The Populist Conclusion

Ballerinas bleed. Their feet are destroyed by the time they are thirty. Nobody writes “maybe we don’t need Swan Lake.”

This week, the San Francisco Standard published a piece titled “Maybe we don’t need restaurants like Noma.” It is a sympathetic article, well-intentioned, genuinely troubled by what it describes. And it is wrong in a way that matters – not about the abuse, which is real and indefensible, but about the conclusion it draws from it. The author decides that if a 17-course tasting menu requires human suffering to exist, then perhaps it shouldn’t exist. It sounds like a moral position. It is actually a populist one.

We do not apply this logic anywhere else. We do not close conservatories because the training is brutal. We do not shut down professional football because knees are destroyed and careers end at thirty-five. We do not ban boxing because fighters absorb punishment that will mark them for life. We do not retire rugby because bodies break in the scrum. We do not ask whether we need virtuoso violinists because their posture is ruined and their fingers hurt from decades of practice. We do not ask whether we need the Paris Opera Ballet because dancers are pushed beyond what any body should endure. In every field where human beings pursue excellence at the highest level, the cost is extreme. The question we ask is not whether the pursuit should exist, but whether the people inside it are treated with basic dignity – and whether those who choose to give three months of their lives to learn something that cannot be learned anywhere else, receive what they came for. Those are different questions. Conflating them is not moral clarity. It is laziness dressed up as a principle.

 

A Question of Culture

Noma is not just a restaurant. It is culture – in the same way that La Scala is culture, that a Duchamp installation is culture, that a Merce Cunningham performance is culture. It exists at the outer edge of what is possible in its field, and like everything that exists at that edge, it is uncomfortable, expensive, inaccessible to most, and enormously influential on everything that comes after it. And that influence is the argument its critics miss entirely.

 

What Trickles Down

I grew up with two grandmothers who were extraordinary cooks – one Italian, one Serbian. Two of the great food cultures of the world, distilled into two women who wanted to teach me everything they knew. I wasn’t interested. I was ten years old, and food was just food. Then I saw Paul Bocuse on television. A cooking show, nothing more – but it cracked something open. I bought his cookbook, I taught myself to cook from it, and somewhere in that process I began to understand what my grandmothers had been trying to show me. I went back to their recipes. I cook them now. High cuisine didn’t replace the simple and the honest – it gave me the eyes to see it.

That is what Noma did, not just for me, not just for Denmark, but for food culture broadly. The influence didn’t travel in a straight line. Noma opened, other restaurants were inspired by it, chefs who staged there went home and opened their own places, a movement grew – and eventually, quietly, it reached ordinary kitchens. Local, seasonal, foraged, fermented – these stopped being the obsessions of a tiny culinary elite and became values that millions of people absorbed, cooked with, shopped around. Denmark, which before this movement subsisted largely on supermarket convenience food and hot dogs – a post-industrial food culture not unlike Britain’s – now has one of the most curious and engaged home cooking cultures in the world. Noma didn’t teach anyone to cook at home. It created a cultural permission. It changed what people thought food could be.

I have a daughter. When she was a toddler, I made her food into pictures – shapes, colours, small compositions on a plate. She ate everything. She grew up to be the most adventurous eater I know. She has eaten with me in great restaurants and gone home and done extraordinary things in her own kitchen. The line between high cuisine and everyday life is not a wall. It is a membrane. Things pass through it constantly.

 

The People Nobody Asked

The chefs who spoke to me for this series – people who worked at Noma, who staged there, who built their careers in kitchens shaped by that world – were consistent on one point. It was hard. Genuinely, sometimes brutally hard, but they loved it. One told me, “To say this changed my life is an understatement. What I witnessed there, learned there, and experienced there was no less than inspiring, and to this day it still inspires me. It has opened doors for me that I would have never known existed.” This is not someone who comes from money or connections. This is someone who saved up to stage, who earned every opportunity, for whom Noma represented not exclusivity but access – a door into a world that would otherwise have been closed.

The same chef added something that has stayed with me: “I also can’t believe the lack of people talking about the incredible work in the last decade to help change from the original narrative – symposiums like Food On The Edge and MAD, to name a few. Why is no one talking about those?” It is a good question. The answer is that progress is a less satisfying story than destruction. And we are living in a moment that prefers destruction.

The LA pop-up was supposed to be something extraordinary – for the team that had worked toward it, for the diners who had waited for it, for the continuation of something that has mattered to food culture for over two decades. As the same chef told me, it has been tarnished “by a handful of humans whipped up into a frenzy.” The people who wanted this least are the people who worked hardest to be there. His partner is currently on that team in Los Angeles. He is proud of her. Nobody asked them about their experience.

