‘No, chef’: Denmark’s Rene Redzepi resigns from Noma after bombshell New York Times expose

Chef Gordon Ramsay yells at people. His mentor was known for throwing pans and plates. That chef, London’s Marco Pierre White, titled his own memoir “The Devil in the Kitchen” — in part for the punishments he meted out to his chefs. Recommended Video “If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll turn up late,” White wrote, saying his kitchen staff at Harveys accepted that. “They were all pain junkies, they had to be. They couldn’t get enough of the bollockings.” No more. The public downfall this week of Denmark’s Rene Redzepi , arguably the world’s top chef, has forced a reckoning in real time over when “brigade de cuisine” becomes abuse and what should happen to perpetrators who direct the creation of edible art. At issue is whether time is up on the storied bullying and intimidation of fine dining kitchen culture, brought to the masses through pop culture by celebrity chef reality shows and high-end TV like “The Bear.” Lofty, pricey matters like leadership style and legal liability are suddenly at the center of a relatively small industry known for narrow profit margins, not HR departments or training. “The resources aren’t there for self-policing,” said Robin Burrow, associate professor of organization studies at the University of York. “The general feeling, though, is that things are so tough even for very good chefs that this kind of culture ends up being inevitable.” Kitchen magician, toxic chef Redzepi, a Danish knight and the founder of Noma and innovative “New Nordic” cuisine, stepped down Thursday after The New York Times reported that dozens of former employees had shared their accounts of abuse and assault between 2009 and 2017 at the Copenhagen landmark . Redzepi had been dogged for years by reports of mistreating his staff and employing unpaid interns at Noma, which received three Michelin stars and was ranked first on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List five times. The allegations overshadowed Noma’s $1,500-a-head pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles. Sponsors pulled their funding for the residency, which opened on Wednesday to a small gathering of protesters. Redzepi announced his resignation on Instagram with a tearful video soon after. “An apology is not enough,” he said. “I take responsibility for my own actions.” Former employees said Redzepi has never been held accountable for his conduct, which included punching members of the staff, jabbing them with kitchen tools and threatening to get them blacklisted from restaurants or have their families deported. Jason Ignacio White, a former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, collected anonymous testimonies of alleged abuse at the restaurant and posted them to his Instagram page. The accounts have been viewed millions of times. “Noma destroyed my passion for the industry,” one post said. “I struggled with intense anxiety, bad enough to give me panic attacks in the middle of the night. The trauma, abuse and idea that nothing would ever change all led me to walk away from the career.” The kitchen brigade system is entrenched The process at the heart of restaurants worldwide is the “brigade de cuisine,” a strict organization of the kitchen developed around the turn of the 20th century by French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier, who based it on his own military experience. Under its hierarchy, every member of the staff has a specialty — from the “chief” to the sauce-maker, the roast cook, the grill cook and the fish cook. Their choreography and their communications — “Hand!” and “Yes, chef!” — are designed for speed, consistency and cleanliness. Even so, kitchen atmospheres have long been filled with chaos and intensity. Escoffier himself wrote that his first chef believed it was impossible to govern a kitchen “without a shower of slaps.” George Orwell, the essayist and author of the dystopian classic “1984,” once described the restaurant kitchen of his time as a place where one person in the hierarchy yelled at his subordinate, who yelled at someone below him and so on. Weeping was not unusual. As a plongeur (dishwasher), Orwell ranked at the bottom. “A plongeur is one of the slaves of the modem world,” he wrote in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933. “He is no freer than if he were bought and sold.” It’s a place ‘where the rules don’t apply’ In the modern era, professional kitchens are thought to be some of the toughest places to work thanks to a recipe of long hours, close quarters, strict hierarchies, grueling physical conditions and relentless pressure. The rise of the chef as an auteur during the 1970s with an obsession with Michelin-star-level excellence only accelerated the poor behavior as prices and egos rose. In his 2006 memoir, White described his kitchen at Harveys in London as “my theatre of cruelty” and boasted of giving his chefs “a 10-second throttle.” Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” helped romanticize that testosterone-fueled vision, describing kitchens filled with “heated argument, hyperma