I have never envied the chef/owners of high-flying restaurants. Who could possibly thrive under the immense pressure of serving perfect food perfectly, night after night? And then be expected to break even, let alone turn a profit?
No wonder so many high-end restaurant kitchens are laboratories of abusive behavior. The merciless Gordon Ramsay is hardly an outlier.
But Rene Redzepi, the celebrated chef who introduced conceptual Nordic food to the world when he opened Noma in Copenhagen more than two decades ago, has allegedly taken the stereotype to new, sadistic heights.
A New York Times investigation, sparked by Instagram posts from a former Noma employee, landed with a crash just days before the restaurant’s sold-out 16-week, $1,500-per-person Los Angeles pop-up opened Wednesday.
Between 2009 and 2017, the New York Times reported, Redzepi “hit, jabbed and shoved workers for minor errors and punched them when enraged by an infraction. He threatened them with blacklisting, deportation and public shaming.”
When there were customers in the dining room who could see into the open kitchen, said the Times, “he would crouch under the counters in the open kitchen and jab them in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil, like a barbecue fork.”
He should have been sued, or investigated. Not celebrated.
I’ve been seeing lots of online debate about which is more offensive: patronizing a chef accused of brutalizing his employees or dropping that kind of money on a single fancy dinner.
I don’t hold it against anyone spending their own money on an uber-fancy meal, although I am slightly repulsed by the fetishization of the food at places like Noma or the French Laundry, where I’ve eaten a couple of times. Nor would I expect anyone to cancel a reservation because of a chef’s past wrongdoings — and Redzepi insists that after years of therapy, his behavior is a thing of the past.
But his history leaves a bad taste for some. “There’s something about supporting a chef who multiple former employees claimed punched a colleague in the ribs (and berated him until he admitted that he liked giving DJs oral sex), among other abhorrent behaviors, that makes me lose my appetite,” wrote Times restaurant critic Jenn Harris, in an essay explaining why the Noma pop-up is a hard pass for her.
Jason Ignacio White, Noma’s former head of fermentation, who began posting past Noma employees’ distressing accusations of abuse by Redzepi on Instagram last month, led a protest Wednesday at the pop-up site, the Paramour Estate in Silver Lake. He was joined by the labor rights group One Fair Wage.
White has said that Redzepi owes reparations to the young professionals who worked incredibly long hours for free, and traded their dignity and mental health for the opportunity to have Noma on their resumes.
“Noma broke me,” read White’s sign. “You bought a ticket to a crime scene,” read another.
American Express, and others, pulled sponsorships for the pop-up a day before its opening.
While the first dinner went on as scheduled, the deluge of bad press led Redzepi to unexpectedly announce he would “step away” from Noma, as well as from MAD, the nonprofit he founded that’s focused on the future of food. “I cannot change who I was then,” he said in an apology posted online. “But I take responsibility for it and will keep doing the work to be better.”
Redzepi, who built his business on the backs of unpaid interns, or stagiaires, from all over the world, closed Noma’s physical doors a few years ago. It turned out that without all the free labor, his business model was unsustainable. Noma now operates as a food lab, and travels the world as a pop-up.
How does a man who pioneered an entirely new cuisine, whose restaurants have been named best in the world a half-dozen times, whose contributions to Danish culture and tourism led the queen to knight him, become so toxic?
For hints, I watched the 2008 Danish documentary, “Noma at Boiling Point,” made just as Redzepi was about to become world famous. In it, he berates his staff, calls them stupid, and rudely pushes past kitchen workers, knocking things out of their hands. Since he knew the camera was rolling, you really have to wonder what on Earth must he have been like when the cameras were off?
Some of his unpaid workers were painfully young — one 17-year-old boy, who had committed to spending four years at Noma, decides to leave after being denied a day off to attend his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary party.
“Sometimes he’s sick of being so angry,” Redzepi’s then-girlfriend, now wife, Nadine Levy, says in the film. “He doesn’t manage to think before he explodes. Because he wants it to work so badly.”
Redzepi‘s passion and creativity are beyond question.
“When you eat this dish,” he tells staff working on a dessert of blueberries with pine ice cream and wood sorrel, “it should taste like you’re going through a pine forest.”
In another scene, he is not just enraged but on the verge of tears after a customer complains that his lamb was tough.
Redzepi berates the chef who incorrectly sliced the meat — with the grain, not against it — and tells him to “remember this day as one of the worst days in Noma’s history.”
The tragedy? He really meant it.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
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