I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.
The hard work of ‘forging a new path’
“How can we rectify the screaming and shouting and physical abuse we’ve visited on our young cooks? How do we unmake the cultures of machismo and misogyny in our kitchens? Can we be better?”
Those words were written in 2015 by Copenhagen chef René Redzepi, who last week stepped away from his restaurant, Noma, just before the first paying guests were set to arrive for a long-planned multi-month residency in Los Angeles. His abrupt departure was part of the fallout from a New York Times story in which reporter Julia Moskin detailed allegations of physical and psychological abuse that took place in Noma’s kitchen between 2009 and 2017.
Many have referred to Redzepi’s 2015 essay in recent days because in it the chef admitted to some but not all of the past abuse he’d inflicted on his kitchen staff: “I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career,” he wrote in the most quoted part of the essay. “I’ve yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times.”
He realized, he wrote in the essay, that “the public expects more from us now.”
Then Redzepi asked a hard question: “Is there still room for guys like me, who started before this new era?”
The easy answer is “no.” Despite all of the sometimes romanticized accounts of kitchen abuse in food literature, which include stories from the very recent past, it’s simply not true that every chef who trained in an abusive kitchen becomes an abusive chef. And for those who have fallen into patterns of abuse, if they can’t change and make amends, there really isn’t room for them anymore.
In Redzepi’s case, he says he has spent the past 11 years trying to change not only his own behavior but that of the industry as a whole. The results have been mixed.
In 2016, at the semi-regular gathering of chefs and food professionals hosted in Copenhagen by Noma’s nonprofit arm, MAD, Redzepi (who resigned from MAD’s board last week) and his team invited those in attendance from around the world to consider the idea of “tomorrow’s kitchen.”
Noma chef René Redzepi at the 2016 MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, a gathering of chefs and food professionals from around the world.
(Laurie Ochoa / Los Angeles Times)
“Can we allow ourselves … just for a minute,” asked the writer, editor and mental health advocate Kat Kinsman during one of the symposium’s most powerful talks, “[to] envision what it would be like if the people around you weren’t killing themselves to put food on plates and provide pleasure to people who have absolutely no idea what’s going on behind the kitchen doors?”
She bluntly told the chefs: “You’re not taking care of you. And you’re not taking care of each other. … And it’s killing you. It’s killing this profession that we all love. It’s killing people. And there will be no kitchen of tomorrow if there’s no one left.”
It was a wake-up call moment. Off-the-record discussions held in small groups at the symposium allowed chefs to share their experiences in difficult kitchens and perhaps come up with strategies for improving their own situations and the industry itself.
At the next MAD Symposium in 2018, it was clear that a lot of work still needed to be done. Several sessions dealt with toxic male chef behavior in the wake of the #MeToo movement, with one of the most significant talks given by former Spotted Pig server Trish Nelson, who had previously come forward to the New York Times and “60 Minutes” with stories of abuse she’d experienced by the chef Mario Batali and restaurateur Ken Friedman.
“Helping these various people build their empires, I have donated tiny slivers of my sanity and my soul,” she said. And though her love for “this wild and unmonitored” industry and its “highly skilled misfits” remained strong, she said it was past time to “deal with the ugliness that stems from … cycles of abuse … carelessly labeled as kitchen culture.”
“Basically,” she said, “we’re starting a new discussion. And we have to be forgiving of each other for mistakes that have been made along the way. We have to be empathetic because this is nothing but awkwardness and discomfort as we reluctantly and painfully stumble together into this dark and uncharted territory.”
MAD created a space for these difficult discussions, but it’s what happens in Redzepi’s own kitchen that matters most. Moskin’s article documented incidents through 2017, two years after Redzepi wrote his essay calling for change.
Other anonymous reports from later years have circulated online, although, as Stephanie Breijo reported this week, the initial story that prompted the recent social media campaign against Noma — about the restaurant’s kitchen team laughing at an unpaid intern who burned her face — is being disputed by the former intern herself.
“I do not think about that time as traumatic,” the former intern told Breijo. “It’s still, for me, one of the best life experiences I was able to have at such a young age.”
Other former workers, however, say they came away disillusioned and traumatized by their time at Noma.
The restaurant is now offering to meet with representatives of the protesters who have stationed themselves outside Silver Lake’s Paramour Estate, where Noma L.A. continues its sold-out run of tasting menu experiences four days a week.
Noma representatives say the restaurant has been paying its interns for nearly four years and reduced the number of days it is open to the public in order to give its employees a better work-life balance. Instead of leaving its employees without a paycheck during the months of its off-site residencies, Noma brings its workers to the cities it travels to, and it pays for housing and schooling for any children who come along. Before the kitchen and serving teams arrived, Noma contacted California employment experts to ensure compliance with state laws. After Redzepi stepped away from the operation of the L.A. residency, Noma posted a “workplace transparency review” to give the public a look into its employment practices.
Even so, given the complaints that some former interns and employees continue to make against Noma, it’s clear that more remains to be done to not only change but make amends.
“The only way we will be able to reap the promise of the present,” Redzepi wrote in the closing of his 2015 essay, “is by confronting the unpleasant legacies of our past, and collectively forging a new path forward.”
After 11 years and a lot hard work, he probably didn’t think he’d find himself back at the beginning of that path.
Also …
(Irina Selaru / for the Times)
- Restaurant critic Bill Addison has updated his guide to Palm Springs dining with six new additions and nearly 20 other places to try while you are vacationing in the desert.
- And from Addison and Jenn Harris’ 101 best L.A. restaurants list, senior editor Danielle Dorsey put together a guide to 20 great lunch spots.
- Deborah Vankin reports that Taco Bell of all places is getting into the beauty business. Along with your Cheesy Gordita Crunch you soon will be able to order “Mountain Dew Baja Blast Under Eye Patches” designed to “energize skin and deliver cooling hydration.”
- Finally, as we prepare to unveil our ultimate birthday cake recipe later this spring, we want your input. Tell us your pick for the ultimate birthday cake. We’ll tally the votes and come back to you with the ultimate recipe. Find our birthday cake questionnaire here.
