It was always going to be an indulgence for René Redzepi, the Danish-Albanian chef of Noma fame, to bring his exacting, innovative vision of haute cuisine to Los Angeles and spend several weeks tickling the palates of well-heeled diners at a hilltop estate once dubbed “the most beautiful home in Hollywood”.
The timing has certainly been unfortunate, since the US is now fighting a destabilizing war in the Middle East and food prices are climbing so steeply that many ordinary Americans can no longer afford to eat at McDonald’s, much less contemplate the counterintuitive delights of tacinga cactus, bougainvillea petals, mealworms and giant tuna eyes.
Now, though, with old stories resurfacing from what Redzepi himself has acknowledged to be a shameful history of physical and verbal abuse in the kitchen, the Noma residency in southern California is facing a full-blown public relations emergency. Protests and a rash of last-minute sponsorship cancellations overshadowed Wednesday’s opening, and with the entire 16-week residency suddenly in peril, Redzepi announced that he was stepping down from Noma after more than two decades at the helm.
“An apology is not enough; I take responsibility for my own actions,” he wrote in an Instagram story with dinner yet to be served.
Whether his resignation will be enough to quiet the furor remains to be seen. Earlier in the day, as a succession of a large black and white SUVs with tinted windows drove up to the gates of the fabled Paramour Estate in Silver Lake to deliver guests to the inaugural lunch service, a small circle of protesters held up signs reading: “No Michelin stars for violence” and: “Your kitchen is a crime scene.”
The protest organizers, a vocal former Noma employee named Jason Ignacio White, and Sarumathi Jayaraman, a lawyer for the labor rights organization One Fair Wage, made clear they were interested in more than just a symbolic change at the top. They read out a letter demanding reparations for past actions and changes to Noma’s management and employment policies. And they vowed to keep protesting throughout the residency.
White, who was in charge of Noma’s fermentation, a key aspect of Redzepi’s culinary method, has spent several weeks publishing firsthand accounts of what he characterizes as abusive conditions there, earning about 14m views for his posts on Instagram. The public relations fiasco did not kick into high gear, though, until the New York Times published a story last weekend detailing some of those allegations – most if not all of which date back a decade or more but include accounts of Redzepi allegedly punching employees, jabbing them with kitchen implements and body-shaming them.
In response, both Redzepi and Noma issued statements acknowledging problems in the past – Redzepi has previously admitted to being a bully prone to explosions of rage and physical abuse – but said that the claims “do not reflect the workplace Noma is today”. The company statement went on: “We’ve made meaningful changes to transform our culture and workplace over the last several years – including a fully paid internship program, improved hours and time off, expanded benefits, a dedicated HR team, leadership training, mentorship programs, and more.”
In an email to the Guardian, the organization added that it has launched a workplace audit, and believes it has robust policies in place to ensure fair workplace conditions in its LA operation.
Still, that was not enough to prevent a handful of sponsors of the LA venture including the online dining reservation platform Resy, the loyalty point platform Blackbird, and American Express to drop their support at the 11th hour and cancel several nights of bookings that they had reserved at the Paramour. Blackbird said it would resell the $1,500-a-head tickets it held and forward the proceeds to organizations fighting for better working conditions in the restaurant business.
“We cannot lean on time elapsed and rehabilitation claims when these things resurface,” Blackbird’s chief executive, Ben Leventhal, said in a statement. “Regardless of context, this is highly problematic behavior.”
This was hardly how Redzepi’s team imagined their reception in Los Angeles, the latest stop on a journey of experimentation and reinvention since the original Noma restaurant in Copenhagen closed at the end of 2024. The Paramour was deemed an exciting enough location – built as the Spanish Mediterranean home of an oil heiress and the silent era movie star Antonio Moreno, complete with rose gardens, citrus orchards, and a swimming pool worthy of an ancient Roman villa – that it was kept under wraps until close to opening day.
Tickets for the residency became available in January and sold out within three minutes. When the Noma team joined forces with Courage Bagels, a popular outlet between Silver Lake and downtown Los Angeles, for a one-day pop-up a few days later, the line for the extra special $25 bagels – oyster mushroom, pumpkin bush, savory rose fudge, nasturtium and bergamot on sea salt sesame – snaked around an entire city block.
In the run-up to Wednesday’s opening, Noma’s Instagram page offered teasing glimpses of the team’s test kitchen and its multiple experiments with southern California flavors to develop a multi-course menu to “blow minds”, as one young Noma chef put it. While the final menu is a secret known only to the staff and the first few diners, some of the experimentation has featured hibiscus flower dumplings, witches’ butter, acorns, crickets, turkey wattle and what Redzepi describes as “the intrigue of a slimy texture”.
What exactly the team intends with the giant tuna eyes has not been made clear, although one video sequence on Instagram hinted that they might end up inside sunflowers as a visually arresting amuse-bouche.
Many chefs and food enthusiasts in the Silver Lake area were excited about Noma’s arrival and saw the choice of their part of town as an honor. The renewed abuse allegations have since split the community down the middle, with some saying that top restaurants have no excuse not to cultivate safe, supportive work environments and others defending Redzepi as an exacting artist who has made a heartfelt effort in recent years to rein in his excesses.
“It’s a bummer, man,” said one diner who prides himself on his relationships with local chefs but did not want to be named for fear of the sort of trial by social media he felt Redzepi was being subjected to. “I feel bad for Noma’s 130 employees, the 18 kids they brought with them … and all the Eastside restaurateurs who should be celebrating great food and collaboration with Noma for the next four months.”
Some chefs defended Redzepi by saying they had seen worse in other kitchens. One, cited by chef Erich Eichstetter on his podcast Pot Luck Stories, said his experience at Noma was “overall positive” and he described the abuse as “low to medium” – before going on to describe seeing Redzepi push people and punch them in the stomach.
The controversy has also shone a spotlight on the economics of fine dining, with several food websites reminding readers that, as of 2019, the Noma restaurant in Copenhagen relied on unpaid interns for almost half its kitchen staff. Once the bad publicity of that revelation, first reported in the Financial Times, forced Noma to start paying its interns, the additional $50,000 in monthly labor costs soon prompted Redzepi to announce he was closing his doors for good.
That, in turn, has prompted some observers to question not only the toxic masculinity that characterizes many fine dining kitchens but also whether such establishments can be anything but exploitative to survive.
“The truth is that the kind of high-end dining Noma exemplifies is abusive, disingenuous, and unethical,” Rob Anderson, a chef in the Massachusetts beach resort of Provincetown, wrote in a much-discussed essay in the Atlantic in 2023. “Chefs know it but continue to imitate Redzepi. The food media know it but continue to celebrate his kind of food. Wealthy diners know it but continue to book tables en masse – if not at Noma, then at comparable destination restaurants around the world.”
Jenn Harris, the Los Angeles Times food critic, announced that she would not be dining at Noma because she believed, unlike Anderson, that high-end restaurants can in fact model better work practices and behavior in the kitchen – and she pointed to a number in Los Angeles that pride themselves on doing so. “Let’s not forget that we are talking about restaurants,” she wrote. “These are not operating rooms or battlefields. Are some chefs so self-important that they believe their role above moral and societal obligations?”
