained period of such creativity. Certainly there are secondary benefits—a new bout of media attention, renewed Michelin consideration, and the possibility of a restored top spot on the 50 Best list—but what truly drives him is the need to prove there will be no settling. “My greatest fear,” Redzepi said, “is that people won’t think it different enough from what came before.”

Redzepi possesses a near-primal restlessness, born of a childhood in which his parents struggled to make ends meet. His father was an Albanian-born Macedonian who immigrated to Denmark and worked as a taxi driver; his Danish mother worked as a cashier and cleaning woman. Redzepi recalls going to bed hungry, having dined only on toast, at the end of many months. And in Denmark’s tightly knit, largely homogenous population, he felt, with his Muslim dad, a permanent outsider. In many ways, he still does.

In December, four days after Redzepi turned 40, his father died. Now, in ways he doesn’t fully understand, he finds himself again consumed by the same fierce, outraged, determined sense of having something to prove that he felt when he opened the original Noma more than fourteen years ago. “I thought I was prepared for it, but I wasn’t,” he said of his father’s death. “I feel so angry now. It’s all coming back. Never fitting in because your dad’s a Muslim, never celebrating Fastelavn [Danish carnival] because you don’t have enough money to buy costumes, your school kicking you out in ninth grade. When we opened Noma I wanted to show them-nothing was going to get in the way. Now I feel that again.”

Maybe that anger helps explain some of his otherwise-rash-seeming decisions: closing Noma so far in advance that merely keeping staff on payroll became a burden, or opening bookings months before construction was completed. But even after delaying the opening a day this week, he couldn’t quite bring himself to admit a misstep: “Do I think we made a mistake? In hindsight, it would have been…” He trailed off, then corrected himself: “It always would have been a push. And we needed a deadline to focus on.”

That might be true. But it certainly heightened the pressure. A week before the restaurant was to open, a massive tarp protected the still-exposed space from rain and snow, the lounge windows had yet to be installed, and the dining room ceiling wasn’t complete. The staff had long abandoned the idea of landscaping. Special projects director Annika de las Heras was just hoping they'd have time to throw some mulch over the thick mud that surrounded the restaurant. Cooks and waiters worked through the night, hauling planks and stuffing acoustic insulation between the ceiling slats. And that was before the kitchen tops failed to appear.

The staff had decided to open the restaurant for an extra service on Sunday, in order to accommodate the guests originally slated for Thursday. Everyone was gracious about it and managed to reschedule, with the exception of a German indie band that was going out on tour. Yet no sooner was one fire out, than another erupted. When the kitchen tops finally arrived, late on Monday, they were missing essential parts. As he had on many other occasions, Noma’s director Peter Kreiner tried unsuccessfully to get information from the company, and for one horrible day, some of the senior staff feared they might have to cancel the entire first week.

It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon that everyone was confident it would go forward. Finally, the place looked more like a restaurant than a construction site. In the dining room, florists put the finishing touches on the dried seaweed and herbs that hung from wooden beams, and servers set tables with handmade ceramic cups. The craft of the place astonished even those who helped build it. Almost everything had been custom-made: the Tomás Saraceno art made from mold, the long stretch of cabinets that ran the length of the service area, the rope-wrapped wooden chairs, the lampshades made of kelp, the waiters’ shoes. It was the first restaurant for David Thulstrup who designed the interiors, and he said the biggest challenge was articulating Noma’s precise balance. “We wanted everything to be modern and fresh, but also rustic,” he said, pointing out the stacked oak planks that comprise the dining room walls. “Just not too rustic. We invented a lot of things, because everything had be completely new.”

The kitchen combines the same modernity and sense of craft. With its polished wood stations, big open spaces, and walkways covered with glass ceilings, it bore traces of the one Noma had built in the jungle of Tulum during its most recent pop-up. “We learned that in Mexico,” Redzepi said. “How amazing it is to have an outdoor kitchen. We just had to figure out a way to do it in a place with shittier weather.”

