You raise some thought provoking points - particularly about the validity of a movement of the outside vs the desires of the team on the inside. And once again your insider's view gives unique insight.
But I think the issue of alleged abuse is too contentious to be laid to rest, despite the organisational and personnel changes that have been made in recent years. Acknowledgement, apology and personal change are important. But those things do not erase the fact that harm occurred, nor do they negate the entitlement of those who say they were harmed to seek justice.
To take an extreme but clarifying example as context; a few weeks ago the British Media was awash with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's implication in the Epstein Files and his alleged history of vile abuse. If the former Prince were to come forward tomorrow, admit wrongdoing and apologise, that would not invalidate the right of alleged victims to pursue justice. The passage of time or the act of contrition would not cancel that entitlement.
The same principle applies here. Apology and reform matter, but they do not cancel the rights of those who say they were harmed.
I believe we have reached a point were industry leaders have a duty to demand the accountability of our peers, no matter what position they hold, or how intimidating we may or may not find them, in Hospitality and beyond.
“I was not traumatized, I had not been abused but I can certainly see why some people would have experienced it this way and how his demeanor could have a very different impact on others”
This is textbook gaslighting language. Furthermore, divorcing his actions and abuse from his persona, claiming it comes from ambition is incredibly insulting to anyone who suffered under his leadership.
Abusers are skilled at invoking loyalty in the form of “generosity” which you laid out above, yet in the next moment be an absolute raging psychopath. Both can be true, yet it doesn’t cancel out abuse.
Is someone giving their own, actual experience gaslighting? Never does he write the accusations are untrue - only that he himself did not experience them. Over the course of nearly two decades are we all to believe there was abuse daily and to all that worked there? That would not only be untrue, but also irresponsible. Truths need to be told from different perspectives for real change and there is no reason to not believe this perspective.
The problem with this industry does not only lie in the drastic and obvious (being physically injured, publicly ridiculed, etc) but truly lies in the shadows, in the idea that accepting the slippery slope that leads from smaller faults ends up with dramatic ones…they are all a problem - and yet an incredibly difficult one to change. Progress is necessary, but does not happen overnight, if the approach happens the way it is with this situation, it will quickly be forgotten and replaced by the next drastic thing. (See Amex/Resy question below)
This article is exactly the type of conversation necessary for change that is long lasting. We can most certainly disagree, we would all be better off continuing to discuss and continuing to question.
Funny, I have yet to see any boycott of Amex or Resy. They are moving on to the next hot new restaurant, and will guaranteed market it as a safe place, but if we dig deep into the history of all the people involved, will it really be a place full of safety, love and compassion? We all want that, but pasts are hard to accept, impossible to avoid, but also can be the catalyst for positive change.
I wrote a more eluqent post, and pressed "cancel" instead of post :( so, just to summarize:
1) Your premise of "no one asks the current employees at Noma" is misinformed at best, a lie at worst. Efforts have been made, but Noma has a very strict gag order in place, and all employees are banned from speaking publicly or directly to involved parties. The Noma machine controls the narrative.
2) The outlook that a protest is invalid from the outside is deeply unfair. You should not disregard protests made in solidarity, when the actual workers (the people INSIDE, as you call them) risk their career, income and reputation. Not an abstract career but the actual income that pays their rent. These protests are not outsiders, they are mainly industry people in solidarity.
You seem to set out that what he did was unquestionably wrong, and then almost justify it for the rest of the essay.
The premise of what you are saying seems to me that for 10 years he didn't realise that verbally abusing and physically assaulting staff and not paying stages was wrong, and then when somebody pointed it to him in 2017 that it was wrong out he suddenly saw the error of his ways and hired a HR department. This is at best a highly credulous take on what happened.
I believe the strength sentiment against him is rooted in the fact that he has been given the platform and opportunity to grow, heal, hire HR, be vaunted as the world's greatest chef and make a small fortune since the serial allegations were made, whereas those he has allegedly abused have melted into the background or out of cooking altogether. There is no excuse for him ever having done what he allegedly did, in any context, period. It doesn't matter if that was the culture in the industry at the time, it was wrong then and it is wrong now, and it is patently so to anyone. It is a crime to physically assault people.
