The cult of abusive chefs

0:00Loyal listeners of Today Explained from Vox will know that Noma out in Copenhagen was maybe the most acclaimed restaurant in the history of food until it announced its closure in 2023. We covered the story back when the restaurant's lead chef, Rene Redzepi, said fine dining had become unsustainable. But now Redzepi is back. He's got a pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles for just 16 weeks. If you're willing to fork over$1 ,500 per diner, you can have that Noma experience without even having to travel to Copenhagen. What a deal. Everyone must be super stoked, right? Of course not.

0:47Old allegations of abuse are raining on Noma's parade. We're going to talk about the cult of the abusive chef on the show today.

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2:07Yes, chef. Yes, chef. Yes, chef. No, chef. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from here with Stephanie Brejo. She's a reporter for the Los Angeles Times food section. And there's one big story in food world right now. Rene Redzepi, the top chef of top chefs. He's the final boss of fine dining chefs. I mean, he is... He's the Bowser. He is the Bowser. Peaches, peaches, peaches, peaches, peaches. I mean, he is one of the most famous chefs in the world, like, indisputably. He's entirely influential. Flowers, moss, ants. Not exactly what you might expect to find on your plate, unless, of course, you're at Noma.

2:50And they even used the brain of reindeers to create this omelet. He sort of proliferated new Nordic cuisine in terms of how much foraging and fermenting sort of came to the forefront in the last 20 or so years of fine dining. I remember the first time I went foraging. I'll never forget that sensation of suddenly realizing what I was surrounded by. I was like, oh, shit. I'm actually standing in the middle of all this food. He's now, you know, influenced multiple generations of chefs at this point over the last couple of decades. And so the question, how does this nice down to earth guy rise to the top of the food world, all while presenting things that no one could possibly think would taste that good?

3:37Rene Rydzeppi is, you know, the words genius, I think, would not be inappropriate here. He's just one of those people. He led NOMA to a three Michelin star ranking. He's been knighted by, you know, the Queen of Denmark. This is a very influential figure in the culinary world. And he's been accused of some ish. Yeah, there are a lot of allegations. And I should say that a number of them sort of started trickling out a few years ago. But in February, a former NOMA staff member, he was the former head of the fermentation lab. His name is Jason Ignazio White. He began posting Instagram, you know, screenshots, basically, of these anonymous, allegedly former NOMA staff and interns who were sharing their stories.

4:24NOMA destroyed my passion for the industry. NOMA broke me in so many ways. Everyone told me to just look away. And he was also talking about his own experience alleging abuse, specifically, mostly under Rene Redzepi. For over two decades, the culture surrounding Rene Redzepi and NOMA has been celebrated without confronting the true harm countless workers have experienced behind the curtains. Earlier this month, there was a years-long report from the New York Times, from reporter Julia Moskin, who had spoken to, over the course of years, 35 former NOMA staff. And at this point, those are some of the most raw and visceral and detailed allegations of abuse that we've ever heard coming out of NOMA.

5:09So all of this sort of escalated, and Jason Ignacio White, the former fermentation lead who was posting to Instagram, decided to stage protests.

5:25He's joined up with a worker advocacy nonprofit, and they have been out there pretty much every day of this pop-up.

5:39So Rene Rizzepi specifically is he's being accused of a lot of things ranging from, you know, physical abuse to psychological torment. In the New York Times article, he is reported to have marched his workers outside into the cold and punched them in the ribs. At one point, someone said that he crouched under a table in the kitchen and was jabbing staff in the legs with a barbecue fork when diners wouldn't be able to see it. you know, he was threatening deportation at one point, alleged body shaming, just general psychological torment. Beneath the glamour and stars, workers being pushed beyond their limits, workers being punched and choked, workers being humiliated, and dreams being broken.

6:23And I should say that these allegations in the New York Times article are called from reports from, you know, 2009 to 2017. So that is also another layer of this, is that a lot of these allegations stem from years ago. And, you know, there are a number of NOMA apologists and sympathizers who say, well, this happened years ago and they've since changed their ways. Rene Redzepi himself has been open about his, you know, anger issues. He wrote an essay about it for a food magazine called Lucky Peach in 2015. And then one day the lid came flying off. The smallest transgression sent me into an absolute rage.

