Restaurant/food news lately has featured René Redzepi, the innovative chef and founder of the Copenhagen-based restaurant Noma. As has been documented in recent years, the heights achieved in his kitchen were counterbalanced by the lows of his behavior towards his staff—many of them unpaid interns eager to learn from a master.
This news to some might seem less important considering that every day we are under assault by a president and administration blatantly imposing totalitarianism. But our current daily lives and the abuse—financial, mental and physical—brought by this administration I think play into this most recent backlash against Redzepi. (Not that he should excused in any way.)
Some background: what Redzepi brought to fine dining was combining the exacting detail of molecular gastronomy with digging-in-the-forest foraging idealism.
What came with that was what often comes with extreme fine-dining: hyper-intricate fare that 99-percent of humans living on the planet could never afford, and everything that comes with producing such fare—which often includes egomania and abuse towards staff.
I wrote about the “everything” three years ago, when Redzepi converted the restaurant to more of a research and teaching—he called it a “food laboratory.” I don’t regret anything about my piece, except one sentence that contained, “I don’t hold anything against René Redzepi…”. I wrote that knowing that he could be an overbearing prick to his staff. I wrote that knowing he acknowledged part of his rationale for changing the restaurant’s format was because of the behavior he exhibited—he called the whole extreme fine-dining format unsustainable “financially and emotionally…as a human being.” He went into therapy, and appeared to take seriously his effort to change.
In recent days, however, we’ve learned that his behavior went beyond just being an overbearing prick to include physical abuse and intense shaming that spared no one. What prompted these revelations was Redzepi organizing a Noma pop-up at a rich estate in a wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood. For $1,500, one could enjoy a lunch.
A former Noma employee, Jason Ignacio White, began collecting stories from other past employees and interns and posting them to Instagram. Protests were organized outside the estate at which the pop-up was being held.
It’s been three years since Redzepi “closed” Noma as a restaurant, moved the operation outside Copenhagen and converted it to a food lab. Who cares if he does a nostalgia tour for a bunch of rich food snobs?
One should care because if he’s doing that same fare, it’s still on the backs of all those people he abused in years past. And, to reiterate, the abuse extends to the economics—he relied on battalions of unpaid workers. And he still treated them like garbage.
Without diminishing the reasons former employees are protesting Redzepi currently, another reason why this pop-up effort stings is: this exclusive experience for the elites is just another item scrawled angrily to an epically long list of indignities and abuse kept by the stressed and exhausted middle and lower class in this country.
We’ve experienced how for the past 50 years our tax structure in the US has increasingly passed wealth from the lower and middle class to the rich (and from the young to the old), to the point where the top 0.1 percent of the US population owns $24.89 trillion in household income compared to $4.25 trillion for the bottom 50 percent of the US population.
This is shoved in our faces daily in the news, from the Epstein files (notably those currently in power in the US not facing any consequence) to Elon Musk and the trillion-dollar pay package approved by his servile Tesla Board (oh, and Elon’s in the Epstein files). Not to mention the Trump family cashing in on crypto currency ventures, Venezuelan oil, real estate deals linked to foreign policy “negotiations,” and blatant pay-to-play bribes (see Paramount, TikTok and the Ellison family). All this while healthcare subsidies get cancelled, and prices rise for everything else because of arbitrary, ego-driven tariffs against allies and adversaries alike and an ego-driven war in Iran.
We see it clearly on our streets, also. High end restaurants, clothing stores and other high-end ventures aren’t suffering at all, while stores and eateries affordable to middle and lower class or are neighborhood anchors struggle and/or close. Trump tax cuts (both times) didn’t help anyone in the bottom 99.9 percent of the US population. Billionaire tech bros suck up so hard to the administration we can hear it, and we get pounded by the lack of regulation on their toxic social media and AI products. ICE agents deployed to our streets harass immigrants and US citizens—and sometimes kill them—without consequence.
We see and feel all of it.
So, when Redzepi, after appearing somewhat contrite and closing Noma in its restaurant form, tries to make a comeback of sorts literally catering to the crowd that could afford the product born of horseshit behavior toward the working class in his kitchen, it strikes a nerve—especially to those who labor in hospitality.
It’s a microcosm of what is happening in the US today, generally: the working class, which includes our immigrant populations, is routinely being taken advantage of for cheap labor and abused.
I will again give Redzepi some (barely—he should have had the sense to not try this pop-up) credit. He again stepped back and acknowledged (with some dispute on details) the behavior charged to him by his former employees and interns. That might not be enough, but it’s far more than what we, in the US, are getting from leaders in our current federal administration linked to fraud, incompetence and Jeffrey Epstein.
There is opportunity here. Redzepi could turn his focus and his vast knowledge of food production and preservation toward food education for the masses—and enlist some of those he treated poorly to this effort.
It would be a fine example of how shame should—and used to—work.
