The Travails of Noma: God Chefs, Brutal Kitchens and the Cult of Fine Dining

There are an easy bunch to demonise, and to a certain extent, they should be.  The God Chef, the collector of Michelin stars; the veteran of the kitchen, with all the cuts, bruises and wounds to show for it; the brute who terrorises the staff, mocking their lack of adeptness, skill and knowledge for overcooking the pigeon or adding a touch too much salt.  Hurled crockery, flying language bristling with savagery and filth.  And the rituals of hazing and collective shaming.

Copenhagen’s Michelin starred restaurant, Noma, has seen much of this and more besides.  It has been at the forefront of fine dining propaganda, holding forth about that fiction called sustainability.  (Nothing is sustainable, since entropy and death awaits us all.)  Three Michelin stars and earning first place in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List no fewer than five times, has been put down to the efforts of founding chef René Redzepi.  So confident was he that he closed Noma in 2023 to pursue his food laboratory vision (this was aided in no small way by the Covid pandemic), along with an empire of global pop-ups.

History, however, caught up with the head chef.  Last month, Redzepi’s past conduct in the kitchen featured prominently and most negatively, the object of much grief from former employees.  The signal event was the pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles, costing the pretty sum of $1,500 a seat. Former Noma employee Jason Ignacio White, in collaboration with the worker-advocacy non-profit group One Fair Wage, staged a protest against the venture outside its location in the neighbourhood of Silver Lake on March 11.  Righteousness had gripped White, who insisted that “the repercussions of staying silent are worse than me speaking up and standing with my peers against violence.”  Saru Jayaraman, a member of One Fair Wage, also posed a few questions to CBS News.  “Who wants to eat in any environment of abuse?  Who wants to eat food that comes from the tears and sweat of people who are suffering?”  Given the customers that pay criminal sums for the jiggery-pokery that is the fine dining experience, these questions are moot.

Following the withdrawal by various sponsors, Redzepi announced he would be resigning.  On Instagram, he stated that, “An apology is not enough; I take responsibility for my own actions.”  The restaurant had been “open for 23 years and I’m incredibly proud of our people, our creativity, and the direction Noma is heading.”

Last month, The New York Times reported that the work environment at the exclusive restaurant had been one of heightened toxicity.  An incident from February 2014 was recounted, involving the ritualised tormenting of a sous chef who had dared play techno music in the production kitchen.  An enraged Redzepi ordered the entire kitchen staff to follow him and the chef into the cold.  A circle of some 40 cooks formed around the two.  All the parties were thereby complicit in the scene.  Redzepi ranted, punched the chef in the ribs screaming that no one would be permitted to go back inside till the offender confessed to enjoying giving D.J.s oral sex.  This was duly done, and the staff returned.

This moment of savaging was but the tip of a rather large iceberg.  According to the paper, 35 former employees were interviewed, revealing “a pattern of physical punishment” visited upon the staff by Redzepi.  Between 2009 and 2017, employees were punched in the face, assaulted by kitchen implements, slammed against walls.  They suffered enduring trauma from “psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule.”  Redzepi also made it clear he would wield influence over the future employment prospects of the staff by threatening their blacklisting from restaurants, have their families deported, or even have their spouses fired from employment at other businesses.

Redzepi has not been indifferent to the monster within.  An essay authored in 2015 begins with descriptions of violence in the kitchen.  In his culinary pupillage, the future head chef of Noma was the victim.  “It wasn’t uncommon for me to be called a worthless cunt or worse.”  Pans with handles searingly hot would be placed at his station, a form of kitchen terrorism.  He promised to “never be like that.”  But behaviour had been learned.  The conditioning was too strong.  With his own restaurant, investments and expectations, the pattern reasserted itself.  “The smallest transgressions sent me into an absolute rage”.  He had learned to cook that way, and, importantly, it yielded results.  Stress, terror, determination.  Noma “succeeded beyond whatever I could have imagined for it.”

What, then, to do?  Change, yes, but not at the cost of certain qualities.  A martial quality was indispensable.  One had to be careful of going soft.  “The kitchen needs discipline, codes of conduct, a clear chain of command.”  The “boiling points of service” could not be removed.  What was needed was finding “tools to handle them better.”

The sense of purging and ecstatic lynching of Redzep did obscure the more recent evolution of Noma.  Andreja Lajh, founder of the London-based agency for chefs, restaurants and gourmet food producers called Haut de Gamme, has issued a plea for greater balance in covering the Noma affair.  The God Chef should be given a chance.  Contrition and change were possible.  “The kitchen that exists today is not the kitchen of 2012.  That distinction was never made in a single major piece of coverage.”  The list of changes is outlined, some of them being the institution of a fully paid programme for interns in 2022; a four-day working week; a vigilant HR section; fourteen weeks of co-parent leave; and full health insurance also covering dental and physiotherapy. (A more comprehensive list of changes is documented in Noma’s Workplace Transparency Review.)

Lajh also makes another claim: that the protests against Redzepi failed to account for the genuine welfare of the workers on whose behalf the campaign had supposedly been waged.  Campaigns of redress and retribution can distort.  Be it White, One Fair Wage, the media or the “mob”, had the workers, notably the current crop of employees, genuinely benefited?  Some 130 had moved to Los Angeles with their families over a year to prepare for the Los pop-up.  The kitchen workers “who chose to be there, who crossed the world because they believed in what they were building […] were silenced.  Not by Noma but by the people who claimed to be their voice.”

As long as the punters seek the oddly named experience known as fine dining (is there such a thing?) curated by titans of the kitchen, and are willing to pay astronomical amounts for a lining of sauce from a bottle across a barely visible piece of meat with garnish, the God Chef will continue to thrive.  To expect that such divinities of the kitchen will be kept in their place, well behaved and sensitive captains of the “team experience” will be expecting much.  Food writer and chef Lauren Joseph makes a sensible observation on this score: “Until we rejig how we measure greatness, until the kingmaking awards – Michelin Guide and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants – include some basic labour standards in their criteria, there will be no meaningful change.”  The problem is in the dining itself.

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