The Wages of Hierarchy
What Elite Commercial Kitchens Have To Do
With Your Work Environment
On March 11, the 5-time World’s Best Restaurant, Noma, began a 3-month Los Angeles residency. The vanguard establishment of New Nordic Cuisine was finally available to Americans without an international flight. All-inclusive bookings—sold out well ahead of opening day—went for $1500 per person.
Diners, arriving in luxury vehicles with tinted windows, anticipated the hyper-local, painstakingly presented menu designed by Noma’s celebrated chef René Redzepi.
But first, they had to make it past the protesters. They held signs that said, “Noma broke me,” “Prestige is not a paycheck,” and “No Michelin stars for violence.”
The allegations of psychological and physical abuse by Noma’s Redzepi weren’t exactly news. They came to light in drips and drabs over the last decade or so. What’s more, the hostile and often violent environment of commercial kitchens at all levels of service has become fodder for TV and film.
But Noma LA provided an event to organize around, a point of focus for demanding attention, action, and restitution.
There are a bunch of reasons I wanted to dive into this story on What Works. First, this is a labor story. It’s about what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to how we work and why we work. Second, and closer to my literal home, it’s a topic that my husband Sean is super passionate about, having spent the bulk of his working years in restaurants before I rudely relocated him to central Pennsylvania.
Last Thursday, I texted him a link to one of many stories about Noma by New York Times food writer Julia Moskin, and said, “We need to do an episode.” That episode is available to listen to here, but as always, keep reading for a written version.
Sean and I talked through his own experience in restaurants, his long-time interest in the Noma project, what we understand of the past abuse at Noma, the response from Redzepi, and how this all ties in with the constructions of work-life we all experience.
Spoiler: it’s a story about hierarchy and making sure everyone is in the “right” place.
There are so many ways to analyze this story. You can apply the lenses of gender, race, and class. You can examine the story from an economic angle, an artistic angle, or a media angle. The analysis changes depending on whose voices you center, how close you zoom in on individual stories, or how far you zoom out to look at the systems at play.
I chose a systems lens and asked: "What does the story of Noma demonstrate about the ways power is exercised and reproduced in our current work-life systems?" There are a hundred other questions one could ask about this story, so if you find yourself asking something different, I encourage you to explore that question too.
A Really Long Pair of Tweezers
Noma was founded in Copenhagen in 2003 by René Redzepi and Claus Meyer. Most of today's story is about Redzepi, but briefly, Claus Meyer is a cook, restauranteur, and TV host in Denmark. Meyer was central to the foundation and spread of the New Nordic cuisine philosophy.
In 2004, Meyer convened a group of 13 Nordic chefs and developed the Manifesto for the New Nordic Kitchen. This document is a 10-point declaration of the goals of New Nordic cuisine, including an emphasis on purity and simplicity, seasonality, locality, sustainability, and Nordic culture and identity. It's probably worth noting that all 13 chef-signatories on the manifesto are men.
Under Redzepi's leadership, Noma has been the vanguard brand for the New Nordic cuisine. It was named the World's Best Restaurant a record 5 times by Restaurant Magazine and earned its third Michelin star in 2023. Its dinner service uses the chef-curated tasting-menu model common in the upper echelons of fine dining, which in Noma's case, requires a kitchen staff of upwards of 60 classically trained cooks to pull off.
When I asked Sean to describe the style of dining Noma specializes in—haute cuisine—he replied:
“They definitely lean into multiple senses, including the visual elements. It's basically a piece of visual art, taking into consideration the [components] of the dishes as conceptual pieces and of themselves. The idea would be, sure, it tastes good, and it's actual food ingredients, but sometimes when it makes it to your plate, it's no longer identifiable as food.
And they do love a really long pair of tweezers.”
In 2023, for reasons we'll get into in just a bit, Noma ended its regular dinner service and converted the restaurant complex to a "food innovation lab." Today, Noma's dinner service lives on in a series of pop-up residencies around the world, like the current residency in Los Angeles.
Noma's influence spreads far beyond the Nordic region. While in some ways styled as a successor to El Bulli, the restaurant Noma would dethrone as the "world's best," it differed from it in key ways. Redzepi staged—interned—at El Bulli in Spain under Chef Ferran Adrià before starting Noma. El Bulli's prominence was central to the trend toward molecular gastronomy that was big in the late 90s and early 2000s, in contrast to Noma's farm-and-forage aesthetic, which would come to dominate global fine dining in the 2010s. Or, as Kieran Morris put it for The Guardian in 2020: "...it represented a transition between two self-defined 'eras' of haute cuisine—from the laboratory to the forest cabin, so to speak." This was a shift not between these two restaurants but one that reverberated through the whole of fine dining and trickled down into your neighborhood pub.
