From Bourdain to Noma, the same old kitchen

Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000. It was meant to shock us. Instead, the industry wore it as a badge of honour. Twenty-five years later, we are still paying the price.

The news of René Redzepi’s resignation from Noma this week – following allegations of physical and psychological abuse spanning years – has brought a familiar discomfort back to the surface for me.

Not a surprise, exactly. Something more like grief.

In 2016, weeks before I opened Wolfgat, I staged at a celebrated two-Michelin-star restaurant in Belgium. I’d eaten there as a guest the year before and had been genuinely moved by the experience. So I paid to work there. What was meant to be three months lasted five shifts.

During my first service, I found myself running between the waiter’s station, the scullery and the cold section, frantically washing and replating bowls because there was less than half the quantity I needed for the amount of covers. When I flagged it with the sous chef, I was told it wasn’t his problem.

A small thing, perhaps. But it was symptomatic of something larger.

To be clear, I witnessed no physical violence. But what I did witness was a pervasive laddish culture I had honestly believed the industry had long outgrown and left behind.

Crude, dismissive, demeaning.

The sous chefs repeatedly swore at and humiliated me and other stagiaires without cause or provocation — the precise opposite of how I would welcome any colleague, let alone international guests, into my kitchen.

A fellow stagiaire – an older man of colour, with a heavy accent – was openly and repeatedly mocked for how he spoke. He handled it with quiet dignity. Homophobic slurs were also commonplace and used to address anybody new or less senior in the kitchen. Misogynist remarks were as typical.

Tolerated

And what struck me perhaps most of all was that this behaviour was tolerated by senior management, including senior female members of staff, as if completely normal. That, in some ways, is the most disheartening part.

I walked away after shift five. I chose to protect the memory of the remarkable meal I had enjoyed there the year before.

I genuinely believed that by 2016, the industry had moved on. Noma this week, another 10 years later, tells us it still hasn’t.

What the Redzepi story lays bare isn’t one man’s behaviour. It’s the mythology the industry built around him – and around so many like him – that allowed such behaviour to continue. The idea that pressure produces greatness. That a chef’s genius licenses cruelty. That the brigade system, with its military hierarchy and culture of silence, is simply how excellence works.

And this type of excellence is globally recognised, celebrated and awarded at the highest level.

Former Noma staff described going to work as “going to war”. That is not a standard. That is a failure of leadership, and of the very creativity such kitchens claim to champion. DM