suffering is not part of the recipe

Welcome back to dine well after a fairly long, life chaos-related sabbatical! Just dropping by during this time of global warfare, impending robot wars and general calamity to talk about one of the most pressing issues of today: restaurant industry gossip (lol).

First, a few housekeeping/good news items: if you’d like to stay up to date on my articles for Serious Eats, you can find all of them here- scroll all the way down past my bio and the Serious Eats blurb!

Aside: one thing I’ve learned about writing for a major publication is that most of your copy WILL be edited beyond recognition to fit their stylistic “voice” (not that it keeps me up at night or anything…..), but all my recipes are original and intact, which is a real honor. I mean, I guess one can only talk about the global significance of barley (the word barn means “place where barley is stored” in old English!!) or the cultivation history of cabbage (one of the oldest domesticated plants!!), or how beer brewing was historically womens’ work before a neurotypical reader’s eyes glaze over, and I guess thats why editors exist. As a family friend said, when it comes to being sensitive about having your writing edited, one must remember that your precious original copy was probably amazing “for you, me, and the three other people who care”. Wise words to live by! If you make any of the recipes, please let me know and send pics <3

Also, I’m suuuper excited to say I’ll be featured on an upcoming episode of the Thank You For Coming Out podcast, where I’ll talk about queer food, the dine well supper club and all manner of fun gay things with Dubbs Weinblatt! Release date tbd but watch this space for updates :)

Lastly we just nailed down a date/space for our next supper club: Saturday July 11th in Williamsburg! It will be a pride “decompression” dinner plus cocktail party (for those of us who are Old and get pride fatigue) featuring an AMAZING lineup of queer chefs :) stay tuned!

Now without further ado, let’s talk about Noma-gate- and the piece of NYT journalism that rocked the culinary world last month, shaking the pillars of the industry status quo.

If you haven’t read the article/don’t know what I’m talking, I highly recommend you read it, but the tl/dr is this: Noma was a three Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen that for many years was crowned by the powers that be the best restaurant in the world. The man at the helm was Rene Redzepi, one of the most famous and well-respected chefs- a culinary god amongst men, credited with inventing what is now called “new Nordic” cuisine (for context we also have “new American” cuisine, and French “nouvelle cuisine”). Last month, Julia Moskin published the (above) NYT exposé detailing the (alleged) working conditions at Noma over the last 20 years, with interviews with 35 former staff members who reported routine screaming, shoving, punching, public humiliation, psychological and verbal abuse, and in one particularly bizarre and cruel practice, regularly stabbing cooks with a BBQ fork.

The exposé came at a critical moment for Noma. While the flagship brick-and-mortar in Copenhagen closed in 2023 (the reason being, according to Redzepi, his discovery that fine dining is “inherently unsustainable” lol duh), numerous offshoot products worth millions of dollars are still going strong, such as a world class fermentation lab, biotech partnerships and ultra-exclusive global popups. Popups like the current one in LA, that had just barely opened its doors when the NYT piece dropped.

It’s a 16-course tasting menu with a $1500/person price tag. The popup had already drawn criticism for its timing in a city still recovering from wildfires, where a lot of local restaurants are struggling, and for featuring a Mexican-inspired menu at a time when so many Latinx people in LA are suffering due to ICE kidnappings and the like. But a global brand like Noma can and will do whatever it wants.

Within hours of the article’s publication, all hell broke loose. Social media exploded. American Express and hospitality magnate Blackbird rushed to withdraw their sponsorship of the LA popup. Redzepi quickly issued a written mea culpa, then a few days later announced his full resignation from all things Noma (which he hired a crew to film, edit into an emotional piece painting him as a martyr, and post on Instagram). The unsinkable ship of Noma had sprung a leak, and under the weight of today’s lightning fast and ultra-connected media machine, it went down fast.

In the culinary corner of the internet, Noma’s public reckoning felt like blowing the lid off a pressure cooker. Chefs, cooks and interested bystanders flooded every app with countless posts and filled comments sections with opinions all along the spectrum- some vehemently defending Redzepi, many joyfully celebrating this very public dressing down. Redzepi’s defenders were quick to point out (correctly) that this behavior, while unseemly, is part and parcel of fine dining culture and has been since time immemorial- complaining that we’re making an example out of him, painting poor Rene as a sort of whipping boy. They also rebuffed the criticism of Noma’s use of stagiaires, or “stages”, who are unpaid interns; they argued (correctly) that stages have always been an integral part of the fine dining business model, and unpaid labor is not unique to Noma. Some Noma alums proudly lauded his leadership and waxed poetic about how grateful they felt to have worked under him, and that they personally never had any bad experiences with him.

