Out of frying pan? Noma’s Rene Redzepi resigns and fine dining confronts ‘brigade’ culture

London — Chef Gordon Ramsay yells at people. Their mentors were known to throw pans and plates. That chef, Marco Pierre White of London, named his own autobiography “The Devil in the Kitchen” — partly for the punishments he inflicted on his chefs.

“If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll be back late,” White wrote, adding that his kitchen staff at Harvey’s agreed. “They were all pain addicts, as they had to be. They couldn’t get enough of the bollackings.”

No more.

The public downfall this week of Denmark’s René Redzepi, arguably the world’s top chef, has forced a real-time reckoning of when the “brigade de cuisine” becomes abusive and what happens to the perpetrators who dictate the creation of edible art.

Whether the intimidation and intimidation of the fine dining kitchen culture story brought to the masses by pop culture via celebrity chef reality shows and high-end TV like “The Bear” is debatable. Noble, valuable things like leadership style and legal accountability are suddenly at the center of a relatively small enterprise 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 York University. “However, the general feeling is that things are so tough even for good chefs that this kind of culture will inevitably end.”

Redzepi, founder of Danish Knight and Noma and innovative “New Nordic” cuisine, stepped down Thursday after the New York Times reported that dozens of former employees shared their accounts of abuse and assault at the Copenhagen landmark between 2009 and 2017. For years, RedJP had been troubled by reports of mistreatment of his staff and hiring of unpaid interns at Noma, which received three Michelin stars and was ranked first in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list five times.

The charges overshadowed Noma’s $1,500-a-head pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles. Sponsors pulled their funding for the residency, which opened Wednesday to a small gathering of protesters. Redzepi soon announced his resignation with a tearful video on Instagram. “An apology is not enough,” he said. “I take responsibility for my own actions.”

Former employees said Redzepi was never held accountable for his behavior, which included punching staff members, hitting them with kitchen equipment and threatening to blacklist them from restaurants or deport their families.

Jason Ignacio White, former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, collected anonymous testimonies of alleged abuse at the restaurant and posted them to his Instagram page. Accounts have been viewed millions of times.

“Noma destroyed my passion for the industry,” said one post. “I struggled with severe anxiety, bad enough to give me panic attacks in the middle of the night. The trauma, the abuse and the idea that nothing would ever change made me walk away from the career.”

A process at the heart of restaurants around the world is the “brigade de cuisine,” a strict organization of the kitchen developed by French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier at the turn of the 20th century based on his own military experience.

Under its hierarchy, each member of the staff has a specialty – from the “chief” to sauce-maker, roast cook, grill cook and fish cook. His choreography and his communication – “Kai!” and “Yes, Chef!” – Designed for speed, stability and cleanliness.

Even so, the atmosphere in the kitchen has long been full of chaos and intensity. Escoffier himself wrote that his first chef believed it was impossible to rule the kitchen “without a rain of slaps”.

Essayist and author of the dystopian classic “1984” George Orwell once described the restaurant kitchen of his time, where one person in the hierarchy yelled at someone below him and so on. Crying was not uncommon. As a plonger (dishwasher), Orwell ranks at the bottom.

“Plonger is one of the slaves of the modem world,” he wrote in “Down and Out in Paris and London,” published in 1933. “He is not free from being bought and sold.”

In the modern era, professional kitchens are thought to be some of the toughest places to work due to long hours of cooking, close quarters, strict hierarchies, harsh physical conditions and relentless pressure.

The rise of a chef obsessed with Michelin-star-level excellence in the 1970s accelerated poor behavior as prices and egos rose.

In his 2006 autobiography, White described his kitchen at Harveys in London as “my theater of cruelty” and boasted of giving his chefs a “10-second throttle”. Anthony Bourdain’s memoir “Kitchen Confidential” helped romanticize the testosterone-fueled vision, describing kitchens filled with “heated arguments, hypermacho posturing and drunken ranting.”

Personal accounts and research suggest that there is a painful truth behind the romantic branding. Cardiff University conducted interviews with 47 elite chefs for a 2021 study and found that the isolation of commercial kitchens can create a kind of “deviant geography” that creates “feelings of invisibility, alienation and detachment” among lower-ranking employees. It found that chefs’ behavior made the kitchen “an instrument of social withdrawal and a symbol of deviance around which the community turns”.

Open kitchens are designed to merge two spaces, the kitchen and the dining room. Several employees told the Times that when Redzepi wanted to discipline him in the open kitchen but there were customers in the dining room, he would duck under the counters and jab him in the legs with his fingers or a nearby utensil.

Many chef protégés remain silent because they don’t want to risk the opportunity to learn from the best — or the ability to launch their own high-flying culinary careers. That was the case with the fictional, wildly popular show “The Bear,” in which the main character, Carmi Barzatto, endured open and blatant abuse in order to study under one of the world’s greatest chefs.

Noma — a contraction of the Danish words nordisk and mad, meaning Nordic and food — began in 2003 “out of a simple desire to rediscover wild local ingredients through foraging and follow the seasons.” By the time Redzepi stepped down, he had become so prominent in the culinary world that Noma played a role as a training ground for the two main characters in “The Bear”. Redzepi himself made a guest appearance in the series.

This was not his first time on camera. He is seen yelling at cooks in the 2008 documentary “Noma at Boiling Point” and has issued several public apologies. He admitted to being “a bully for most of my career” in a 2015 essay. He said he “shouted and pushed people. I’m a terrible boss sometimes.”

And — despite today’s mass-culture enthusiasm for intense kitchen behavior — he recognized that the old way alienated young, talented workers and jeopardized the future of cuisine.

“The only way we can hope for the present is by confronting the unpleasant legacy of our past,” Redzepi said, “and forging a new path forward together.”

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Associated Press writer Mark Kennedy contributed from New York.