Michelin kitchens are not uniquely stressful environments. For example hospitals, the armed forces, the aviation industry, all work at as high or arguably higher levels of stress, and there are rarely incidents comparable to these occurring in those settings. It is not valid to say that it was effective to verbally abuse people, and that you thrived; the effectiveness is entirely beside the point, when the act is wrong in and of itself. Those entering that environment were subject to vast power imbalances where this all worldly head chef was able to dictate their career path, and thus in effect coerced into accepting that toxic working environment.
You open the Rene section with "... very ill-tempered and emotionally unregulated. I have seen and experienced him yell at me and others in ways that were completely disproportionate to the claimed wrongdoings we had committed," but then you say you weren't abused. That is abuse, plain and simple. You may not be traumatized, but, by your own account, you were abused.
As for the apology, imagine if every battery case was resolved with just an apology. An apology is not enough when people where physically assaulted, as the people in the article credibly were. And I understand this isn't an exclusively-Noma issue, but accountability has to start somewhere.
It's not like this is only coming to his attention now; there is a long history of complaints and a long history of abuse. Where is the growth, really?
This piece is just another apology for his bad/criminal behavior.
The restaurant industry is not some isolated ecosystem. It’s simply one of the many mirrors of modern society: hierarchy, ambition, pressure, money, desire, and sometimes abuse of power.
What makes restaurants different is not necessarily the behavior — it’s the visibility. In this industry there are journalists, Instagram, PR machines, myths, and reputations. So when something happens, it becomes a global story.
What happens in hospitals, military barracks, prisons, universities, or law firms, where journalists and social media rarely enter? Do we believe those and other environments are free from the same dynamics?
Justice and spectacle are not the same thing. When powerful figures fall, the ritual is ancient: it is not enough that they lose — they must be publicly humiliated. Societies have always treated fallen rulers this way. The king is brought down, and the crowd gathers.
The real question, Christia, is not just “Now what?” Today it feels more like “What’s next?” ...as long as the "next" generates outrage, traffic, and spectacle.
René Redzepi resigned today after physical abuse allegations went viral, but the real architect is co-founder Claus Meyer. Meyer is a millionaire entrepreneur who used his TV fame and elite Danish connections to shield Noma’s toxic culture for 20 years while selling "New Nordic purity" to the masses. René is a bully, but Meyer is the one who made the empire possible.
This was a really interesting read, thank you for sharing this with us.
I myself had a brief experience in a kitchen, about ten years ago, when I wanted to reconnect with my dream of working in the culinary world. And in just two months, I experienced this kind of behavior in a condensed form. Today I’m 31, I work as an IT engineer, becoming a chef remains one of my dreams, but I still carry the memory, branded into me, if I may say, of that kind of behavior.
I was 19 or 20, first time setting foot in a professional kitchen, with the feeling of finally accomplishing something, of finally being where I was meant to be. Everything went well at first, I was discovering a whole new world, learning its unspoken codes, and it wasn’t easy.
During a busy service, right in the middle of the rush, I placed a stainless steel plating tweezer on the plancha. The tweezer heated up, the chef grabbed it with his bare hand and burned himself. He said nothing, set it back down to let it heat up again, called me over, and when I was standing next to him, pressed the burning tweezer against my arm several times. I had the burn marks on my forearm, literally the shape of the tweezer seared into my skin. “That’s so you learn and understand what you did,” he told me. And I understood. I even thought it was normal because, in a way, I had deserved it. I was the only one in my circle who saw it that way. To my parents, my friends, and my girlfriend, it was abuse. I could add to that the inappropriate remarks, the crude comments… but anyway.
And outside of all that, it was just… amazing. I learned so much in so little time, tasted so many different things… and the chef’s behavior was so different outside of service that it was truly, genuinely a dream. I rarely saw someone so generous. We used to make sandwiches for the homeless people who hung around near the restaurant, using some of the leftover food. We’d cook them proper meals and hand them out in the street. It was truly amazing.
People often say it’s the “old-school chefs” who behave this way because they learned from older generations and simply replicate what they went through. It’s an “excuse” I read and hear all the time.
The chef I worked for was barely older than me, we were maybe three or four years apart, so he was about 22 or 23. He wasn’t old. And the person he apprenticed under, while older, was relatively young too. You’d have expected different behavior, but that wasn’t the case.
In my view, the profession of cooking only amplifies the worst flaws in a person. If you have a precise vision, ambition, a desire to reach for the stars, and the people you work with don’t share that same degree of drive, of madness, even?, of dedication and commitment, things can only blow up. And we know that when there are 80 covers to push, service is falling behind, and something random goes wrong on top of everything else, it can only explode. I think it’s normal, in the sense that too much pressure in a pressure cooker and it eventually blows. We’re still human, after all.