“Yes, Chef!”
Sean told me he landed in restaurants “the way a lot of people land in restaurants, which is that it is an easy job to get for most people.” He started as a dishwasher, learned enough to become a prep cook, and then his path took him to waiting tables while others go on to become a line cook or a chef.
The first restaurant he worked in on the Oregon coast was a tiny—three tables, nine stools—artsy, rough-around-the-edges joint. It wasn’t fine dining, he said, but it was the kind of place that put thought into where its ingredients came from and how a menu was constructed. It wasn’t just “different restaurant, same box cutter,” as Sean put it.
“The guy who owned and ran the place was a minor celebrity in the region,” he explained, right around the time that the celebrity chef persona was reaching its cultural apex. “I think that once he started seeing [the celebrity chef idea], it started allowing him a lot of behavior… He got a permission slip from a lot of people, so I experienced a lot of abuse there. We all did.”
Despite that, Sean appreciated the good pay (on account of sharing tips) and egalitarian structure. “We were all just like structurally on even ground with each other,” he explained, “You just took care of what your part of it was.” He told me that the work environment was “in a lot of ways… one of the most liberated spaces that I ever worked in. While at the same time, being one of the most abusive spaces that I ever worked in.”
Personally, I don’t think both of those things can be true! But that’s the kind of brain pickling that happens in this industry.
Sean’s experience of an egalitarian, if abusive, work environment differs significantly from the rigid hierarchy of many kitchens. Before researching this story, I knew that kitchens were organized by various roles and titles, but I didn’t know it was a prescribed model: the brigade system.
The Brigade System
The brigade system, first introduced by Chef Auguste Escoffier at the turn of the 20th century in London, is the hierarchical system that's been almost universally adopted in high-end kitchens. Inspired by his 7 years in the French military, Escoffier envisioned a kitchen where each worker knew their specific role and place in the chain of command. He was also influenced by Frederick Taylor's scientific management.
As sociologist (and kitchen worker) Ellen Meiser explains in her book, Making It, the brigade system is:
”...a top-down hierarchy where an executive chef reigns over rank-and-file cooks. In descending order, the pecking order typically is: executive chef, sous chefs, area-specific chefs—such as pantry, sauces, fish, and pastry—line cooks, stages/apprentices, prep cooks, and dishwashers. The brigade was created by famed French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) in 1890 at the Savoy Hotel in London. The chef appreciated Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management. So, in a bid to decrease redundancy and guest waiting time, Escoffier applied Taylor’s production line to the kitchen, allocating the creation of separate components of each dish to a specific cook, all of which would come together at plating. Within this system, every kitchen worker has a clear status, direct supervisor, physical workspace, and specific job to complete. It is a rigid but effective system. And because of this efficacy, the brigade has since been widely adopted, solidifying a clear set of hierarchical identities within the kitchen.”
One of the chief legacies of scientific management is the way that it breaks down the production of a good into minute steps. Taylor used meticulous observation and a stopwatch to figure out the most efficient way for workers to complete a task. Taylor noticed that the smaller the task, the faster someone could complete it. Larger tasks were broken down into minute steps, deskilling labor and reducing its value (i.e., lowering wages) even as workers produced more goods for sale.
This fractionalization of labor tasks is evident in how high-end kitchens, like Noma's, operate. One chef is responsible for a clearly-defined subtask within the dinner service system. And while non-elite kitchens may have wider roles and less rigid hierarchies, the system and expectations embedded in it have trickled down over the last century-plus, as Meiser notes. Each kitchen has its own unique blend of folkways and responsibilities, but the overall system tends to be legible between kitchens. Learning to navigate this system is what Meiser calls "kitchen capital:"
"Kitchen capital is a grasp of kitchen culture and workplace networks, command of food and cooking, embodied practices, and management of emotions that display a hierarchical kitchen identity."
In this way, hierarchy (along with discipline and unwavering obedience) is inscribed and reinscribed through kitchen culture in restaurants across all levels.
Abuse and Accountability
As I mentioned, the opening of Noma LA was met by protests. These protests were organized by One Fair Wage, a group that advocates for better working conditions for restaurant and service workers. The publicity around Noma’s opening in LA provided an opportunity to amplify allegations of psychological and physical abuse against chef René Redzepi. While these abuse allegations had been reported on previously, little was said or done about them with regard to the victims.
