The problem goes far beyond Noma – I’ve seen rot creeping into too many kitchens | Lauren Joseph

The fine-dining world has been closely watching the fallout at Noma since chefs spoke out about the physical violence and emotional abuse that the head chef, René Redzepi, subjected them to at his Copenhagen restaurant. There were protests in Los Angeles before a four-month pop-up of the restaurant opened there this month, and Redzepi, in an Instagram video in which he failed to fully assign himself blame (“I’m sorry everyone is in this situation,” he begins), then announced that he has stepped away from the business. The LA pop-up, however, remains and the question lingers: will this be the reckoning an ultra-pressured group of restaurants has long avoided?
It depends on whether we allow ourselves to be distracted by Redzepi and what comes next. I hope every chef who was allegedly intimidated, punched and threatened gets the reparations they seek. Then the story should move on. No waiting for the public redemption arc – but also, no useless vilifying of this man, whose past transgressions have previously been accepted.
Anyone willing to participate in the frenzied response to the Noma news cycle should also be willing to look at the system that creates environments for abuse. Profit margins, unrealistic demands by wealthy guests for luxury and theatre, a media that skips due diligence and the staggering lack of gender parity all play a role. As do the award programmes that hold an undeserved amount of power over chefs and diners.
Until we rejig how we measure greatness, until the kingmaking awards – the Michelin Guide and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants – include some basic labour standards in their criteria, there will be no meaningful change.
Three years ago, I spent a few days at a restaurant with rankings on both lists, where an army of “stages” (unpaid interns working in a restaurant kitchen) washed vegetables and picked herbs, mostly in silence. All kitchen work relies on a level of mundanity: most of cooking is cleaning, really, and there is beauty in that focus on, and reverence for, each task. Yet I was surprised at the number of stages, many of whom had opted to come from across Europe for a few weeks out of their own pocket and learned very little.
I didn’t regret my 72 hours of scrubbing: the experience was wholly innocuous. Meditative, even. I’ve also done stages where I’ve learned a tremendous amount, a luxury only possible because I was given the chance to observe and ask questions, not just silently scrub. But a chef who recently completed a similar stage at a three-star restaurant describes very different conditions. “You are learning how to repeat the same task 1,000 times. By the 50th time, you’ve got it. By the 100th you are bored. Then you repeat the task another 900 times, for free, while being shouted at.”
These restaurants are trying to meet an incredibly high standard. If unpaid labour helps them get there and there’s no punishment for it, why wouldn’t they take advantage of it? Inspectors come, see four micro-herbs on a single bite and reward the amount of labour, regardless of the source. There are plenty of places that are doing it ethically, but often at a cost to themselves. Judging like this is like the Olympics without the guardrails. We’d never push for more speed or power without an anti-doping policy, and yet we’ve long seen the cost of these expectations in kitchens.
These practices extend well beyond just “stages”. “Employees trade the dignity of fair pay for the ‘honour’ of putting certain names on their résumé,” Eric Huang, previously a sous chef at Eleven Madison Park, tells me. When he left in 2020, the take-home pay after tax and insurance was about $700 (£520) a week, he says. He was doing about 70 hours of work a week.
Last year, I trialled in two London restaurants. Both grill a nice whole fish, both serve a pretty crudo. I ended up accepting a role at the wrong place – doing 70 hours in a seven-day period, while tuning out racist and sexist babble. From what I gather from current employees, the other place would’ve been 50, maybe 60 hours in an intense but humane kitchen. The proposed contracts were nearly identical. There’s no Glassdoor for these places. There’s just hoping for an honest read from a friend of a friend; some information spreads through a whisper network. But to the diner, each restaurant holds the same Michelin star.
When I asked Chris Watson, a former Michelin inspector, if he could tell me about how the guide takes labour practices into account, he said “that would make for a short conversation”. A representative from the World’s 50 Best, meanwhile, explained that they “strongly encourage” voters to consider sustainable practices, including staff treatment, but that “there is no pre-determined checklist of criteria”. A chef who trained at a storied three-star restaurant and watched some of his payslip be used to cover “services provided” including a bunk bed and an apron, asked me: “Should a restaurant be able to receive a Michelin star, or two or three, if it does not pay its workers the minimum wage?”
If these awards won’t adapt, we can at least stop giving them so much weight.
After all, there’s plenty of room for others. I’d love to see more businesses focused on ranking restaurants based upon the workplace itself. In London, chefs look to Home Hospitality for job listings – the business only partners with restaurants that stick to fair work standards, such as paying the London living wage, and is known to quietly verify those standards with calls to current and former staffers. In the next few weeks, an accreditation programme called VERiFAIR will launch, taking restaurant policies (and anonymously reported concerns) into account.
If you speak up in a kitchen, you’re usually branded as difficult and told you can’t hack it. Huang tells me he’s lost a few friends since he posted about his time at Eleven Madison Park on Instagram, and every other chef I spoke to for this piece asked to be anonymous.
We need to turn that idea on its head. You can’t hack it if you take out your difficult emotions on your staff. No amount of hand-wringing over Redzepi will matter if we continue to reward brilliance that’s built on exploitation.
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Lauren Joseph is a writer and chef