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Punching, slamming, screaming: A chef’s past abuse haunts Noma, the world’s top-rated restaurant
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Noma became one of the world's most famous restaurants under head chef Rene Redzepi, but former workers say its reputation was built on abusive working conditions.
PHOTO: DITTE ISAGER/NYTIMES
Julia Moskin
On a February night in 2014, in the middle of a busy dinner at the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant Noma, founding chef Rene Redzepi ordered the entire kitchen staff to follow him outside into the cold.
He was shoving a sous chef in front of him, a young man who had put on techno music, a genre Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen. Far from the dining room, it was where unpaid interns worked 16-hour days, performing tasks such as picking herbs and cleaning pine cones to adorn Redzepi’s celebrated New Nordic dishes.
