Let’s protect people in kitchens everywhere from the culture of bullying

Unless you are really interested in chefs and restaurants you may have missed the storm over a residency by Noma, one of the world’s most influential and important restaurants in Los Angeles.

What happened was this: when Noma announced its residency some ex-employees drew attention to the bullying of the staff at the restaurant’s main operation in Copenhagen.

 

The allegations dated back several years and the uproar drew the attention of The New York Times which researched them and published a devastating article about Noma’s treatment of its junior employees. Consequently Noma’s Los Angeles residency has gone on as planned but without Rene Redzepi, Noma’s charismatic founder, who has stepped away from the restaurant.

 

   More about Redzepi later but what the uproar demonstrates is that there is growing concern about bullying and harassment in restaurant kitchens. This is not about sexual harassment which was the subject of another controversy some years ago, one that led to the downfall of such famous chefs as Mario Batali. The charge here is that chefs treat their subordinates with too little respect and that many top chefs subject their kitchen staff to abuse and sometimes, violence. It is, they say, the dark side of Michelin starred restaurants, one that customers don’t know about.

 

   Well yes and no.

 

  People who go to these restaurants do know about it. Stories about violent chefs have been featuring in British newspapers for decades. And there have been Instagram accounts like HospitalityBullshit which have documented the abuse. More recently books like the chef Sally Abe’s A Woman’s Place Is In The Kichen, and Tart by the pseudonymous blogger The Slutty Chef, have described the underbelly of top kitchens and have drawn attention to the harassment.

 

   Even the average British diner who goes to a restaurant run by the well-regarded chef Tom Aikens is aware that Aikens was thrown out of the kitchen of the Michelin two star Pied a Terre in London two decades ago after he attacked a chef with a branding iron.

 

   When such instances are reported there are expressions of shock and horror but in a sense, all of us have contributed to the creation of this culture. For instance Gordon Ramsay is a very good chef but he owes his global fame to TV shows and cooking competitions where he shouts abuses in the kitchen. The more four letter words he uses the better his ratings get. When we see his subordinates and contestants cowering under the abuse, many of us enjoy it when we should really be objecting to the celebration of this culture of abuse. Nor is this is a purely British phenomenon. Ramsay is the only Brit to crack mainstream American TV and streaming. Could he have done this without the kitchen conflict and the swearing? I doubt it.

 

   Ramsay’s mentor Marco Pierre White is one of the two greatest British chefs of his generation. But integral to his appeal was that he was not just rude to his chefs but he was also willing to insult his guests. Marco did not need to be a bully. The other great British chef of his generation Heston Blumenthal has no reputation for kitchen bullying or insults. Yet he is far more globally famous and influential than Marco ever was.

 

   So why did Marco do it? Why does Ramsay continue to make millions from swearing?

 

"In Britain the desire of chefs to be regarded as dangerous bullies in the kitchen may stem from shame and inadequacy."

   Apart from the obvious reason- people notice you if you are rude - there are other explanations. Most Western kitchens are patterned on French kitchens which in turn are patterned on military operations. The kitchen team is called a brigade and the hierarchy of kitchen ranks is military style except that the chef is not just any general: he is Napoleon, master of all he surveys.

 

   All top French kitchens are terrifying places. Eric Ripert (now the chef at three Michelin star Le Bernardin in New York) has written about the ‘brutality’ of Joel Robuchon’s kitchen. The great French chef was a tyrant, he recalls.

 

   And though the French are less willing to call out their chefs, proudly treating their restaurant kitchens as extensions of the French Foreign Legion, the writer Bill Buford has written about the violence he encountered in French kitchens and the American chef Dan Barber and our own Vikas Khanna have talked about the anti Semitism and racism of top French Kitchens.

 

   In Britain the desire of chefs to be regarded as dangerous bullies in the kitchen may stem from shame and inadequacy. Till the end of the last century cooking was seen as a woman’s job. The so-called bad boy chefs who emerged during that era were eager to assert a toxic masculinity to demonstrate how macho they were.

 

   There are other more complex explanations. A study of chefs at Michelin starred restaurants by Cardiff University found that people who worked such long hours hidden away in kitchens started feeling estranged from society and from norms of civilised behaviour. Like the boys in Lord of the Flies they turned to bullying and violence.

 

   I accept that kitchens are high pressure spaces and that tensions and conflict - up to a point - are inevitable but I don’t accept that this gives chefs enough of a reason to behave badly. A rocket scientist is as obsessed with perfection and his working conditions are as tension-filled. But have you ever heard of a punch up at NASA? Chefs need to stop making excuses for themselves. The bullies need to accept that they need psychiatric help.

 

   Which, ironically enough, is exactly what Rene Redzepi did. When I did my first long interview with him for Brunch three years ago he said that he had been a bully and a horrible person. But he had gone into therapy to seek treatment and was a much better human being now. I must have looked sceptical because he then sneaked me into the kitchen and said ‘judge for yourself: is this a happy place now?’

 

   I wasn’t the only journalist he said this too. And he wrote publicly about his bullying manner and his efforts to overcome that terrible defect in his personality through treatment.

 

   So every journalist who wrote about Noma over the last several years knew that Redzepi had issues. The current uproar is not prompted by any new incidents. But because he had already admitted to the abuse Redzepi became a soft target especially when a high profile residency in Los Angeles was announced.

 

   If you tell people attacking Redzepi that they were content to enjoy his food despite knowing about his past behaviour before this controversy erupted on social media, you get one of two responses. It’s either “I knew he had done bad things but not that they were so bad” or “it’s not enough that he had said sorry; he should pay reparations.”

 

   Oh well.

 

   I imagine that Redzepi’s talent will ensure that he will be back sooner rather than later. On the whole however this controversy is a good thing. All harassment, bullying and abuse are bad. But let’s not turn this into a lynch mob. Let’s protect people in kitchens everywhere from the culture of bullying. And let’s stop watching so-called cookery competitions where the excitement comes from abusive chefs like Ramsey.

 

   All abuse and bullying are terrible. And we should not be the enablers.