On Monday, I published an article about the situation around Noma and René. The response was enormous. Most of it was positive, but there was a striking difference in where it appeared. On Facebook, the positive messages were public. People used their real names and spoke openly. On Instagram, most of the positive messages came privately. Many people were not comfortable saying positive things publicly because they feared being attacked. The negative responses came mostly from people repeating phrases without engaging in any real discussion. I am not afraid of criticism – I welcome anyone who engages thoughtfully and argues their point. But blind repetition of talking points is not a critique. It is just anger looking for a place to land. At the same time, I was already reaching out to chefs and people who have worked in kitchens around the world, collecting their experiences for a longer piece. What I discovered in that process provoked me to write the article you are reading now.

 

It always starts with something real. Someone speaks up about genuine harm, and suddenly, a conversation that was silent becomes visible. That conversation needs to happen. But somewhere between the first voice and the hundredth, something shifts. The movement becomes the moment. And people who were not harmed, who were not part of the original story, show up to participate in something that feels like justice but tastes like belonging to a mob. They become what they claim to be fighting against. And anyone who notices this shift gets accused of defending the original harm. This is how we end up here, unable to distinguish between accountability and hysteria, between real victims and people using victimhood as currency.

 

The pattern: how movements get colonised

This is not a new story. Every movement that starts with a legitimate grievance eventually grows beyond its original circle. People arrive who did not experience the harm directly but feel connected to it for reasons that are sometimes hard to name. A sense of injustice, a personal frustration that has found a home, a need to be part of something that feels important. This is human. This is understandable. But it changes the nature of the conversation, and it is worth being honest about that. The original harm becomes secondary. The performance of outrage becomes primary.

What makes this dangerous is that these two groups, the genuinely wronged and the opportunistic, look identical from the outside. They use the same language. They stand on the same side. And the moment you try to make a distinction between them, you are accused of defending the harm itself. There is also something more uncomfortable at work. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. The pleasure taken in someone else’s misfortune. Some of the people participating in these pile-ons are not outraged. They are enjoying it. The public destruction of someone successful and celebrated gives them a satisfaction that has little to do with justice or any genuine care for the people who were actually hurt. And in the case of Noma, that Schadenfreude has a very specific fuel: money, exclusivity, and the particular resentment that comes from being on the outside of something you cannot afford or access. A dinner at the Noma LA residency costs 1,500 dollars per person. Tickets sold out in minutes. That price tag, that exclusivity, is a provocation to many people. And when a provocation meets a scandal, what looks like moral outrage is often something older and simpler. It is class frustration finding an approved target.

 

The #MeToo lesson

#MeToo began because women had been silent for decades about harassment, assault, and abuse. That silence needed to be broken. And for a time, the movement did exactly what it needed to do: it created space for real stories, real accountability, real change in how people understood power and consent.
But then something happened. The energy that had been about truth-telling became about something else. Women who had experienced genuine trauma stood next to women who carried a different kind of anger, a frustration with men, with power, with experiences that had nothing to do with abuse but had been looking for somewhere to go. All of it got labelled the same way. All of it demanded the same response: belief, support, and the destruction of the accused.

Some men, particularly in professional environments, became so afraid of being misread that they started pulling back, avoiding mentoring relationships, avoiding one-on-one situations. Not because they had done anything wrong, but because the climate made normal human interaction feel like a risk. The movement that was supposed to create safety created paralysis instead. The pendulum did not swing to balance. It swung so far that it created new forms of harm.

 

The Noma moment

Rene Redzepi abused people. That is documented. That is real. That matters. And he has known this about himself for over a decade. He spoke about it in 2015, years before the recent articles, years before the social media pile-on, unprompted, in an interview with me at Noma. He has been working on changing since then. Last week, he posted a public statement acknowledging physical aggression, speaking of therapy, of stepping back, of still learning.

Rene chose to speak. To acknowledge. To work on it, over the years, quietly, before anyone demanded it. Thousands of chefs and kitchen leaders abuse their teams, never acknowledge it, never change, and never face any scrutiny at all. That is where the real silence lives. But they remain untouched. If we genuinely care about changing kitchen culture, the conversation cannot stop at one name. There are abusive kitchens in every country, chefs who have never been questioned, never been challenged, never been asked to do better. Where is the outrage about them? Real change requires looking at the whole picture, not just the most famous face.

Some people say Rene has not done enough. Perhaps. But he is aware, and he is trying. And here is a question worth sitting with: are those pointing the finger angels themselves? Never done anything wrong? The question is not whether you have ever failed. The question is what you do about it.

Then some people arrive with a different kind of grievance altogether, and join the voices of those who were actually abused. A man for example, who at the time was a visual artist, and who has since built a career as a food journalist, many years ago tried to walk into Noma without a reservation – he was politely turned away by a host doing her job, and he felt humiliated. He held onto that experience for years and chose to publish it this week, at the height of the public pile-on, transforming it into a narrative about abuse. He speaks of the restaurant as an institution built on power, of diners as victims of a system designed to exclude them. From there, it is a short step to: the people who work there must be abused, and anyone who does not share his outrage is complicit. He disabled comments on his post the moment he published it. He wanted the performance of outrage without the accountability of dialogue. He is not speaking for the stagiaires. He is using them. And his story, the reservation story, sits alongside actual accounts of physical violence and becomes part of the same undifferentiated pile. Justice looks the same whether you were punched or you were made to feel poor.

A well-known European chef posted an article in support of nuance and accountability. Within hours, he was attacked so viciously that he had to remove the post to protect his business. Not because he defended abuse – he didn’t defend it at all. It’s just because he refused to join the mob. He told me he was angry, upset, disappointed and sad. But he had to choose between his conscience and his survival.