 

The Right Question

None of these excuses abuse. Physical violence in a kitchen is not discipline, not tradition, not the cost of excellence – it is assault, and it should be treated as such. The answer is accountability, labour protections, and a culture that separates high standards from humiliation. These things can coexist. It is worth noting that Noma, for all the noise surrounding it now, had made more visible and documented progress on this than most: paying stagiaires when others still did not, creating forums for open conversation about kitchen culture, attempting to build something different from the inside. Demanding kitchens and dignified workplaces are not mutually exclusive. We know this because there are demanding kitchens that are also dignified – they exist, they produce extraordinary food, and the people who pass through them are grateful for it for the rest of their lives.

 

The Press That Looked Away

There is another actor in this story that has escaped scrutiny: the media. Not the tabloids – the serious press. The publications that built Noma’s legend over two decades, that sent their critics and correspondents to Copenhagen, that wrote reverentially about the genius of the place and the vision of the man. They knew the culture of professional kitchens. They chose not to write about it then, because the story was inconvenient and the access too valuable to risk. They share responsibility for the culture they celebrated without question and the abuses they chose not to see. Now the wind has changed, the mob has gathered, and the same outlets are publishing “maybe we don’t need restaurants like Noma” without asking whether that conclusion follows from the evidence, without speaking to the people who were actually there, without distinguishing between a systemic industry problem and one man-made into a symbol. They interviewed people who felt abused, people who left, people who were let go – including the person now leading the campaign against Redzepi. They did not interview the people who stayed for ten, fifteen or even nineteen years. They did not ask the obvious question: if it was truly that unbearable, why did so many people build their entire careers there, willingly, gratefully, and say so publicly? That omission is not accidental – it is a choice. A choice to serve a narrative rather than interrogate it. Amplifying outrage is not the same as investigating it. Following a mob is not the same as leading a conversation. The media that helped build this world has a responsibility to understand it before helping to tear it down – and that responsibility does not disappear because the crowd is loud and the clicks are good.

 

Selective Outrage

And while we are asking questions about selective outrage – where was this energy before? The kitchen behaviour of certain celebrated British chefs has been documented for years. Screaming, humiliation, throwing dishes, and cultures of fear that their own staff have described in detail. These chefs were not asked to step down. They were given television empires, lifetime achievement awards, honours, supermarket lines, and airport restaurants. Their abuse was packaged as entertainment and broadcast into living rooms across the world. Nobody wrote, “Maybe we don’t need their restaurants.” Nobody asked whether the tasting menus were worth the human cost. The moral reckoning being applied to Redzepi has not been applied evenly. It has been applied to the person who was easiest to reach at this particular moment, in this particular media cycle. The campaign was initiated and led by a former senior Noma employee. No major outlet that covered his allegations appears to have asked the elementary journalistic question: why did he leave? The answer – that he was let go by Noma – does not appear in a single report. That omission tells you everything about the quality of the scrutiny being applied.

 

Prejudice in Progressive Clothing

There is a particular type of food writer worth examining here. They present themselves as progressive – concerned with workers, with sustainability, with equity. They are suspicious of luxury, of exclusivity, of anything that smells of elitism. And yet their deepest aesthetic loyalties are quietly conservative. They are happiest with comfort food, with casual dining, with the familiar. Places like Noma make them uncomfortable – not because of the ethics, but because the cooking asks something they are not sure how to give. The abuse allegations arrived like a gift: a respectable, moral-sounding reason to say that what they never quite valued was not worth valuing at all. That is not a reckoning. That is a prejudice wearing the clothes of principle.

 

The One Who Stayed Small

Which brings us to the sharpest irony of all. Redzepi did not build an empire. He did not franchise his name onto frozen food lines or open fifteen restaurants across three continents or appear weekly on prime time television. He made one restaurant, in one city, for 23 years, with obsessive and unglamorous dedication. He did not post selfies with celebrity guests. He did not monetise his fame as much as others did. He stayed at one table, in one kitchen, making one thing as well as it could possibly be made. That is not the profile of a man driven by ego and money. That is the profile of a craftsman. The chefs who built the empires, who spread their names across airport terminals and supermarket shelves, who turned their kitchen volatility into a television format – they are still there, still celebrated, still open.

Destroying what is difficult, what is challenging, what refuses to be comfortable, has never once protected the people who make it, or enriched the lives of the people who might have experienced it. Closing Noma does not protect kitchen workers from an industry with a systemic problem. It just leaves us with less – less beauty, less ambition, less of the kind of cultural production that quietly changes how ordinary people live and eat and think about what ends up on their table.

We don’t need fewer restaurants like Noma. We need the courage to ask why we celebrated the wrong chefs for so long – and the honesty to hold the whole industry to account, not just the one who stayed small enough to make an easy target.

Andreja Lajh