On Beating a Dead Horse Named Noma

We need to start telling ourselves new stories. Or at the very least coming up with new takes on them as they come to light. Anyone in the restaurant industry circle knows by now that the world-renowned Noma is closing next year, and that chef Rene Redzepi is moving on to other pastures. Less of you may have read the hit piece in The Atlantic from a few weeks back skewering him and the working conditions at the restaurant. I've read it a few times now and can't shake the urge to say a few things on the subject.

It's not surprising to still see contributions being made to the tired, predictable takedown genre. The creative cul de sac that almost everyone has scared themselves into over the past few years is real, but the timing of this one caught my attention. Why now? Why call in a hit after Redzepi has already announced that the restaurant is closing and has made statements essentially admitting failure, like, "financially and emotionally, it just doesn't work." In this case it seems at least partly because the author wants a confession.

The basic proposition is that Noma is an exploitative and abusive working environment, built and run on cheap wages and uncompensated labor, and operated by someone who, despite being "transparent about his sins," has been otherwise "unrepentant." Some familiar sounding tropes sprinkled with religion. Interesting. Additionally, the author proposes that Noma was bad for fine dining more broadly because its massive influence helped to spread abusive practices throughout the industry.

Okay. There is plenty more to say about the specifics on display here, but for the sake of not writing a point by point hit piece of my own, I think there are some more general things to address. To lend myself some credibility I should mention why I have any interest in this subject in the first place. In my former life, I worked my way up the kitchen ranks at several Minneapolis restaurants over the course of ten years. I loved it and I hated it. It's a nearly impossible industry for almost every reason which is why I bowed out in 2018 and why I can appreciate anyone else swallowing their pride and doing the same. There is actually more to life than one all-consuming thing, turns out.

But back to the point. Unpaid internships are a staple practice in the industry, a fact first introduced to yours truly during the final portion of my culinary program at Le Cordon Bleu. Every student got to pick a few choice restaurants from a huge list and apply to intern at them part-time and unpaid over a six week period. Despite the list of valid arguments against going to culinary school, this part of the program was incredibly valuable in preparing cooks-to-be for the industry, the reason being fairly obvious. It placed you directly in a professional kitchen and forced you to quickly learn essentials like urgency, preparedness, organization, and the long list of other applied skills that a classroom setting cannot provide.

You might be sensing where I’m going here. This is not at all to make an argument for unpaid labor, but instead to suggest that when you turn an internship at a place like Noma into a labor issue instead of seeing it as an educational experience at one of the highest ranked restaurants in the world, you might be missing the point altogether.

Which leads me to a broader trend that seems counterproductive. If you are going to attempt to speak on behalf of a group of people and indeed try to enact change that would affect their lives, you should at the very least try to understand and speak to their perspective. I'm not keen on taking too many liberties in this department which is why I don't generally speak on others' behalf. However, one assumption that I feel safe in making is that every person who worked at Noma understood the stakes involved and chose the experience of being there over the money that they could have made working elsewhere. Unless your theory is that they were somehow brainwashed or stripped of their own autonomy there is no other assumption to make. Speaking to my own experience of working with loads of cooks who did internships and stages around the world over the years (including a former boss who interned for a week at Noma), I gleaned that there were basically three reasons that people did it; bragging rights, building a resume, and a desire to learn from great chefs.

One could argue that the points made so far are moot if the central argument is for everyone getting paid regardless of how they view themselves. And I don't disagree with that as an ideal. It would be amazing if everyone working anywhere, regardless of skill or anything else, were paid a living wage. But as usual, reality complicates the issue. There are always two uncontrollable, very consequential factors that come to my mind when this subject pops up in a restaurant context; food cost and menu price. Every chef and restaurant owner has to bend to the cost of the food that they are bringing into the restaurant, and also has to play a never ending game of setting menu prices that balance making a profit with not overcharging and alienating guests. Again, the point is obvious. The profit, or lack thereof, entirely determines what and how many employees you can pay. And if the restaurant can't afford to stay open no one gets paid anything. A New York Times article from this past January interviewed Redzepi stating, "the math of compensating nearly 100 employees fairly, while maintaining high standards, at prices that the market will bear, is not workable." It's all in there.

There is another point to make here, maybe more esoteric than the others. I have a strong intuition about human nature. I think that people always have been and always will be drawn to greatness in whatever form it comes. And I think that if it isn’t genuine, or it’s a fleeting trend, they eventually see through it and move on. I also think that pursuing and being inspired by genius is a beautiful and deeply human thing to do. It’s forged every new movement and genre and furthered art and culture across time. And the character flaws of any individual within that lineage, short of them being a total monster whose work is overshadowed by their monstrousness, have historically been forgotten. And maybe they should be. Because everyone is flawed, but not everyone creates beauty in the world. Take that as you will.

With all of my objections to the point of view presented in The Atlantic piece I still feel like I might come to a similar conclusion that the author does, funnily enough. My wife is a fellow former chef and we've been talking about the sustainability of fine dining for years now, largely settling on a bet against it. And maybe that's alright in the long run. Maybe an entirely luxury industry with so many financial hurdles going against it wasn't meant to be. But trying to help crash the ship with so many people on board that would give their entire livelihoods to learning and expanding the craft is pretty fucked up. And just not very nice. Maybe the best you can do is hope that people are happy choosing to do something that you can't understand.