CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Travails of Noma: God Chefs, Brutal Kitchens and the Cult of Fine Dining

Photograph Source: paz.ca – noma Restaurant in Copenhagen – Main Entrance – CC BY 2.0

There are an easy bunch to demonise, and to a certain extent, they should be.  The God Chef, the collector of Michelin stars; the veteran of the kitchen, with all the cuts, bruises and wounds to show for it; the brute who terrorises the staff, mocking their lack of adeptness, skill and knowledge for overcooking the pigeon or adding a touch too much salt.  Hurled crockery, flying language bristling with savagery and filth.  And the rituals of hazing and collective shaming.

Copenhagen’s Michelin starred restaurant, Noma, has seen much of this and more besides.  It has been at the forefront of fine dining propaganda, holding forth about that fiction called sustainability.  (Nothing is sustainable, since entropy and death awaits us all.)  Three Michelin stars and earning first place in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List no fewer than five times, has been put down to the efforts of founding chef René Redzepi.  So confident was he that he closed Noma in 2023 to pursue his food laboratory vision (this was aided in no small way by the Covid pandemic), along with an empire of global pop-ups.

History, however, caught up with the head chef.  Last month, Redzepi’s past conduct in the kitchen featured prominently and most negatively, the object of much grief from former employees.  The signal event was the pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles, costing the pretty sum of $1,500 a seat. Former Noma employee Jason Ignacio White, in collaboration with the worker-advocacy non-profit group One Fair Wage, staged a protest against the venture outside its location in the neighbourhood of Silver Lake on March 11.  Righteousness had gripped White, who insisted that “the repercussions of staying silent are worse than me speaking up and standing with my peers against violence.”  Saru Jayaraman, a member of One Fair Wage, also posed a few questions to CBS........

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