Inside 108, Noma’s More Casual Spinoff

Late on the night of September 20, Kristian Baumann’s friends threw him a birthday party. They cranked up the AC/DC, and passed round glasses of sparkling wine and bacon-wrapped sausages from a hotdog truck parked outside. Two cakes appeared, and a colleague set out a pot of curry so spicy it had a few celebrants looking longingly at the harbor waters nearby. Through it all, Baumann—the chef of Copenhagen’s hottest new restaurant—kept a smile on his face and gamely thanked well-wishers for the surprise. But his slumping shoulders told another story. He might have been turning 30, but what he really wanted was to go to bed.

Since opening 108 on July 27, Baumann has been working 16-hour days, seven days a week, without a single night off. That’s not unusual for the chef of an ambitious new restaurant,—widely considered one of the world’s best restaurants—and Baumann’s boss is the . As 108’s chef, Baumann must walk a treacherous tightrope, balancing Noma’s image on one hand, with the need to carve out his own identity on the other. And since 108 is located just 100 meters from Noma, Baumann has to do all this in a restaurant that stands, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of its parent.