7:01Why the hell have you not picked the time correctly? Why have you overcooked the fish? What is wrong with you? Suddenly, I was going crazy about someone's mise en place or some small thing they said wrong. This was how I had been taught to cook, and it was the only way I knew to get a message through. I can't say that it didn't work for a time. Noma had succeeded beyond whatever I could have imagined for it. But there was also, you know, a 2008 documentary called Noma at Boiling Point that really discusses his anger in the kitchen. It shows him berating his staff. You know, these are things that have been discussed, And I think right now there's a big question of reforming the restaurant industry and can a person change?

7:40Can the industry change? Can a restaurant change? Can that hostility and that sort of ambience of hostility and fear ever really change? Is the middle right there? Yes, sir. So you know that the middle is right there. Shut up and just fucking let me be finished. I'm going to go crazy on you, OK? What is it you don't understand? First you finish the fucking dishes. Is that clear? Yes, sir. Wow. So Redzepi has responded to his behavior before. Is he having to respond to his behavior again? Yeah. Yes. Yes and yes. So some of these allegations more vaguely were covered a few years ago. He, quote unquote, stepped away from the restaurant's day-to-day activities, quote unquote, day-to-day activities.

8:27Of course, he's still involved. He was still here in Los Angeles helping to lead, you know, the pop-up here. When this came out on the evening of the protest, sort of late afternoon, early evening, he released a statement saying that he, in fact, would now be leaving NOMA, you know, again, using the word stepping away. He not only released a statement, but he released a video that has also somewhat been controversial. Oh. Because it's like a docu-style sort of video of him addressing the staff. I'm sorry everyone is in this situation. I really, really am. And he explains that, you know, all of this is happening and it must be very hard for the staff.

9:08And he apologized to his staff and he said he would be stepping away because there's too much attention on him. Because it's so much focused on me, I have to remove myself. And he's sort of giving the restaurant over to his staff at this point. This is your restaurant now, each and every one of you. But then at the end, he says... For me, I'm going into planning the next phase. So there's a lot of, you know, curiosity and confusion as to what that next phase also means. And meantime, how's the restaurant world responding to maybe their, you know, most accomplished chef being a total arse? You know, there are a lot of chefs that I've spoken to who, you know, of course condemn this, but they feel torn because they knew him personally or maybe they've worked with Noma.

9:50They've traveled to Copenhagen in the last few years. one chef told me that, you know, he's trying to square what he saw in the kitchen there, which he felt was a very welcoming and nurturing atmosphere with, of course, these allegations of, you know, apparently what the kitchen culture there was like, you know, years ago. So, and then, of course, there are chefs who are outright, you know, outcry and saying this is never acceptable. We should never have, you know, put any chef on a pedestal. I don't really think that this is the time to be making excuses for apologizing for enabling or uplifting people who've had such abusive pasts.

10:28Like we literally are like putting these people at God tier level because what they do in the kitchen and they're exploiting people and they're abusing people and they're getting But it is bigger than just Renee Redzepi as well. This is not just Redzepi and Noma. This is addressing an entire kitchen culture that for years has been, you know, rife with stress and high tempers and cramped situations. And sometimes it can become a powder keg. But there are a number of voices who have, you know, tried to change that culture over the last few years, especially as conversations like this have been coming to light.

11:01With all that said, with all the blowback and the protests and reactions from around the restaurant world, how's it looking? Can I get a reservation for next week? You very much cannot. So, I know it's it's really heartbreaking, but it's I guess I'll have to keep my fifteen hundred dollars. I know. Put it into anything else at this point. I, you know, I spoke with Pablo Soto, the head chef of Noma, and he said they're fully booked up for the 16-week run. So there are no seats. And I have, in fact, spoken to a few diners who had reservations and planned on keeping them because they said these are allegations of abuse that had occurred in the past.

