Noma’s highly anticipated $1,500-per-head tasting menu in LA would have been controversial under any circumstances.
But when it is being hosted by achef facing scrutinyover abusive kitchen practices, a backlash was inevitable.
What’s ironic, though, is that much of the outrage is coming from the same elite food world that helped build a culture of abuse.
The New York Times recently detailed allegations of long hours, unpaid labor, harassment, and abusive kitchenculture at Noma.
TheCopenhagen restauranthas long been celebrated as the pinnacle of modern gastronomy –– a place where you pay $200 to smell butter.
The reaction across media and social platforms has been swift condemnation.
But anyone who has worked in professional kitchens for more than a decade, and especially those of us who came up in the early 2000s or earlier, had a very different reaction.
To us, none of this is surprising.
For decades (really, for more than a century), elite kitchens have been run like military brigades. The chef is the general, and the cooks are the peons, the soldiers in a culinary Full Metal Jacket.
Books have been written about this kitchen culture. Anthony Bourdain made a career exposing it. Marco Pierre White helped define the modern version of it. One of his most famous cooks, Gordon Ramsay, turned the persona of the volatile chef into a global media brand, humiliating cooks on television for their mistakes.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
