A note before you read: I have written at length in previous articles in this series about the culture of professional kitchens, about René Redzepi’s acknowledged behaviour, and about the genuine need for change in this industry. I do not dispute that abuse happened at Noma in the past. I do not condone it. René Redzepi himself has never denied it.

What this article is about is something different. It is about what happens when a story is told incompletely – when media and social media combine to deliver a verdict before the facts have been examined. Real justice happens through legal processes that weigh all the evidence. What happened here was not justice – it was a public lynching that created new victims: the workers everyone claimed to be protecting. The hundred and thirty people who came to Los Angeles with their families, their dreams, and more than a year of preparation, and who found themselves paying the price for a narrative that nobody had properly interrogated.

If you want to understand what I think about kitchen culture and accountability, the previous articles in this series are there. This article is about what was done to the people nobody asked.

The previous five are here: one, two, three, four, five.

 

There is a question that nobody asked: not Jason Ignacio White, not the New York Times, not the Guardian, the FT, or many other outlets that ran the story within hours of Jason’s post reaching over a million views. Not One Fair Wage, which delivered a deadline letter to René Redzepi on behalf of workers, not the mob that gathered on social media to celebrate each new development. And yet all of them claimed to care about workers.

The question is this: what do the people who actually work at Noma want? What do they think of all this?

One hundred and thirty of the Noma staff came to Los Angeles. They had been preparing for more than a year. They packed up their lives – some of them with children, partners, families – and crossed the world to be part of something they had worked toward with everything they had. Noma paid for their flights, housing, schools and daycare for the children who came with them, health insurance from day one, travel insurance, monthly phone stipends, and two free staff meals daily. Every local hire was paid above the LA minimum wage. No interns, only full-time staff. Over fifty local suppliers, community programmes.

These are not the actions of an institution that views workers as disposable, but the actions of an institution that brought its entire community across the world, at enormous financial cost, because it believed in what it was building and in the people building it.

And then a campaign was launched in the name of those people. And those people began receiving hate messages, personal threats, a targeted harassment campaign directed at Pablo Soto, Noma’s head chef – photographed years ago doing his job and showing his care, transporting an injured intern to the hospital, waiting with her, taking her home – who became a target not because of things he did, but because his face was visible and the mob needed somewhere to direct its anger.

A relative of a current Noma team member, who asked not to be named, described what she witnessed: “There have been reports that the current staff feels Jason White’s methods have created a new cycle of intimidation and trauma. Although he speaks out against toxic cultures, we can all see that his own actions and those who support him use the same bullying tactics and harassment they claim to despise. Since there has been a noticeable absence of public statements from him asking his followers to refrain from targeting or doxxing current staff members, his intentions are beginning to feel less like activism and more like a vendetta.”

A current Noma team member wrote: “Jason has put people who work here today in danger, when they should feel proud of what they do, not ashamed of a past they were not involved in.” They are afraid to speak publicly. Not because of Noma but because of the hate messages they receive when they try.

This is what the campaign produced and what the media enabled. This is what nobody who claimed to be fighting for kitchen workers has acknowledged or apologised for.

 

What They Came To Build

The five thousand available seats for Noma LA sold out in less than three minutes. More than fifty thousand people had signed up for the chance. Even after the New York Times article dropped, fewer than a dozen reservations were cancelled – all quickly filled. Food critics and serious diners who attended ranked it among the finest Noma pop-ups ever staged, alongside Kyoto and Mexico. The team that made this possible had invested more than a year of preparation. Some had left other positions, and some had uprooted families – all of them had chosen to be there.

When the protests began, they were working. When the hate messages arrived, they were working. When Pablo Soto’s name and face were circulated as a target, he was working. When the campaign announced FBI investigations, permit violations, and illegal activity – Noma’s health inspection had given them an A grade, all permits were in order, all visas valid – the team was still working, carrying a weight that was never theirs to carry, for a past they had no part in.

The financial losses were real and significant. American Express, a longstanding partner, Bluebird and Cadillac withdrew their sponsorships – not following any investigation, not after any legal finding, but in response to the media pressure generated by a handful of protesters and a press that had not done its homework. Their withdrawal represented significant losses that fell not only on René Redzepi personally but on the project, and therefore on the hundred and thirty people whose livelihoods depended on it. The flights, the housing, the schools, the wages and stipends – an enormous investment now operating under siege conditions, haemorrhaging the support it needed because a few social media posts had been treated as fact. The same people who enabled this destruction were loudly demanding that workers be paid fairly. They never once asked what their campaign was costing the workers it claimed to protect.

