When the news broke Monday that Noma, the Michelin three-star restaurant and repeatedly listed as “Best In The World” was closing its doors at arguably the height of its powers, I shrugged. As someone who started reporting on the restaurant industry 20 years ago, all I can say is, ultra fine-dining seemed to be turning into a zombie even back then, surviving on immigrant labor (like many restaurants) and, during the next decade in the US, cooking-show brainwashed culinary students that wound up financially broken by attending predatory for-profit schools. Internationally, food temples like El Bulli in Spain (the world’s best before Noma’s run) also couldn’t survive without cheap labor, even if elite diners were willing to pay high prices (Ferran Adria, chef at El Bulli seemed to recognize this when he announced the restaurants closure in 2011).
Not that I have anything against René Redzepi, the restaurant’s chef and owner. His influence is enormous, and he is, without a doubt, a visionary. I paid attention to his work because, as a journalist covering the food and restaurant industry, and then joining the industry, one should.
And nothing against ultra-fine dining in particular, either. For anyone with an appreciation for food, it can be grasped that those intricate meals carry influence not directly to the neighborhood bistro or burger joint, but, like those high-fashion designers placing clothes on models to sway down a Paris runway, it’s a trickle-down effect to our everyday lives. But fine dining of the caliber of Noma, while always exclusionary, increasingly was afforded only by those with extraordinary disposable income. Those meals have become just a bucket-list experience to those who benefit from vast wealth disparity, and the disconnect from the world that wealth affords them. To much of the rest of the world, restaurants with the ambition of Noma had arguably become as tasteful and obnoxious as big-game hunting.
Noma, being on that extreme upper-end of fine dining, its needs (labor) and costs (monetary, physical and mental) were extreme. While I never observed an operation as elite as Redzepi’s, I was present in many fine-dining kitchens (some Beard nominees and winners, Food & Wine best chefs, etc.) that appeared to operate with general respect for everyone in the kitchen. And while most of the chefs I encountered were not screamers or pan throwers, there was an expectation that one’s job as a line cook, no matter how low-paying it was, was to be the central focus in one’s life.
The chefs had help selling this idea, of course: the fawning food media. I include myself in that group. At the beginning of my food-media career, it was exciting to learn from these people who opened their kitchens to me, and be part of the general excitement of the then-food renaissance, what with Food Network, Bravo and Travel Channel creating food stars by the barrel and bloggers achieving their own celebrity status.
I count myself fortunate to have “cut my teeth” in journalism writing for newspapers covering city government and business. Even while getting sucked into the excitement, I couldn’t help but observe the realities, and ask questions. Often those questions turned to labor. Kitchen wages, as has been well documented in recent years, was (and is) depressingly low.
In particular, when I watched those on the upper-end of the dining spectrum, I could see a disconnect between what was often charged on the menu to the labor required to produce the food (the detailed cooking methods, sub-recipe after sub-recipe contributing to a whole, and then the intricate plating of the food) down to the dishwashers. Throw on top of that a chef with an outsized ego and little interest in team building and you get a very stressful work environment.
Further, the restaurant itself, as a business, ran on thin margins with little in reserve to weather tough times—something everyone understood quickly when the pandemic hit.
(Consumers bear some responsibility in this reality. We are willing to pay only so much for food, even when expertly prepared. But a $15 cocktail? Sure! This is, finally, beginning to change.)
But still, when the times were good and Bravo’s Top Chef at its peak, everyone kept pumping the gas. Restaurants opened at a startling pace, and James Beard awards were being handed to chefs in places no one before thought of as food destinations. Chefs as mercurial characters still weren’t judged harshly for their boorish behavior. Mostly, they were rewarded, and sexism and harassment just “part of the culture.” Get your tattoos and jump right in. Culinary schools were filled—including those for-profit ventures.
(Tangent: I was asked to join a curriculum committee for one of those for-profit schools that, at least verbally, was exploring how to better serve those wanting a culinary education. “How ‘bout coming up with a certificate program that costs about as much as a community college?” I suggested. “Your students are graduating at least $40K in the hole to a $10 to $13 an hour job.” A few administrative heads nodded, but that was as far as it went. I attended one more meeting, before “resigning” as it was clearly pointless.)
Fast forward to now, and those for-profit schools are bankrupt and gone, some investigated for fraud having bankrupted many. The #MeToo movement carried over into all sectors of the economy, calling out many of the country’s top chefs and restaurateurs for shameful, criminal behavior.
If there was one realization that came out of the pandemic that most people share, it’s that there’s more to life than work. Sure, we want a rewarding job, and to work hard. And if we can’t have a rewarding job, we want one that treats us with respect, pays enough to pay the rent, afford health insurance, buy food and have some time to just enjoy life—that’s not much to ask for.
Restaurant laborers and other service-industry workers want those same things. Talking heads for years have noted North America’s shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. So why should we be shocked when those laborers stocking shelves, delivering goods and cooking and serving food want the same basics and security as those manufacturing jobs that helped build the US middle class?
So, Noma is closing. Food as art (and expensive art) will not—and should not—die. But, Redzepi says a restaurant business model for his particular and elite work, however, is unsustainable, both mathematically and, in essence, morally (both in a broad sense, and the personal—he acknowledged, to some degree, his own failings). This is not a tragedy, this is simply catching up with a reality that began more than a few years ago. It will be interesting to see the evolution—a research and development facility might be the perfect fit for his ideas, and work well for current labor and health realities.