 

And then the corporations arrived. American Express, Resy, and Blackbird, companies that had been proud partners of Noma for years, quietly erasing the words ‘our longstanding partner’ from their websites and announcing their withdrawal with statements full of ethical language. Blackbird’s founder said they could not ‘lean on time elapsed and rehabilitation claims.’ American Express spoke of doing what is right. But these companies knew who Rene was when they signed their partnerships. They knew the culture they were aligning with. They stayed through everything, right up until the moment that staying became a reputational liability. Then they left, donated money, and issued statements. That is not ethics. That is brand management. The difference matters.

What troubles me most is this: the people who had positive, formative experiences in these kitchens, the ones with real names and real reputations at stake, are now afraid to speak. They are being silenced not by the industry, but by the online conversation itself. That is not justice. That is not how we build understanding.

This is hysteria. This is what happens when a real problem gets colonised by people who need to belong to something, who need an enemy, who need permission to be cruel. And who are, in the very act of doing this, becoming abusers themselves.

 

What gets lost

When hysteria takes over, several things die: The ability to think. Nuance becomes complicity. Understanding becomes defence. The ability to distinguish. Real harm and petty frustration get treated as equivalent. The person who was punched and the person who could not get a table without booking occupy the same moral universe. The ability to change.

If the cost of acknowledging a problem is destruction, then the incentive is to hide, deny, and protect yourself. People stop trying to do better. They just try to survive. And most tragically: the real victims get lost. Their specific pain, their specific stories get buried under a tsunami of displaced anger and performative outrage. The person who actually suffered becomes invisible behind the person who just wants to be seen.

 

The mirror nobody wants to look into

Here is the uncomfortable truth that nobody in this conversation wants to face.
Everybody should start with themselves. Not with Rene. Not with Noma. With themselves. Are we certain that we have never hurt anyone? Never stayed silent when we should have spoken? Never benefited from a system we knew was wrong? Never become a bully ourselves, because we felt frustrated, excluded, or simply unhappy?

It is worth pausing on that last question. People do not become cruel in a vacuum. Hard times, unhappiness, a sense of not belonging, these things make people angry. And anger needs somewhere to go. A public pile-on offers exactly that: a target that society has already approved, a crowd to join, a moment of feeling powerful when you otherwise feel powerless. This does not excuse the cruelty. But understanding it matters, because if we only condemn without understanding, we will never interrupt the cycle.

The people attacking most aggressively are not doing so because they are morally superior. They are doing so because it feels good. Because it is easier to destroy someone else than to examine yourself and create something. Because joining a mob gives you the sensation of belonging to something meaningful without requiring you to actually do anything meaningful. This is Schadenfreude dressed as justice. And it is one of the oldest human impulses.

 

What accountability actually looks like

It is not a mob. It is not public destruction. It is not turning away everyone who was ever involved in a system, as if proximity to harm is the same as causing it.
Real accountability looks like what Rene did in 2015 and again last week: speaking honestly about your failures. It looks like the work of changing, the hard, unglamorous work, over the years. It looks like building structures that protect people, stepping back from daily operations so your damage does not replicate itself, going to therapy, and still learning.

It also looks like trying to build something better. Not just stopping the harm, but actively looking for solutions, creating systems with more oversight, more care, more transparency. Doing good rather than simply doing less bad.

Real accountability also looks like refusing to participate in hysteria while still taking the original problem seriously. Holding both things at once. That is harder. It does not feel as good. It does not give you the same sense of righteousness. But it is one of the things that actually changes anything.

 

The cost of getting this wrong

When we allow movements to become mobs, we do not punish the guilty. We just make it harder for anyone to change. We create a world where people hide their problems instead of facing them. We turn real victims into currency. And we permit everyone watching to participate in cruelty as long as they frame it as justice.

The world does not get better through destruction. It gets better through example. Through people doing better, showing what better looks like, and inviting others to be part of something positive rather than part of a pile-on. Rene Redzepi is trying. That is something. Many of the people who are angry started from a genuine place, too. But anger alone, without moving toward something constructive, does not change anything. It just burns.

Movements matter. Accountability matters. But the moment we stop being able to tell the difference between accountability and hysteria, between a real victim and someone performing victimhood, between justice and Schadenfreude, we have lost something essential. We have lost the ability to actually fix anything.

 

A call for voices

As I wrote in the introduction of the article you are reading, I am working on a longer piece about staging and working in the world’s best restaurants. I am collecting experiences from all sides, from people who staged at top restaurants, those who worked there, people who had positive experiences, those who had difficult ones, people with constructive ideas about what needs to change.

What became clear as I reached out is that the people with genuinely positive experiences, the ones who built careers and friendships from those years, are afraid to speak. Some will only do so anonymously. Others wanted to route everything through their PR representatives rather than speak honestly. This silence, this fear, is precisely what provoked me to write this piece before the other.

I am inviting anyone with real experience in professional kitchens around the world to get in touch. Chefs, sous chefs, cooks, stagiaires, people who have worked at any level. I want to hear from people who had positive experiences and those who had difficult ones – but I want to hear from people with constructive ideas about what needs to change.

I need to know who you are – I am showing my real identity too. I need to verify that you have real experience in this world. But if you wish, I will protect your anonymity in the published piece and will not use your real name. My intention is not to harm anyone. I want to do good for both sides. I want to find a way forward, not create more damage. I only want honest, constructive voices, and I want you to feel safe sharing them. Because right now, we are not having a discussion. We are having a performance. And real change requires real conversation, from all sides.

Andreja Lajh