Things were coming together. In the prep kitchen, sous chef Luke Kolpin trained a handful of the restaurant’s nearly three dozen interns in the dark arts of Frenching codhead bones, scraping the flesh to one end. In his new lab, director of fermentation David Zilber was installing a monitoring system for the koji cabinets. King crabs paddled vigorously in the wall-sized fish tanks. (The large case meant to hold the ants that Noma famously uses as seasoning was still empty; local ants apparently hibernate in winter.) A blue knit cap migrating precariously over his head, Redzepi surveyed the barely controlled chaos as three dozen cooks scrambled to start a tasting for the front of house late Wednesday night. “Can you imagine,” he said, referring to the original start date, “if we were supposed to open in 12 hours?”

At one point Thomas Frebel, Noma’s head of research and development, froze as if he spotted a mistake. Instead, he was just taking in the beauty of it all. “There’s been so much pressure,” he said. “But in a weird way it’s also normal. The point of the whole Noma spirit is that crazy things happen. We need adrenaline like a mackerel needs to keep moving-or die.”

On Friday, half an hour before the first paying guests arrived, office staff were frantically hauling debris and vacuuming the newly laid cement, while the builders sprinted, drills in hand, to affix planks that could act as a walkway to the front door. Three minutes past the noontime opening, with guests corralled at the front gate, Redzepi himself was outside, furiously raking mulch.

Moments later, head chef Ben Ing began calling orders, and the rest of the kitchen leapt into action. The whorled shells of sea snails went out first, their lips adorned with bits of algae painstakingly tweezed into place, followed by clams and mussels, oysters and urchins. The pieces of cod heads were grilled like spare ribs over the room-sized barbecue in back. Even dessert maintained the theme; the final course was a plankton cake. “We made the right choice to focus the menu just on seafood,” Redzepi said. “We’ve never had this kind of creativity before in the cold months.”

Waiters swooped through with trays of fragile wine glasses, muttering backs backs backs as a kind of incantation against collision. Cooks shared instructions in their native Spanish, Italian, Japanese, or English in its Australian, American, and Irish variants. A line cook needed ice, and an intern sprinted at full speed down the hall to retrieve it. A course was called, and five chefs leapt to the station to plate it. At first, every dash and leap felt like an emergency, but gradually it became clear: this was the normal mode of transport, a sign of each crew member’s devotion to the cause. Redzepi may be Fitzcarraldo, but his staff is no less committed, or addicted.

“Adrenaline is the heartbeat of Noma,” said waiter Kirsty Marchant. “You want order, you work at Eleven Madison.” Still, it was controlled chaos. Earlier in the week, fermentation director Zilber had reflected on the recent past. “Rene talks about the pop-ups in terms of maintaining creativity,” he said. “I call them training to be the marines of food.”

When the last delirious guests—one of whom planted himself before the kitchen, threw his arms in the air, and boomed “I love you all”—had departed, Redzepi would congratulate the crew on how smoothly service had gone. There were plenty of things that weren’t right, including hot passes from a Belgian company that still weren’t operative. The staff would still have to come in at five A.M. the next morning to ensure they finished mise en place in time, but 45 minutes into service Redzepi could tell they had nailed it. “It was like getting on a wild horse that wants to throw you off,” he said. “We tamed it.”

In fact, it was almost too tame. At one point during service, Redzepi had called his head chefs and managers together. Since things were going so smoothly already, maybe, he mused, they could add some tables, a few in the lounge, or maybe in the kitchen itself. And if they did that, adding extra tables and perhaps extending service hours a bit on weekends, they could cut work hours the other days without losing any revenue. His crew paused for a second to take in the news.

“You couldn’t give us two weeks to just enjoy things as they are now?” asked manager James Spreadbury.

“No,” Redzepi replied. “That would be too easy.”