And then there is the reputation. Twenty-three years of work, of influence, of changing how the world thinks about food and the people who make it. A reputation that was not only Noma’s but belonged to every person who had ever worked there, staged there, built their career in its orbit. That reputation was not destroyed by what René Redzepi did in a kitchen in 2012. It was damaged by what a press that stopped asking questions did in 2026.

 

The Man Who Said He Was Protecting Them

Jason Ignacio White worked in Noma’s fermentation lab, not in the kitchen, which is a separate space. He arrived in 2017. He left in 2019. Then, in 2020, he chose to return, voluntarily, deliberately, to lead the fermentation programme as its director. He stayed until 2022.

Media coverage described him variously as having worked at Noma for “roughly five years” or “three years.” The actual figure was never more than four. No publication verified this. No publication asked why, if the environment was as he described, Jason had walked back through those doors of his own free will in 2020. No publication asked why he left in 2022.

The circumstances of his departure are confirmed by multiple independent sources. He left after his request to become a partner in the business was refused – a claim he denied directly to me this week, calling it “completely false” and saying “I never once thought I’d be a partner.” Multiple sources confirm the opposite. He also left owing Noma a significant sum of money. At the final meeting, when asked how he intended to repay a loan of more than 100,000 Danish kroner, he became angry and claimed it was a bonus rather than a loan. And on his way out, according to multiple sources close to the situation, he wiped computers in an attempt to set Noma back in its research.

His own publicly posted evidence tells part of this story. In July 2022, he received a warm message from a senior Noma representative – the tone of people who had tried to treat him with genuine care, even as the relationship was ending. But in September 2022, Peter Kreiner wrote formally: “The case is closed from our end. We wish you all the best in the future.” White posted both messages himself on Instagram as proof he had not been fired. He did not explain what had happened in between.

In messages sent to me this week – unsolicited, apparently prompted by the articles already published in this series – White offered his own account of events. He described a meeting with Redzepi after the New York Times article from years ago appeared, in which he said Redzepi claimed: “the past finally came back to get him.” He said he lost faith in Noma at that point. He described working conditions he found deeply difficult. He said he could not attend his father’s funeral.

Noma’s records tell a different story about the funeral: at the time of his father’s death, White had already resigned and had been explicitly told he did not need to return to work. He had written to Noma not to request permission to attend a funeral, but to explain why he could not repay the money he owed, saying that flights were expensive following a death in the family. Nobody told him he could not go.

White also claimed that Redzepi was pulling millions out of the business in dividends. Noma strongly disputes it. Danish company financial records are public and available for anyone who wishes to verify this characterisation. White further claimed that Noma Projects was created to conceal information that was supposed to be in the NYT article. This, too, Noma disputes. Noma Projects was not born in any crisis meeting – it was conceived during Covid, when the closure of the restaurant revealed how financially fragile a business dependent entirely on in-person dining could be, long before Jason’s public campaign began.

As for the garum White describes making, he claimed 35,000 bottles made by hand, alone. Sources close to Noma say the figure was 8,000 bottles, made by the entire team together during the Covid closure, while everyone was being paid.

 

His Own Record in the Lab

Paul Leopold Kaufmann, a chef who staged at Noma during White’s tenure, published a detailed public account under his own name. His motivation, he told me, was simple: he was angry about the lies being spread about Pablo Soto and the burn incident, and felt someone who was actually there needed to speak. What he described is specific, documented, and on the record.

White was, Kaufmann wrote, one of the biggest sources of intimidation for interns. An intern formally reported him to Thomas Frebel and to René Redzepi. White’s response was to make that intern’s life extremely difficult. In his final week, the intern was thrown out because White did not like his mood. The man now accusing Noma of blacklisting was himself, according to a named eyewitness, using exactly that threat against the people who worked under him.

White also deliberately created division between the fermentation lab and the kitchen – speaking badly about the kitchen team to his lab staff, fostering an atmosphere of separation and mistrust that he later blamed on Noma. Multiple former colleagues confirmed this independently.

A current Noma staff member, speaking with permission to publish, described White playing recordings of disturbing sounds – including dripping water and insect noises – at extreme volume for hours in the fermentation lab as deliberate psychological punishment of interns. Multiple former Noma staff members independently confirmed experiencing or witnessing this behaviour.

Kaufmann also raised a specific factual question about White’s most widely shared story – the account of a young intern burned in the kitchen, laughed at by colleagues as she cried in agony. On the day that the incident allegedly occurred, Kaufmann writes, he was working alongside White in the fermentation lab. The lab is completely separate from the kitchen. White was never based there.

