The Price of the Plate
The world’s most righteous restaurant turned out not to be. What are the ethics of fine dining, anyway?
[Note: This was written before Redzepi announced his resignation.]
Among the most memorable things I have ever put in my mouth was a dish so austere it barely seemed like food. It arrived at my table at Noma in Copenhagen in 2015 as a kind of provocation: monkfish liver, shaved to translucent ribbons and draped over something fermented and cold, the whole thing tasting of the sea but also of the forest, of decay and vitality at once. I sat with it for a moment before eating, the way you might pause before a piece of music you know will change you. The dish had been conceived by René Redzepi, and it bore his signature: radical restraint, almost theological seriousness about ingredients, and the quiet insistence that beauty could be found where no one had thought to look.
I left Noma a convert. I have cited Redzepi in my writing more times than I can count. He seemed to me not merely a great chef but a genuine thinker about food — about ethics, provenance, sustainability, the obligations of the kitchen to the land it drew from. Noma had replaced foie gras with monkfish liver; had replaced imported herbs with foraged weeds; had built a philosophy of cooking in which every ingredient’s origins were a moral statement. Here, I thought, was fine dining that had done the work. That had earned its stars not just through brilliance but through conscience.
I was wrong. Or rather: I was only half right, in a way that now costs me something.
Last weekend, the New York Times published a detailed account of Noma’s kitchen culture, assembled from interviews with 35 former employees. What they described was not a philosophy of restraint but its violent opposite. Between 2009 and 2017, according to the accounts, Redzepi punched cooks in the ribs, jabbed them in the legs with a barbecue fork, slammed them against walls, and subjected them to rituals of public humiliation that some described as leaving lasting psychological damage. He allegedly threatened to have workers blacklisted across the industry, and in at least one instance, threatened to have an employee’s family deported.
The timing of the story was itself a kind of editorial comment: Noma’s 16-week Los Angeles pop-up — $1,500 a person, sold out in 60 seconds — was opening the following Wednesday. By Monday, American Express, Resy, and the hospitality platform Blackbird had all pulled their sponsorships. Protests were planned for the sidewalk outside the Silver Lake venue, led by One Fair Wage and former Noma fermentation director Jason Ignacio White. The restaurant, meanwhile, opened as scheduled.
Redzepi posted a response on Instagram that acknowledged “enough of my past behavior” to confirm the accounts were not fabrications, expressed regret, cited therapy and personal growth, and stopped conspicuously short of conceding the full extent of what had been alleged. Brazilian chef Bel Coelho spoke for many when she replied: an apology without reparations, she wrote, “serves no purpose.”
None of this, it should be said, was truly new information. A documentary called Noma at Boiling Point had aired in 2008. In 2015 — the same year I sat with that monkfish liver — Redzepi published an essay in Lucky Peach in which he wrote that he had “been a bully for a large part of my career,” that he had “yelled and pushed people,” and that he had become the kind of chef he had once sworn he would never be. The food world read this as confession-followed-by-redemption and moved on. Awards continued. Reservations sold out. Critics, myself included, continued to celebrate the food without asking much about who made it, or at what cost.
This is the specific shape of fine dining’s ethical blind spot, and it deserves examination.
The industry has become adept at a particular kind of moral presentation. The sourcing is impeccable. The carbon footprint is considered. The menu celebrates the local and the foraged and the sustainable. These are not false virtues — they are real, and Noma’s contributions to thinking about food’s relationship to place and environment are genuine. But they have also functioned as a kind of ethical alibi: the restaurant demonstrates conscience toward the ingredient while the people handling that ingredient work in conditions that, by any ordinary standard, would be classified as abuse.
There is something almost theological about this inversion. The monkfish liver was treated with reverence. The cook who shaved it risked being jabbed in the leg for moving too slowly.
And the open kitchen — long considered a symbol of transparency in fine dining, the chef-as-visible-artist — turns out to have been Noma’s most elegant deception. While cooks prepared dishes in view of the dining room, Redzepi allegedly crouched below the counter line, out of sightlines, to administer punishment. The theater of accountability was the cover for what lay just beneath it.
Can diners know? This is the question I have been asking myself since Saturday, and the honest answer is: sometimes, if you look. The documentary was there. The essay was there. The Financial Times reported in 2022 that Noma employed up to 30 unpaid interns working 70-hour weeks while paying their own rent in one of Europe’s most expensive cities — that story, too, passed without much consequence for reservations. A Cardiff University study found that the physical isolation of professional kitchens creates what researchers called a “geography of deviance” — this is a term coined by geographer Susan J. Smith to describe a moral universe where the normal rules cease to apply. Labor advocacy organizations like One Fair Wage, industry newsletters like Expedite, and former-employee accounts on noma-abuse.com increasingly document kitchen culture in ways that didn’t exist a decade ago.
But the structural truth is that the restaurant industry is designed to make this information hard to find and easy to ignore. The Michelin Guide rates the plate. Nobody rates the sous-chef’s safety. The awards ecosystem that made Noma’s reputation had no mechanism for asking whether that reputation was being built on fear. Diners who wanted to know could have known. Most didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to know.
The question that remains — the one the protesters outside Noma LA are pressing, the one Redzepi’s apology conspicuously avoids — is what accountability actually looks like.
This is not the same as asking whether Redzepi can change, or has changed. He may have done both. The people he punched, threatened, and humiliated are not particularly interested in his therapeutic journey. They have asked, through One Fair Wage and through former colleague Jason Ignacio White, for reparations and structural change. An apology delivered on Instagram two days before a $4-million pop-up opening is not a reckoning; it is crisis management. As Bloomberg Opinion’s Howard Chua-Eoan wrote this week, this is not the first time Redzepi has confessed and sought forgiveness — and the pattern itself is now part of the story.
There is a version of the “art from artist” argument that applies here, and it goes like this: the food is real, the cuisine Redzepi helped create is genuinely important, and boycotting the restaurant punishes the many other workers — innocent of abuse — who depend on it. This argument has some force. It also happens to be the argument that every powerful person relies on when asking others to absorb the cost of his past conduct without consequence.
The more honest version of the question is this: what is a $1,500 dinner, right now, in this moment, actually paying for? It is paying for a meal, yes. It is also paying for Redzepi’s rehabilitation — for the cultural signal that the controversy has been survived, that the brand endures, that the world’s appetite for his genius is sufficient to outlast the discomfort of knowing how it was produced.
That is a calculation every diner must make. I have made mine.
I still think the monkfish liver was extraordinary. I still think Redzepi changed how serious cooks think about place and season and the moral weight of an ingredient’s origins. These things are true, and they do not stop being true because something darker was also true, simultaneously, in the same building.
What has changed is my sense of what my admiration was complicit in. The food world — critics, awards bodies, food media, attentive diners like me — built and sustained a consensus that Noma’s ethical credentials were a package deal: the foraging, the fermentation, the philosophy, the whole project of conscience. We were not lied to, exactly. We were told some of the truth, and we chose not to push on the rest.
Fine dining asks us to pay attention. To notice the provenance of the ingredient, the intention behind the technique, the thinking embedded in the dish. It asks us, in other words, to be ethical consumers. What it has never asked — what no star, no award, no open kitchen has ever really required — is that we pay the same attention to the people in the kitchen.
It’s past time we started.