And speaking of being human, I think we treat chefs, especially those with a burning desire to succeed, or who have already made it, as superhumans. They must never react badly, never speak out of line, absorb everything, and lead by example at all times. Being French, we’ve seen plenty of this kind of behavior from ultra-renowned chefs. We’re sometimes even surprised to hear rumors, to see them relayed by the media without much further investigation. And we think to ourselves, “Wow, I never would have expected that from him.”
And that’s the problem with Noma and R. Redzepi. I never would have imagined reading this about them. In my mind, and in the minds of many others, Noma was the perfect example of what cuisine should be. It’s a bit of a cold shower. But it circles back to what I said earlier: ambition, pressure, success… explosion.
Now, my deepest thoughts go out to those who endured the worst this profession has to offer, I hope they’re doing well and have been able to rebuild elsewhere. R. Redzepi is recognized as the best chef in the world, Noma as the best restaurant in the world, praised by every guide, which makes it a prime target. There’s a crack, a breach in the Noma sphere, and journalists and media will throw themselves into it. It gets shared on social media and people, who haven’t lived through these things, who don’t know the industry, who don’t know Noma or the people who work there, will seize the topic because they’ll see more of an “idol to tear down” than a real, meaningful issue. As one of my mentors used to say, “Public opinion is a prostitute pulling the judge by the sleeve.”
In short, a thought for Noma, for everything it represents. A big thought for those who suffered this kind of treatment. An even bigger thought for those currently working there and having to face all of this. And a thought for R. Redzepi, hoping he does the hard work on himself and comes back changed and better.
Christian I've been a fan of you and your cooking/cookbook for years - it made me happy to read in Redzepi's own words that as his sous chef you were the one who confronted him when he treated a young female Colombian chef poorly. So he was made aware of his behavior as early as '07-'09
I’m thankful for your perspective Chef. I’ve always been a big fan, and it’s sad that creating a dialogue for the exchange of ideas so often results in insults instead of a polite exchange of thought. I will continue to follow you and I look forward to your next essay.
Hi Christian,
You raise some thought provoking points - particularly about the validity of a movement of the outside vs the desires of the team on the inside. And once again your insider's view gives unique insight.
But I think the issue of alleged abuse is too contentious to be laid to rest, despite the organisational and personnel changes that have been made in recent years. Acknowledgement, apology and personal change are important. But those things do not erase the fact that harm occurred, nor do they negate the entitlement of those who say they were harmed to seek justice.
To take an extreme but clarifying example as context; a few weeks ago the British Media was awash with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's implication in the Epstein Files and his alleged history of vile abuse. If the former Prince were to come forward tomorrow, admit wrongdoing and apologise, that would not invalidate the right of alleged victims to pursue justice. The passage of time or the act of contrition would not cancel that entitlement.
The same principle applies here. Apology and reform matter, but they do not cancel the rights of those who say they were harmed.
I believe we have reached a point were industry leaders have a duty to demand the accountability of our peers, no matter what position they hold, or how intimidating we may or may not find them, in Hospitality and beyond.
Sincerely,
Nicholas
“I was not traumatized, I had not been abused but I can certainly see why some people would have experienced it this way and how his demeanor could have a very different impact on others”
This is textbook gaslighting language. Furthermore, divorcing his actions and abuse from his persona, claiming it comes from ambition is incredibly insulting to anyone who suffered under his leadership.
Abusers are skilled at invoking loyalty in the form of “generosity” which you laid out above, yet in the next moment be an absolute raging psychopath. Both can be true, yet it doesn’t cancel out abuse.
Is someone giving their own, actual experience gaslighting? Never does he write the accusations are untrue - only that he himself did not experience them. Over the course of nearly two decades are we all to believe there was abuse daily and to all that worked there? That would not only be untrue, but also irresponsible. Truths need to be told from different perspectives for real change and there is no reason to not believe this perspective.
The problem with this industry does not only lie in the drastic and obvious (being physically injured, publicly ridiculed, etc) but truly lies in the shadows, in the idea that accepting the slippery slope that leads from smaller faults ends up with dramatic ones…they are all a problem - and yet an incredibly difficult one to change. Progress is necessary, but does not happen overnight, if the approach happens the way it is with this situation, it will quickly be forgotten and replaced by the next drastic thing. (See Amex/Resy question below)
This article is exactly the type of conversation necessary for change that is long lasting. We can most certainly disagree, we would all be better off continuing to discuss and continuing to question.