White’s public response did not deny the intimidation or the retaliation against the intern who reported him. He wrote: “I am so terribly sorry if the environment in the lab or my intensity ever caused you to feel these things. I am no hero or ever claimed to be a saint.” On the burn incident, he shifted the date – first saying 2022, then revising to “towards the end of 2021” – and described finding the intern alone and running for help, where he found people laughing rather than responding.

The woman who was actually burned told the Los Angeles Times a different story. The LA Times reviewed photographs of her injuries and her messages to her parents at the time. She did not recognise anything of what White described. She called her time at Noma one of the best experiences of her young life. She said she never cried, never screamed, and never heard anyone laughing. Pablo Soto, whose alleged negligence White implied, transported her to the hospital, waited with her, and took her home. For this, he received hate messages and personal threats.

A second former intern also spoke to the LA Times, describing verbal abuse by White of the lab workers “who were suffering under him.”

White’s own public comment thread, in response to Kaufmann’s post, is revealing. Pressed by multiple commenters – including some who had supported his campaign – to take genuine accountability for his conduct in the lab, he offered variations of “I am intense” and redirected attention to René’s behaviour. One commenter from within the movement observed: “I’ve read a whole lot of excuse making, defensiveness and deflection. That’s not accountability.”

Someone with both technology and workers’ rights advocacy experience, who had initially wanted to join White’s movement, posted publicly on Kaufmann’s thread. White had never responded to his attempts to make contact. When this person mentioned San Antonio – the city where White had lived before his European career – people warned him away. White had, they said, a very poor reputation there going back fifteen years. This advocate eventually announced he was compiling his own investigation into White, based on accounts from people willing to go on record – accounts that “would normally warrant police intervention.” His conclusion: “We simply cannot allow an abusive and self-important person to become the face of the workers’ rights movement.”

That verdict did not come from Noma. It came from someone who had tried to stand beside White, looked more carefully, and stepped back.

I have personally listened to voice messages sent by White to a member of the fermentation community. The tone was intimidating and creepy in a way that is difficult to convey in print. It was not the tone of a man who had been wronged but the tone of a man who does not accept being questioned.

 

The Protests and What They Were

The media images tried to show a movement. What was actually there was the same small group photographed from multiple angles, the same faces appearing across pictures published by the Guardian, the New York Times, NBC, the LA Times, and ABC. On some days, White stood alone outside the Paramour Estate with a pan. The maximum attendance on any single day was around twenty people.

A source involved in attempts to resolve the situation told Page Six Hollywood that when White originally said he wanted a direct dialogue with Redzepi, the Noma team agreed to facilitate that meeting. One Fair Wage then added new demands. “They keep moving the goalposts,” the source said. When Page Six contacted White for comment, he declined, saying only: “Rene is a master abuser and manipulator, so I can’t be comfortable in this situation.”

The protests eventually moved to a second location – the Noma Projects retail store on Sunset Boulevard. A building that had not yet opened. No staff, no customers, no activity of any kind. It was outside this unopened space that an inflatable frog costume appeared, and where Susan Park, one of the protest organisers, purchased five hundred tamales to attract a crowd, promising one free tamal to each of the first five hundred who came. Security personnel, hired to assess the threat outside an unopened shop, counted the crowd at its peak: twelve people. Five tamales were distributed.

Park had called the Los Angeles health department to report that Noma was operating without permits. She had also announced that she had personally reported Noma to the FBI, claiming that bringing foreign staff to a US pop-up constituted human smuggling. The health inspector who arrived was confused by the call – they already had a copy of Noma’s permit on file. They checked everything – the grade was A, and all workers had a visa. Park’s permit claims had been based on what the neighbouring business had told her, not any official source. No federal charges followed the FBI report.

Among those who led the campaign against Noma was a person who had never worked there, never staged there, and had no personal connection to the abuse allegations that started it. Her grievance was older and different – about what she called the “Columbusing” of Asian fermentation traditions by Western chefs, a pre-existing anger that had nothing to do with kitchen labour practices or unpaid interns. She arrived at this protest with her own agenda, attached it to the campaign, and the media that photographed her never asked what had brought her there. Another figure in the orbit of the online campaign was a film director who had pursued unsuccessful legal action against Noma years earlier, losing the case. A third – the man who led the campaign itself – had spent at most four years at the restaurant, received multiple warnings for his own conduct toward staff, been refused what he sought, and left owing money. None of this was checked. The press saw their social media posts and called it a workers’ rights movement.

