Noma and the tyranny of angry chefs

Was René Redzepi born like this or did the kitchen make him this way?

Photo by Soeren Bidstrup / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images

I have never had to show up to work in personal protective equipment – food critics don’t have much need for flak jackets emblazoned with the word “PRESS”, and even less so for ballistic helmets. The same can’t be said for the line cooks at a once-beloved (now-closed) London kitchen, who wore shin pads during service thanks to the head chef’s proclivity for shin-kicking. Or so the rumour goes.

I once believed the only person more angry than Marco Pierre White was Gordon Ramsay (neither of whom is the subject of the above tale). But a recent New York Times investigation into the owner of one of this century’s most celebrated and pioneering restaurants – Noma of Copenhagen – makes the grouchy MPW and irascible Ramsay seem like perfect sweeties by comparison. The accusations against René Redzepi? Not paying interns, punching juniors in the ribs and face, threatening to deport staff’s family members, and more.

Redzepi said he didn’t recognise “all details” in the allegations his former staff made against him, as reported last week. But he conceded that he may not always have been a spring lamb of a boss: “I am deeply sorry and I have worked to change.” Such is the pressure of serving insects made of fruit leather and tiny plums wrapped in kelp at a three-Michelin-star level, I suppose. Gordon Brown – often lacking something in tolerance and composure – was accused of throwing phones and staplers around No 10. And he was only steering the United Kingdom through a global financial crisis. Unlike Noma, No 10 doesn’t even have a dedicated fermentation laboratory to maintain. Yesterday morning (12 March), Redzepi resigned.

We are well used to the caricature of the tyrannical chef – they terrorise the sauciers and the commis, who eventually get promoted and in turn terrorise the new generation of sauciers and commis. No one has an incentive to complain about such behaviour, or so a cook at a London institution told me with a thousand-yard stare over breakfast recently. Because kitchens run on hyperspecific systems that don’t like being disrupted – certainly not by effete 21st-century notions like “duty of care” and “please don’t punch me in the ribs”. And so the cycle of hand-me-down aggro continues.

Are chefs born like this, or does the kitchen make them this way? Neither argument satisfies. With sincere apologies for the equivocation, never has the answer “it’s both, duh” been more applicable. Of course restaurant life attracts irrational and turbo-ambitious weirdos: why else accept the bad pay, burned hands and gruesome hours? For the chance to be a visionary star, obviously. And why do these men (not all men! Not all men!) adopt a turbo-masculine approach to the brigade de cuisine? Well, how else to compensate in a profession once deemed a bit feminine? “I’m not gay – look at my tattoos and hear my guttural yelling.”

It hasn’t been this way forever. We don’t have much evidence of what it was like to work on the line at, say, the Ritz in 1911. But we do know that the cult of the singular chef – typified this century by Redzepi, MPW and Ramsay – did not fully emerge until the 1980s. Yes, there was Escoffier, and that one bloke, Monsieur Joseph, at the Savoy at the turn of the century. But work was irregular and hard for the late-Victorians and early Edwardians. There may simply have been insufficient time to develop the God complex required to (allegedly) kick your boys in the shins all day.

Chefs will tell you that the culture of hazing is on the way out: just wait until the genteel Gen Z weaklings get their hands on the top jobs, they say. But I am sceptical. When news of Redzepi’s misadventures broke, WhatsApp groups pinged across London. It wasn’t the pushing and shouting at Noma that outraged the beleaguered restaurant workers of this city, but the three months of no pay. By all means force me to eat boiling-hot, undercooked rice – so goes another eyebrow-raising story from one of London’s kitchens – but at least sling a tenner my way for the pleasure.

The question of what the diner should accept is different from what the chef is willing to endure. Sure, that consommé is damn clear. But is it “traumatise the unpaid intern” clear? A moral quagmire, that.

[Further reading: ChatGPT – what should I drink with dinner?]