Funny, I have yet to see any boycott of Amex or Resy. They are moving on to the next hot new restaurant, and will guaranteed market it as a safe place, but if we dig deep into the history of all the people involved, will it really be a place full of safety, love and compassion? We all want that, but pasts are hard to accept, impossible to avoid, but also can be the catalyst for positive change.
I wrote a more eluqent post, and pressed "cancel" instead of post :( so, just to summarize:
1) Your premise of "no one asks the current employees at Noma" is misinformed at best, a lie at worst. Efforts have been made, but Noma has a very strict gag order in place, and all employees are banned from speaking publicly or directly to involved parties. The Noma machine controls the narrative.
2) The outlook that a protest is invalid from the outside is deeply unfair. You should not disregard protests made in solidarity, when the actual workers (the people INSIDE, as you call them) risk their career, income and reputation. Not an abstract career but the actual income that pays their rent. These protests are not outsiders, they are mainly industry people in solidarity.
You seem to set out that what he did was unquestionably wrong, and then almost justify it for the rest of the essay.
The premise of what you are saying seems to me that for 10 years he didn't realise that verbally abusing and physically assaulting staff and not paying stages was wrong, and then when somebody pointed it to him in 2017 that it was wrong out he suddenly saw the error of his ways and hired a HR department. This is at best a highly credulous take on what happened.
I believe the strength sentiment against him is rooted in the fact that he has been given the platform and opportunity to grow, heal, hire HR, be vaunted as the world's greatest chef and make a small fortune since the serial allegations were made, whereas those he has allegedly abused have melted into the background or out of cooking altogether. There is no excuse for him ever having done what he allegedly did, in any context, period. It doesn't matter if that was the culture in the industry at the time, it was wrong then and it is wrong now, and it is patently so to anyone. It is a crime to physically assault people.
Michelin kitchens are not uniquely stressful environments. For example hospitals, the armed forces, the aviation industry, all work at as high or arguably higher levels of stress, and there are rarely incidents comparable to these occurring in those settings. It is not valid to say that it was effective to verbally abuse people, and that you thrived; the effectiveness is entirely beside the point, when the act is wrong in and of itself. Those entering that environment were subject to vast power imbalances where this all worldly head chef was able to dictate their career path, and thus in effect coerced into accepting that toxic working environment.
You open the Rene section with "... very ill-tempered and emotionally unregulated. I have seen and experienced him yell at me and others in ways that were completely disproportionate to the claimed wrongdoings we had committed," but then you say you weren't abused. That is abuse, plain and simple. You may not be traumatized, but, by your own account, you were abused.
As for the apology, imagine if every battery case was resolved with just an apology. An apology is not enough when people where physically assaulted, as the people in the article credibly were. And I understand this isn't an exclusively-Noma issue, but accountability has to start somewhere.
It's not like this is only coming to his attention now; there is a long history of complaints and a long history of abuse. Where is the growth, really?
This piece is just another apology for his bad/criminal behavior.
The restaurant industry is not some isolated ecosystem. It’s simply one of the many mirrors of modern society: hierarchy, ambition, pressure, money, desire, and sometimes abuse of power.
What makes restaurants different is not necessarily the behavior — it’s the visibility. In this industry there are journalists, Instagram, PR machines, myths, and reputations. So when something happens, it becomes a global story.
What happens in hospitals, military barracks, prisons, universities, or law firms, where journalists and social media rarely enter? Do we believe those and other environments are free from the same dynamics?
Justice and spectacle are not the same thing. When powerful figures fall, the ritual is ancient: it is not enough that they lose — they must be publicly humiliated. Societies have always treated fallen rulers this way. The king is brought down, and the crowd gathers.
The real question, Christia, is not just “Now what?” Today it feels more like “What’s next?” ...as long as the "next" generates outrage, traffic, and spectacle.
René Redzepi resigned today after physical abuse allegations went viral, but the real architect is co-founder Claus Meyer. Meyer is a millionaire entrepreneur who used his TV fame and elite Danish connections to shield Noma’s toxic culture for 20 years while selling "New Nordic purity" to the masses. René is a bully, but Meyer is the one who made the empire possible.
This was a really interesting read, thank you for sharing this with us.