Somewhat predictably, the majority of Redzepi sympathizers (from what I observed) were men, white men in particular. Men who are defending the honor of an institution (fine dining) created by them and for them, who will clearly abandon any sense of reason or basic humanity to prop up one of their own. As one instagram commenter pointed out, it is SO easy to be on the right side of this, and still so many of these men are completely- and publicly- fumbling this moment- and industry people will likely remember how they handled this.

Ever since Redzepi’s dethroning, I’ve been bursting at the seams to write about it. Industry culture is a subject very near and dear to my heart. But when I sat down to write, I realized I don’t actually have anything new to say. The truth is those of us who exist on the fringes of the culinary world have been talking, writing and sounding alarm bells about this EXACT phenomenon for years.

Some of my colleagues and I have long been vocal about the “chef bro” aesthetic, and the way systemic abuse has gone unchecked and been so normalized for so long it has been woven into the very fabric of culinary life. Historically, when stepping into a professional kitchen, you can essentially expect to be hazed, yelled at, and treated poorly- doubly so if you are a woman, person of color, immigrant, queer or gender non-conforming. And I cannot tell you how many chef bros are out there on the internet who swear that there is nothing wrong with kitchen culture except that some crybabies just can’t hack it. The brutality of industry culture as a way of separating the strong from the weak, they insist. There’s not just glory in the pain, stress and suffering- there’s brotherhood. If we don’t like it, we don’t deserve to be there, and they don’t want us in their club.

Instead of repeating myself at length, I will link to two pieces I’ve written on the subject: this one, entitled “work is love made visible”, where I talk about how I don’t want to eat food made by angry people; and this one which is part 2 of a piece where I reflect on what it means to be a chef- including the intense gatekeeping and “in-crowd” mentality of kitchens that punishes nonconformity, scaring away and effectively excluding scores of amazing culinary talent.

Furthermore, a note on the stage system: staging is an age old apprentice-type custom where young cooks work for free to gain experience and build their resumes, generally performing long hours of tedious and monotonous prep work. But in today’s world, working for no pay is exploitation, full stop. The complicated part is that most young cooks are dying to stage at these institutions- I briefly staged myself- and do it not just willingly, but eagerly. It’s been literally built in to the traditional fine dining system, and it has never been questioned or challenged. But without this free (and often painstaking, mentally/physically exhausting) labor, most fine dining restaurants serving food with the Noma-esque caliber of meticulous detail and complexity would be out of business immediately. In a sense, the institution that we know as Noma isn’t even real- it’s smoke and mirrors. It’s literally not possible to produce and sustain Noma’s menu, create the level of wealth Redzepi enjoys, or even turn a profit at all while paying every worker a fair wage. Without the stage system- at Noma, sometimes 30 or 40 stages were hosted at a time- fine dining as we know it categorically would not exist, and global culinary empires are built on the backs of these invisible interns. I don’t know about you, but I believe if you can’t pay your workers a living wage, you can’t afford to be in business. Maybe that’s just me.

Until now, this discourse has all but completely fallen on deaf ears. But with the burgeoning public interest in all things professional kitchen- due in no small part to shows like “The Bear”- suddenly all eyes are on the culinary industry. A micro-culture that has been functionally invisible, literally hidden away in BOH, has been thrust into the light of day for public scrutiny- and it has been found wanting. And the truth is that much of the workplace abuse Redzepi and his ilk have long perpetuated are actual crimes that can be prosecuted, and in any other workplace setting, likely would be.

Are we making an example of Rene Redzepi and Noma? Yes. And I can’t think of a better person to take the fall. Redzepi is a wealthy man and can retire to a comfortable life out of the public eye- a light consequence for the essentially stolen wages and psychological damage he inflicted on so many. But the hero in this story is Julia Moskin, the NYT reporter that published this groundbreaking piece of journalism. She came for the king and she did not miss. Fine dining restaurants and the (overwhelmingly white men) that have lorded over them have been operating under the radar and above the law for far too long, and the industry is poised and ready for real change. As one chef beautifully said in an Instagram video, when it comes to good food, suffering is not part of the recipe. So here’s to change- to a better world for everyone crazy enough to pursue a career in culinary, for all the humans who make your food with love, care, and passion for their craft.

If you want more juicy details on the scandal- including my (and others’) scathing critiques of the Noma LA popup, the parallels between fine dining kitchens, prisons and boot camps (yup) and links to hospitality professionals on the front lines of Noma-gate and changing the industry, contact me!! I’ll send you links, social media accounts and happily talk your ear off <3 <3