Punching, slamming, screaming: Chef’s past abuse haunts top-rated Noma
Founder René Redzepi has been accused by dozens of former employees of a range of violent punishments, for which he’s never been held to account. They say silence among the staff was customary.
René Redzepi, the head chef at Noma in Copenhagen, pictured in late-2022. NYT
Julia Moskin
Updated
On a February night in 2014, in the middle of a busy dinner at the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant Noma, the founding chef, René 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 that Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen. Far from the dining room, it was where unpaid interns worked 16-hour days, performing tasks like picking herbs and cleaning pine cones to adorn Redzepi’s celebrated New Nordic dishes.