New York Times food writer Julia Moskin has a package of articles covering the abuse allegations, protests, industry responses, and finally, Redzepi’s decision to step away from Noma (all gift links). You can also find accounts of the abuse at a website created by One Fair Wage, noma-abuse.com. I’ll spare you most of the details since there’s so much reporting that already exists, but some allegations included being punched in the chest and stomach, being poked with a fork in the legs under the counter during dinner service, and being forced to watch colleagues receive abuse in freezing Danish weather. It’s all truly disturbing and absolutely disqualifying.
Much has been written about the lone genius or great man persona, how it obfuscates terrible behavior and erases the incredible contributions of others. It’s very easy to fit the Noma story into this model. And it does fit this model. However, models are always at risk of flattening the full story. For this reason, the narrative around a story like Noma's and the victims of Redzepi's abuse is bound to lack nuance. Despite all the practice we have for thinking about and talking about violence and harassment at work, we are still remarkably bad at these stories. Or rather, these stories are told to fit a certain set of consumer expectations and economic incentives.
In 2015, Redzepi penned an essay for the food magazine Lucky Peach in which he admitted, “I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career. I’ve yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times.” In fact, that’s the line that’s most often cited in the coverage of this affair. I clicked through to the full essay expecting a boilerplate mea culpa, but what I found seemed genuinely reflective and indicative of deep thought about the issues at play in the kitchen. It’s not a cliché apology, nor is it performing some sort of “woke” checklist. I think it’s notable that it was published when it was—more than a year before the Access Hollywood tape, more than two years before the beginning of #MeToo, more than four years before, according to some, we all caught the woke mind virus.
To be absolutely clear, a sincere apology and even a change in behavior don’t excuse what Redzepi did. It certainly doesn’t absolve him of the need to try to repair the harm he did.
Media coverage of this story, however, reflects the pretty simplistic models we have for talking about this kind of violation. We want a happy ending—whether that’s the downfall of the big, bad villain or the triumph of an unlikely hero who turned himself around. Nobody wants to hear a story about slowly coming around to a different way of seeing the world and your place in it, making substantive changes to how you behave, and that still not being enough to save your career.
Justice is a messy process. There is no possibility of “an eye for an eye.” No accountant can come up with an objective measure of the restitution that should be paid; no psychologist can assess the damage done and prescribe a course of action that would set it right.
From his account, Redzepi has done a lot to work on himself, a good and necessary step toward doing better. But the next step isn’t to institute top-down change. The next step is listening, working to understand those who’ve been harmed, and involving people at all levels of the organization in designing the kitchen of the future. Maybe Redzepi and other Noma leaders did this. Likely, however, the hierarchy of the kitchen is so ingrained in how they think that a more democratic and inclusive solution wasn’t conceivable.
Taking responsibility for his actions requires Redzepi to accept that, even if he genuinely wants to lead the change, his past actions may disqualify him from that role.
Maybe Redzepi has a role to play in transforming the restaurant world. Maybe he had a real period of reflection and took real action to change the work environment at Noma. Even still, he isn't entitled to a leadership role either in his restaurant or in the industry. I think what organizers are looking for is the kind of accountability that centers victims.
Redzepi's star has burned brightly for 23 years as the head of Noma, while he snuffed out countless flames in the hearts and minds of aspiring chefs. Those chefs, both the ones who continued on and those who changed their goals rather than continue to suffer, deserve recognition.
Know Your Place
As I thought about this story, the question I kept coming back to is one that I’ve asked myself a lot in the Trump era: Why is the idea of a “natural order” of things, of natural hierarchy, so hard to quash? How is it that after centuries of working towards more democratic, more just societies, we’re still dealing with shit like this?
One potential answer is that hierarchy is inscribed in every transaction we make. Marx introduced the idea of “commodity fetishism” into the broader conversation about economics, capitalism, and class. For Marx, the commodity—which can be anything that’s the object of exchange—is imbued with social connotations beyond the simple value of its production or use. It’s a sign that, among other things, points to the relative positions of those engaging in exchange.
In his “Essays on Marx's Theory of Value,” Isaak Ilich Rubin explains that in capitalism, "separate individuals are related directly to each other by determined production relations, not as members of society, not as persons who occupy a place in the social process of production, but as owners of determined things, as 'social representatives' of different factors of production." What we own determines our relationship to others in production systems. Workers own their labor capacity and time. Capitalists own the varied means and capacities for production. Financiers own financial capital, rentiers own real estate, merchants own goods for sale, etc. Entering into a contract as an owner of labor capacity and time establishes someone as a worker and differentiates them from the owner of the system through which they deploy their labor (i.e., the capitalist).
