***Trigger Warnings: Mentions of Abuse***
Many of us have seen movies like Ratatouille, or The Menu. Hollywood constantly creates new films that tell a story about chefs or the fine dining industry. Most of these movies talk about the glamorous side of being the owner of a wealthy restaurant; but there are few films that show how distressing and stressful being in this industry can be.
Rene Redzepi is the owner of the world-famous restaurant, Noma. After Noma recently announced that it would shut down by the end of 2024 to transform into a new project, Redzepi began to talk openly about his experiences in the restaurant industry, and how he regretted many of the things he did as a boss.
The reason I chose to write this article is because I came across his blog post about these experiences, titled “Culture of the Kitchen.” In the article, he clearly mentions that he was a bully for most of his career. He yelled and pushed his limits. To quote a sentence in the blog, he said that “I started cooking in a time when it was common to see my fellow cooks get slapped across the face for making simple mistakes, to see plates fly across a room, crashing into someone who was doing his job too slowly.”
There have been many articles in newspapers that report on the dangers and stresses in the restaurant industry. One specific report in “The Financial Times” reported poor working conditions in elite restaurants like Noma, relying heavily on unpaid or underpaid interns. As I researched more about this issue, I began to find more and more articles that talked about abusive chefs and poor working conditions. One article in the “Bon Appetit” magazine claimed that the depiction of the chef industry in the series “The Bear” was painfully real. The author goes on to describe how traumatizing it was to work in a “chaotic, cutthroat kitchen.” She talks about how the long hours are exhausting and the obsession with excellence is taxing. This high pressure environment is a breeding ground for toxicity and abuse. This “obsession with excellence” results in chefs using bullying and humiliation to get the best results from their cooks. Along with this constant pressure to be perfect, they receive low pay and can sometimes work around 80 hours a week.
All of these factors can cause a huge mental toll on people, whether this is their passion or not. In his blog, Redzepi talks about how owning a restaurant came with so many expectations; within a few months, he felt rage bubbling up inside of him. According to him, ‘the smallest transgressions sent him into a rage.’ It was only years later, when Noma was a success, when he began to realize how much of a bully he had become. He agreed that the kitchens need discipline in order to function properly, but he wanted the industry to look at what the pressure was doing to its employees. How we handle ourselves during stressful times is what really matters.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that this industry is populated with young people. In the long run, this cut throat competition and stress is bound to lead to burnout.
These movies and TV shows ask us an extremely important question: to what extent in your career is it worth it to sacrifice your mental and physical health? We all know that it is necessary to work, to earn money, to make a good life for ourselves.
There is no concrete answer to this question. We always applaud people who endure extreme hardship to reach greatness and satisfaction in their careers; but there are also so many people who realize that these hardships were not worth destroying their sense of self, or their sense of identity. This sense of realization often comes too late.
In addition to this, finding the right balance between stress and a necessary experience needed to develop a skill set can be difficult to separate.
Although I admit that the business of cooking food and creating an elegant experience for customers can be exciting and rewarding, I think these films and shows can provide a useful opportunity for reflection; it can help us understand how food and the people who cook it can create systems of burnout and wealth inequality, while also giving us chances to create a better future in the industry as well.