 

What the People There Actually Say

In all the coverage – all the millions of words – one voice was almost entirely absent. The people who were at Noma, who built careers there, who chose to be there and wanted to say so.

They were not absent because they had nothing to say, but because they were afraid. Not of Noma or of René, but of what would happen to them if they contradicted the narrative.

I was contacted by multiple people who declined to share their experiences on the record – not out of fear of Noma, but out of fear for their own safety. One person who had worked in the industry during White’s tenure said they would be willing to engage in the broader conversation about kitchen culture “as long as I don’t feel I’m compromising my own safety.”

Harriet Mansell, a chef who interned at Noma in 2014, tried to speak. She described her experience – the education, the respect, the sense of being welcomed into something real. She was told to get off social media. She was called a white, privileged abuser for saying that her time there had been good.

Slowly, people found a way to be heard. A former Noma staff member, who asked not to be named at the moment, created the Instagram account @noma_voices specifically to give a platform to the voices the coverage had ignored. What followed was a steady stream of testimonials published by her as she received them – from people who had worked at Noma across twenty+ years, stagiers, interns, managers, current team members, from different countries, different roles, different years. Nobody coordinated their accounts; they simply said the same things.

A chef who came from the South Bronx, for whom kitchens had been the way out, who staged in 2010: “When I had the chance to stage at Noma under Chef René Redzepi, it wasn’t exploitation – it was an opportunity. It was a chance to learn, to see the highest level of our craft up close.” He was direct about what calling it modern slavery actually means: it dismisses the agency of every cook who chose to be there.

A chef who staged in 2023, who arrived expecting the usual heaviness of kitchens at that level, found the opposite. What he found reframed how he sees the industry – not because the standards were relaxed, but because Noma proved you don’t need pretension to operate at the top.

An ex-restaurant manager who worked there for five years described the picture being painted as deeply one-sided and inaccurate. He noted something the coverage never once acknowledged: “René was forthcoming about his own behaviour years ago and has been more open about it than any other high-profile chef I can think of.”

A front-of-house professional who worked at Noma from 2021 to 2024 posted publicly under the headline “Unpopular opinion: a word of praise to Noma.” He described arriving while still studying, overwhelmed but not abandoned: “I was not bullied or shunned. I was showered in support and guidance. A mentor was appointed to me. He challenged and tested me, but always had my back and set me up for success. Not once did I go home feeling abused inside those walls. Not once did it feel hostile.” He was honest about the difficulty, too: “Sometimes the tone didn’t utter love, peace and happiness, sometimes the pressure to deliver was vicious.” But also: “I can’t tell you how much fucking fun I had in all that.” His conclusion: “The noma I know was never riddled with fear or violence. It was charged with the compulsion to succeed, and the cost of that was never what is currently being portrayed in the media.” The post was liked by over four hundred people.

A journalist and publisher with twenty-five years of experience submitted a statement to @noma_voices that cut to the heart of the media’s failure. About the New York Times piece, they wrote: “Either Julia and her editors knew of Jason’s abusive past and chose to ignore it, or they didn’t do the basic background check on their chief source. Both are automatic disqualifications for the story – not necessarily because they change the Rene story, but because either option demonstrates a shocking lapse of professionalism.” They added: “These are not small details in a larger story. These are the very details that maximised the impact of the story. And that impact has in turn upended the lives of hundreds – if not thousands – of people.” They ended with a hope: that a brave journalist or publication was working on a report about the NYT report.

Fabián von Hauske Valtierra, James Beard-nominated chef and owner of Contra and Wildair in New York, spoke to me directly. He arrived at Noma at nineteen, turned twenty while he was there, right after they had reached number one in the world. He had no idea what he was doing. Had never been in a kitchen of that calibre. The fear in the first days was, he said, self-inflicted. He grew out of it. He described the stress not as something done to him, but as the pressure of trying to be his best in a team where everyone was reaching for the same thing. When I asked him directly whether he witnessed abuse and physical aggression, his answer was careful and honest: “I saw people perform under very stressful conditions.” And then: “I don’t really believe that in my time there anyone was there who didn’t want to be there.” He gave me his name. Freely.

Jacob Kear, chef and owner of Lurra in Kyoto, posted publicly with nearly ten thousand likes. He described René writing visa letters for his team, visiting his restaurant more than ten times, going hiking and to the beach with their families. When Jacob lost his Michelin star and was suicidal, René called him. “Don’t let the Michelin dictate your life,” he said. It saved his life.