11:42He's apologized. One diner said, you know, I follow a lot of sports teams and they have problematic players. So why is fine dining different? Why morally would this not be in the same vein? So it's been, again, a range of responses from chefs, from the dining community, from diners themselves. I think I've heard it all at this point.

12:11Stephanie Brasho, read her stuff at latimes.com slash food. So are we the problem? Do we like our chefs with a side of intensity? We're going to ask a food critic when Today Explained is back up.

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15:58Helen Rosner, you're a staffer at The New Yorker. You're their restaurant critic. You write their food scene column. Why do you think this story about Renee Redzepi is getting such a big reaction? Like, we know that chefs like him, and even him, have been accused of very bad behavior before. Noma is quite simply the most important restaurant in the world. Which sounds like a big hyperbolic thing to say, but it is the truth. I think that there is no single restaurant on the planet that is as influential for the fine dining scene that is as contributive to the sort of trickle down of trend and philosophy and the way of thinking and the way of doing business.

16:38Rene Redzepi is the face and avatar of this restaurant that any chef, any chef, any cook in the entire world is aware of and almost certainly is in some way modeling themselves on. And for all my Del Taco heads like in the audience, can you just explain why it's so important? Noma is, to maybe oversimplify it, a restaurant in Copenhagen in Denmark that was opened in the early 2000s by Chef René Redzepi with Klaus Meyer, who is no longer affiliated with it. And it sort of took a couple years to find its footing, but when it really burst onto the international fine dining scene, what Noma was doing was a type of cooking that was really rooted in a phrase that they used that has now become kind of a cliché in the culinary world, but it's because Noma made it a cliché.

17:25And that phrase is sense of place. People that are into food, I think they need to try this. You know, they need to see how we express our nature on a plate. And what Redzepi was doing was a lot of foraging, a lot of going out and finding ingredients, plants, animals, funguses, insects. It, at this point, has become almost a joke, this idea of like, you know, a few ants and a piece of moss plated on a piece of driftwood and a rock that you found and then calling it like the sense of the sea. But what Noma did was actually quite revolutionary. And like a lot of silly-seeming descriptions of art, when you were actually experiencing it in its execution, it was pretty extraordinary and transportive.

18:11And this is why people would pay like$1 ,500 to go to this L.A. pop-up. Well, yeah. You know, it's the kind of thing where I think from the outside you might think of it as pretentious, but I genuinely think, and I've eaten at Noma twice, that I wouldn't call it pretentious because I don't think it was pretense. I think that Redzepi and the team that he cultivated believed quite passionately in the innovation and the creation and exploration that they were doing. They communicated it to diners with extraordinary clarity. It was, I think, by any metric of art, successful art. I want to go now. Open it back up.

18:42No, we'll get to that. Okay. A lot of chefs, as you well know and as we established early in the show, spent their time at Noma as interns or kitchen staff. It was this, you know, resume builder for a long time. I like read sometimes when I'm like going to a new restaurant, it's like this guy was at Noma one time and it's like, OK, now I guess I got to go there. When those chefs left Noma, did they take its toxic culture with them? That's hard to say. I think that the idea of a restaurant kitchen as a particularly toxic workplace predates Noma and is certainly not exclusive to Noma. You know, like we see like the bear exploring the really sort of darker, more painful side of it.

19:20You think you're so tough. Yeah. Why don't you say this? Say, yes, chef. I'm so tough. Yes, chef. I'm so tough. Say, fucking yes, chef. I'm so tough. Yes, chef. I'm so tough. You are not tough. You are bullshit. You are talentless. Say, fucking Hans. Hans! We see a sort of semi-glorification of it in the work of Anthony Bourdain, where he had a very conflicted relationship to it. Like, he reveled in the kind of pirate-shipness of cooking. And he also, you know, later in his career, as he achieved more and more fame, looked on it with a lot of skepticism. and was like, you know, we don't have to make being an abusive dick an essential part of our professional identities as cooks.

