> Well, Noma can charge customers up to $1500 per person and average worker is paid around $50/ hr.
What are you talking about? This was never the case, and when Rene had to pay market prices on labour he shut the place down.
People who dine at these places are all too self-infatuated to ever realize but you are litterly working for slave wages in those kitchens, the saying goes that 'you were paid in knowledge' in order to start your own concept if you survived (as very few would decide to stay as a Sous) those barren years of your career. Never would they offer $50/hr when most heavy season days are easily 12+ hours long.
Just the amount of money they paid to stages racked up 40k GBP/month [1].
Personally speaking, Noma had the cache because of Rene's affiliation to Feran Adria cohort and then Bourdain (who initially dismissed Adria's work as needless snobbery) to most outside of the culinary World, but after El Bulli closed I felt that an era had ended (culinary avant garde) that would never be truly replicated again as it existed mainly during the bubble era before 2008.
Noma tried to re-ignite it with it's creative work-shopping and focus on local-foraging twist but it had all the pitfalls El Bulli had with none of the ground-breaking innovation (I think David Muñoz did a better job of that with XO concepts and he never worked for Feran), including not paying it's workers.
0: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/01/09/worlds-bes...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/108856...