So what I have to sell determines who I am, and who I am determines what I have to sell. What I sell and to whom I sell it sets my place in the capitalist order. And in that way, exchange creates hierarchy. A person who sells their labor capacity and time is necessarily dependent on (and therefore, less powerful than) those they sell to.
With some help from Thorstein Veblen, this idea also extends into the arena of consumption. The commodity buyer creates a social relation at the point of sale or service with the proprietor selling the good. They also create social relations with other classes of consumers. What we buy often denotes what groups we belong to. From my 10-year-old Subaru Outback, to my Apple Watch Ultra, to my beer preferences, you can tell a lot about me and what groups I associate with by what I buy.
Food fits right into this commodity-as-social-relation idea. What we eat, where it's sourced from, how it's prepared, and even how we talk about it are significant social signifiers. The story and performance of what I eat (or don't eat) says a lot about where I belong in the social order. Put another way, there's a reason that "latte liberals" and broke avocado toast-eating Millennials have been such powerful political images.
In the case of Noma and other fine dining establishments, the power dynamics and social hierarchy of commodity fetishism become especially toxic when we start talking about unpaid, or even underpaid, labor. What does it reveal about the hierarchy of fine dining that the whole industry subsists on unpaid or underpaid labor?
From Making It:
"Sociology makes sense of abuse (in its various forms) as a method of domination—the control of and power over others—and claiming of social status. As theorist Pierre Bourdieu argues, 'One’s relationship to the social world and to one’s proper place in it is never more clearly expressed than in the space and time one feels entitled to take from others.' But domination includes extracting far more than just space and time; abuse relies on the nonconsensual taking of dignity, peace, safety, and—in the context of work—economic security. In small group settings with distinct cultures, like kitchens, domination can also be a method to enforce social order and put people in their place."
Sean asked me what I thought of those who defend rigid hierarchy and even abuse as tools that create the necessary culture for discipline, effectiveness, and productivity. For example, they might say a military needs a clear chain of command to be effective, or a fraternity might need hazing to ensure new recruits are all-in, or a kitchen might need to operate through fear to ensure perfect execution.
Violence, exploitation, and abuse—regardless of the form they take—are never the answer. Notions of social order, the idea that I’m better than you and you’re better than that other guy, whether based on race, gender, or even merit, aren’t real.
And yet, hierarchy can have a place in a just world. On this, I turn to adrienne maree brown and her book Emergent Strategy:
“At this point in my life, I am not against hierarchy. I notice hierarchies in my life and attention all the time, inside my own preferences for whom I spend my waking hours with and how I like to spend my time. I also deeply value experience and natural affinity for things—I am oriented towards healing and not math, so I don’t offer myself up to create budgets for people. I follow other people’s leadership around math, I offer leadership around healing, which comes more naturally to me. That give and take creates room for micro-hierarchies in a collaborative environment.“
Hierarchies, even productive ones, tend to ossify. They harden into rigid ways of relating to each other, rather than malleable recognition of what we have to contribute in a given situation. Rigid hierarchy becomes uncollaborative, incontestable. In removing friction, it erases the creative energy and reproductive power created when we come together for a purpose—whether producing a fine dining experience, forming a government, or building a small business.
When the social relations we are part of are contestable, we can truly work together.
Pay Attention to the Small Things
So what does it take to contest and reinvent the social relations created within the capital system, broadly, and within the context of our industries and work-lives, specifically?
Awareness is the first step. It's why I choose to spend time and effort on a story like this one. In his new book, The Story of Capital, David Harvey emphasizes how Marx sought to explicate the "totality" of the capital system. Yes, there are specific pain points, particular flows of value, unique forces of exploitation—but by seeing the whole of the system, we can start to see the forces that act on us and, importantly, countless others whose situations may be vastly different from ours but whose situations are the product of the same forces. Solidarity is the necessary step after awareness.
Thinking about the restaurant industry, we can ask ourselves: How are the forces that are acting on workers in the restaurant industry also the forces that are acting on us? And conversely, how are the forces acting on the restaurant industry also supported by our behavior as consumers?
Violence and exploitation are two sides of the same coin: domination. Who feels entitled to others' time and attention? Who gets to believe that violence is a necessary means to order and discipline? Who is allowed to wield fear—of pain, of poverty, of the loss of dignity—as a weapon?
The answers to these questions are inscribed within systems much larger than the commercial kitchen. It's those systems that influence our work-lives whether or not we've ever been tasked with preparing a culinary foam.
To brown's point, one way we resist the larger systems is by paying attention to the small things. Instead of going with the flow, we can negotiate how we relate to each other and contribute to our shared goals based on the actually-existing circumstances. It takes care, time, and creativity, but it's worth it for more just and equitable working conditions for all of us.
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