19:57The model of fine dining is rooted in what's called the brigade system, which comes out of French fine dining and is modeled on military hierarchy. So you have people who are each in charge of their own stations. This is things like the sous chef, who is the number two to the chef de cuisine. Chef just means chief, right? Like the chef de cuisine is the head of the kitchen. The sous chef is the assistant to that. And then you have chefs who are in charge of different stations. The garde-manger is the person who's in charge of salads and raw vegetables. The saussier is in charge of sauces and things like that.

20:25This system is modeled on the French military. Wow. And it's called the brigade system. I mean, it's right there. And, you know, as a system, it's something that is not in universal adoption across fine dining, but it is kind of the substrate on which fine dining is built. And the whole idea of everybody saying yes, chef in unison sounds like military call and response because it is, because that's what it's modeled on. And, you know, historically, this is certainly less, very much less the case in the last couple of decades. But historically, restaurant work was not something you went into if you were upper class.

21:00It wasn't something you went into aspirationally. It was an industry that took all comers and that didn't do background checks. and that, you know, if you could just walk into a room and if you could scrub a dish, you'd have a job. So discipline, compliance, not talking back, not pushing back, not making any ripples became the way that these restaurants would function. And they were, you know, multimodal beasts with dozens of people running around trying to execute tons of dishes all the time for a demanding clientele. And that kind of rigidity in structure certainly can produce a certain kind of product, but it also creates and enforces a certain kind of mindset, both in the people who are receiving the orders and the people who are giving them.

21:41If I'm not mistaken, there was supposed to have been like a huge reckoning in the restaurant industry. Mario Batali, Barbara Lynch, some other lesser known chefs who were accused of being toxic or harassers or whatever it might have been. Yeah. Do we learn anything from it? Because it feels like, I mean, this is old behavior, but we're still like trying to move past it. You know, I think that the restaurant industry is sort of in a perpetual state of reckoning and is also kind of at all times trying to figure out what it is and if it is even a coherent industry at all or just kind of a loose consortium of individual businesses.

22:15Fair. You know, I think that the Me Too movement and that era of workers feeling empowered to speak out was pretty extraordinary. And if it didn't massively, dramatically shift the way that business is done in the restaurants, it certainly moved the needle a little bit. And so what we have seen over the last few years is a much stronger, much more focused culture of workers standing up for themselves. And I think that part of what makes this NOMA story really interesting and really complicated is that the abuses that were outlined in this blockbuster New York Times report took place between 2009 and 2017, nearly a decade ago.

22:55And that doesn't minimize their horror. That doesn't minimize the nature of the abuse. But it does, I think, tell us something that this took place in a slightly different social environment. In an environment where people who were coming to NOMA, who were seeking out proximity to the creativity, the innovation, the excitement, the prestige, might not have felt as confident as people now might be to push back or to say no or to intervene or to leave and say something immediately in public. You know, the way that the landscape has shifted, I think, is also that consumers, that people are more receptive to hearing these stories.

23:41That, unfortunately, tragically, heartbreakingly, the comment section on any of these Instagram posts, I saw this in the comments on my own article that I wrote about this for The New Yorker, are overrun with people who are defending the actions that Red Zeppi is accused of. Wow. Not just saying it didn't happen, but saying that, like, that's just the cost of being in a kitchen. This is something I want to ask you about because my favorite episodes of The Bear are the ones where people are screaming at each other and like on the cusp of killing each other. And then you look at this NOMA pop up in Los Angeles, even after all this controversy, all this, you know, journalism and protests.

24:22We heard that you can't make a reservation there because it's fully booked at$1 ,500 a person. Is this something that we're OK with to some degree? I think it's impossible to overestimate people's capacity for cognitive dissonance. I think that there are lots of people who think that this kind of accountability culture has gone too far, right? Like, you know, what accountability culture, honestly? Like, I don't actually see meaningful consequences for virtually anybody who gets in the crossfires or this sort of thing. But like, you know, you brought up Mario Batali when he stepped away from his restaurants in, what was it, 2018.