Paul Foster, Michelin-starred chef at Salt in Stratford-upon-Avon, posted a video in which he first acknowledged his own past mistakes in kitchens, giving himself the credibility to speak. Then: “If we create a culture where apologies are meaningless, where improvement doesn’t matter, and where the mob never moves on, what are we? Then we’re not creating a better industry. We’re just throwing mud.”

On March 21st, I posted publicly, inviting anyone with an account of abuse at Noma to contact me. Many people saw the post. Every person who contacted me shared stories of growth, friendship, and transformation. Not one of those who reached out came forward with an account of abuse. I do not say it didn’t exist. But I am still waiting for somebody to talk about it.

 

What Noma Actually Built

The coverage spoke endlessly about what Noma had been. It said almost nothing about what Noma became.

I interviewed René Redzepi in 2015. He acknowledged his behaviour that afternoon – not because a New York Times investigation forced him, not because a campaign demanded it, but unprompted, because he already knew. He had spoken about this in other contexts too, including in Lucky Peach, years before any public controversy. That was more than a decade ago. The New York Times documented incidents running from 2009 to 2017. They stopped. The kitchen that exists today is not the kitchen of 2012. That distinction was never made in a single major piece of coverage.

Since 2022, Noma has operated a fully paid internship programme. A four-day working week. Dedicated HR. Twenty-eight weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Fourteen weeks of co-parent leave. Full health insurance, including dental and physiotherapy. An in-house physical therapist. Mandatory leadership training. An independent external workplace audit. These are not claims – they are published on Noma’s website and confirmed by the LA Times.

The transition from restaurant to food laboratory was reported extensively as a direct consequence of Jason’s campaign. This is not accurate. The seeds of that transition were planted during Covid, when the closure of the restaurant made painfully clear how fragile a business built entirely around in-person dining could be. The plans were in development long before Jason began his public campaign. A source who was present at Noma during that period confirmed that Jason himself had been informed of those plans months before he went public, and asked to keep the information confidential. He later posted about the closure as though he had caused it. He knew differently.

The story was never: Noma refused to change. The story was: Noma had already changed, and yet nobody reported it.

 

What the Press Chose Not to Check

This information was not hidden – it was public, findable, and sitting in plain sight.

The timeline of White’s employment was never more than four years – media reported three, others five, none verified. His voluntary return in 2020 was verifiable. Paul Kaufmann’s post was public. The woman who was burned spoke to the LA Times and said she did not recognise White’s account – and called the whole experience at Noma one of the best of her young life. The Noma Workplace Transparency Review is published on their website. The health inspection result was a matter of public record. The financial commitment Noma made to its LA team – the flights, the housing, the schools, the insurance, the stipends – was documented.

None of it was checked. A clean narrative arrived, and the press ran with it.

The questions were not complicated. Why did Jason return voluntarily in 2020? Why did he leave in 2022? Who worked under him in the fermentation lab, and what was their experience? Why did not one single person who worked alongside him during those years come forward as a victim beside him?

These are the first questions any editor should have asked before publishing. They were not asked. And the cost of not asking them was paid not by editors, journalists or activists. It was paid by Pablo Soto, who received threats for doing his job, by the current team member who cannot say publicly that they love their work, by the hundred and thirty people who came to Los Angeles with their families and their more than a year of preparation, and who found themselves carrying the weight of a story that was never theirs.

Jason White said he was fighting for kitchen workers. One Fair Wage said it was fighting for kitchen workers. The media said it was holding power to account, the mob said it was delivering justice.

And the kitchen workers – the actual ones, the ones who were there, who chose to be there, who crossed the world because they believed in what they were building – those workers were silenced. Not by Noma but by the people who claimed to be their voice.

Paul Foster asked the question that this whole series has been trying to answer: “When does accountability end and mob mentality begin? At what point do the people shouting the loudest start becoming the bullies themselves?”

In this case, the answer is that it happened quickly, loudly, and in full view of a press that had every tool to see it and chose to look somewhere else.

 

Jason White contacted me this week, unsolicited, in response to articles already published in this series and information from someone about my inquiries for a new article. Those messages are cited above. When subsequently asked for the opportunity to respond to specific claims in this article before publication, he declined, stating: “Respectfully, I don’t want to respond to the article. I do hope, however, and encourage anyone who has issues with me to reach out. I’d love wholeheartedly to chat with them and find a resolution.”

 

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency for chefs, restaurants, and gourmet food producers. She has followed Noma’s story since its beginnings. She is not Noma PR or paid by Noma. She wrote this series because injustice, in any direction, is something she cannot ignore.