By Julia Moskin
On a February night in 2014, in the middle of a busy dinner at the famous Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, founding chef René Redzepi ordered the entire kitchen staff to follow him outside into the cold.
He was pushing a new sous-chef forward, a guy who had put on techno music—a genre Redzepi didn’t like—in the production kitchen. It was located off the restaurant floor and was where unpaid interns worked up to 16 hours a day, doing tasks like gathering herbs or cleaning pine cones to decorate Redzepi’s famous New Nordic dishes.
According to two chefs who were present, Redzepi repeatedly mocked the chef while about 40 employees, wearing short sleeves and aprons, formed a circle around the two men. It was not the first time they had been forced to participate in a public humiliation, they said.
Redzepi escalated the attack, hitting the employee in the ribs and shouting that no one would come back in until he said loudly – loud enough for everyone to hear – a humiliating statement. The colleague, out of breath, said what was required. Then everyone returned to the kitchen and continued working.
The event was never mentioned again.
Dozens of former employees described other violent punishments and said silence among staff was the norm after each incident.
“Going to work was like going to war,” said Alessia, now a chef in London, who was in the area that night and asked that her last name not be used for fear of reprisals. “You had to force yourself to be strong and not show fear.”
While Redzepi and the people who work with him today say the abuses are a thing of the past, former employees insist he was never truly held accountable.
Since 2004, Redzepi has been changing the rules of high-end gastronomy, preaching sustainable food and creating refined dishes that have earned Noma three Michelin stars and ranked first five times in the World's 50 Best Restaurants list. For transforming Denmark into a gastronomic destination, he was knighted by the Danish queen. In 2013, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain called him "without a doubt, the most influential, provocative and important chef in the world."
At the height of his fame, in 2023, Redzepi announced that he would close Noma as a restaurant to focus on an empire of innovation: experimental cuisine, biotech collaborations, and global pop-ups that have become coveted destinations for wealthy clients from around the world.
But in recent weeks, Noma's upcoming pop-up in Los Angeles — a series of dinners priced at $1,500 per person starting March 11 — has sparked a public debate about Redzepi's past behavior.
Jason Ignacio White, the former head of Noma's fermentation lab, began posting on Instagram last month saying he had witnessed physical and psychological abuse during his three years at the organization. He also published other allegations from multiple former Noma employees; the posts have been viewed more than 14 million times.
The New York Times independently interviewed 35 former employees, who described a pattern of physical punishment by Redzepi. Between 2009 and 2017, they said, he would punch employees in the face, stab them with kitchen utensils and slam them into walls. They described ongoing trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public humiliation.
According to them, Redzepi threatened to use his influence to blacklist them from restaurants around the world, to expel their families from the country or to fire their wives from jobs at other companies.
Many former employees said they had not spoken out before for fear of retaliation and because their experience working at Noma was a very valuable line on their resume.
Since Redzepi was filmed shouting at chefs in the 2008 documentary “Noma at Boiling Point,” he has made several public apologies. In a 2015 essay, he admitted to being a “beast” who pushed and intimidated subordinates. In a 2022 interview with The Times of London, he expressed regret for the past, saying he “hadn’t hit anyone,” but that “he had probably bumped into people.”
In a statement to The New York Times on Friday, he said:
“While I don’t know all the details of these stories, I can see enough of my past behavior reflected in them to understand that my actions have been harmful to the people who have worked with me. For those who have suffered under my leadership, my misjudgment, or my anger, I am deeply sorry and have worked to change.”
He added that he has not been running the daily kitchen service for years and that he has been in therapy to find better ways to manage his anger.
Many former employees said that working at Noma, while difficult, was worthwhile because of the way Redzepi had opened up gastronomy to practices like foraging and fermentation.
“We would go outside to study wild plants and then work in the lab to learn about koji,” said Julian Fortu, an intern in 2015. Like many others, he said that after Noma, doors opened for him that otherwise would never have opened.
Restaurant kitchens have long been very tough workplaces, as reflected in series and films such as "The Bear" and "The Menu," and many bosses have admitted to bullying employees.
But former Noma employees say Redzepi has never fully acknowledged the extent of the violence they say he perpetrated for years.
According to some of them, that's precisely why they're speaking out now. Noma's pop-up in Los Angeles and the high price it's asking are, they say, a reminder that his empire was built on their work and pain.