I myself had a brief experience in a kitchen, about ten years ago, when I wanted to reconnect with my dream of working in the culinary world. And in just two months, I experienced this kind of behavior in a condensed form. Today I’m 31, I work as an IT engineer, becoming a chef remains one of my dreams, but I still carry the memory, branded into me, if I may say, of that kind of behavior.
I was 19 or 20, first time setting foot in a professional kitchen, with the feeling of finally accomplishing something, of finally being where I was meant to be. Everything went well at first, I was discovering a whole new world, learning its unspoken codes, and it wasn’t easy.
During a busy service, right in the middle of the rush, I placed a stainless steel plating tweezer on the plancha. The tweezer heated up, the chef grabbed it with his bare hand and burned himself. He said nothing, set it back down to let it heat up again, called me over, and when I was standing next to him, pressed the burning tweezer against my arm several times. I had the burn marks on my forearm, literally the shape of the tweezer seared into my skin. “That’s so you learn and understand what you did,” he told me. And I understood. I even thought it was normal because, in a way, I had deserved it. I was the only one in my circle who saw it that way. To my parents, my friends, and my girlfriend, it was abuse. I could add to that the inappropriate remarks, the crude comments… but anyway.
And outside of all that, it was just… amazing. I learned so much in so little time, tasted so many different things… and the chef’s behavior was so different outside of service that it was truly, genuinely a dream. I rarely saw someone so generous. We used to make sandwiches for the homeless people who hung around near the restaurant, using some of the leftover food. We’d cook them proper meals and hand them out in the street. It was truly amazing.
People often say it’s the “old-school chefs” who behave this way because they learned from older generations and simply replicate what they went through. It’s an “excuse” I read and hear all the time.
The chef I worked for was barely older than me, we were maybe three or four years apart, so he was about 22 or 23. He wasn’t old. And the person he apprenticed under, while older, was relatively young too. You’d have expected different behavior, but that wasn’t the case.
In my view, the profession of cooking only amplifies the worst flaws in a person. If you have a precise vision, ambition, a desire to reach for the stars, and the people you work with don’t share that same degree of drive, of madness, even?, of dedication and commitment, things can only blow up. And we know that when there are 80 covers to push, service is falling behind, and something random goes wrong on top of everything else, it can only explode. I think it’s normal, in the sense that too much pressure in a pressure cooker and it eventually blows. We’re still human, after all.
And speaking of being human, I think we treat chefs, especially those with a burning desire to succeed, or who have already made it, as superhumans. They must never react badly, never speak out of line, absorb everything, and lead by example at all times. Being French, we’ve seen plenty of this kind of behavior from ultra-renowned chefs. We’re sometimes even surprised to hear rumors, to see them relayed by the media without much further investigation. And we think to ourselves, “Wow, I never would have expected that from him.”
And that’s the problem with Noma and R. Redzepi. I never would have imagined reading this about them. In my mind, and in the minds of many others, Noma was the perfect example of what cuisine should be. It’s a bit of a cold shower. But it circles back to what I said earlier: ambition, pressure, success… explosion.
Now, my deepest thoughts go out to those who endured the worst this profession has to offer, I hope they’re doing well and have been able to rebuild elsewhere. R. Redzepi is recognized as the best chef in the world, Noma as the best restaurant in the world, praised by every guide, which makes it a prime target. There’s a crack, a breach in the Noma sphere, and journalists and media will throw themselves into it. It gets shared on social media and people, who haven’t lived through these things, who don’t know the industry, who don’t know Noma or the people who work there, will seize the topic because they’ll see more of an “idol to tear down” than a real, meaningful issue. As one of my mentors used to say, “Public opinion is a prostitute pulling the judge by the sleeve.”
In short, a thought for Noma, for everything it represents. A big thought for those who suffered this kind of treatment. An even bigger thought for those currently working there and having to face all of this. And a thought for R. Redzepi, hoping he does the hard work on himself and comes back changed and better.
Christian I've been a fan of you and your cooking/cookbook for years - it made me happy to read in Redzepi's own words that as his sous chef you were the one who confronted him when he treated a young female Colombian chef poorly. So he was made aware of his behavior as early as '07-'09
I’m thankful for your perspective Chef. I’ve always been a big fan, and it’s sad that creating a dialogue for the exchange of ideas so often results in insults instead of a polite exchange of thought. I will continue to follow you and I look forward to your next essay.
Very thoughtful and thought provoking. We need more of this sort of nuanced analysis.