We were scrolling Instagram. Nothing unusual, just the regular feed of plates and sunsets and someone’s cat. Then a post stopped us. Jason White, @microbes_vibes, former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, was talking about what it was really like to work there. And he was not holding it back. He still is not.
We read it. Then we read it again. Then we started reading online, not just about Noma, but about restaurant abuse in general. And the more we read, the deeper the hole got.
White worked at Noma from 2017 to 2022. He is a fermentation scientist from New Mexico who ended up at the most celebrated kitchen on earth. Now he is speaking up about what happened behind those doors.
There is no smoke without fire, they say. This time in the kitchen.
We do not know what is true and what is not. But it left us uncomfortable. And that feeling has not gone away.
Noma is opening in Los Angeles this spring. Sixteen weeks in Silver Lake, 1,500 dollars a seat, fully booked. They are flying in over 130 staff from Copenhagen. Housing them, transporting them, covering their children’s schooling.
And meanwhile, White says he is organising a protest outside, claiming chefs, journalists, and legal support are joining from around the world. He also says a major publication is preparing a piece with former employees going on record for the first time.
Noma, so far, has said nothing.
We always thought the old days were behind us. Anthony Bourdain wrote about them in Kitchen Confidential with a kind of dark romance. The screaming, the hazing, the hierarchy.
Plates flying across rooms. Cooks getting slapped for simple mistakes. It was brutal, and Bourdain made it sound almost thrilling. We read it like everyone else and thought, well, that was then.
Auguste Escoffier, the man who built the modern kitchen brigade in the late 1800s, wrote that his first chef believed you could not run a kitchen without a shower of slaps.
That was over a century ago. And here we are, in 2026, and the slaps have just taken different forms. It just went underground. It got quieter. It put on a nicer shirt.
René Redzepi wrote an essay in 2015 admitting he had bullied his staff. He asked how the industry could undo the screaming and shouting and physical abuse it had inflicted on its young cooks.
Good question. But ten years later, former interns are still describing 16-hour days, working in silence, forbidden to laugh, making dozens of intricate fruit-leather beetles every single day for free. That was their education at “the best restaurant in the world”.
© Iternitty
Working for free in a kitchen is nothing new. It is how young chefs invest in themselves and their careers, and we have no problem with that. But the conditions around it matter. When people are sleeping in shared rooms, working 16-hour days in silence, and too afraid to speak up because it could end their career before it starts, that is not an investment.
In December 2025, SVT (Swedish Television) aired a piece on Björn Frantzén. Frantzen, the only chef in history to hold three restaurants with three Michelin stars at the same time, responded by comparing his kitchens to elite sport. He said it is not for everyone.
He also showed the burn marks on his arms where a head chef had pressed a hot spatula against his skin when he was working in London kitchens in the 1990s. He did not name the restaurant. He knows. But he will not say it.
That silence tells you everything about how deep the loyalty runs in this industry.
In France, a Michelin-starred chef at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz resigned after footage surfaced of a hazing ritual in his kitchen. A young kitchen hand, tied naked to a chair for hours, with an apple in his mouth and a carrot in the other end. The entire kitchen brigade looked on. The chef looked on. This was December 2023. Hazing has been illegal in France since 1998. The law changed. The culture did not.
We are going to have a hard time eating a carrot next time in a restaurant.
These are not scandals. These are symptoms.
Here is the part that bothers us the most, and it includes us in it.
We sit down. The napkin is folded. The wine is poured. The dishes arrive with precision and ease. We write about how the scallop was a work of art, how the sommelier read the room, how the pacing was perfect. And we mean it. Every word.
But behind the swing doors, someone might be falling apart. Someone might be on their third double shift, unpaid, on a visa tied to the restaurant, terrified of being blacklisted if they walk out. Someone might be the most talented person in that kitchen and still going home in pieces.
We never see it. That is the whole point. The guest is not supposed to see it.
Every time we write a glowing review of a restaurant with a rotten kitchen, we are part of the problem. We do not mean to be. But the stars keep shining, the bookings keep filling, and the people behind the pass keep paying for it.
We are not going to tell you where to eat or where not to eat. That has never been what we do. We share what we experience, honestly, and you make your own choices.
We are not going to research every restaurant we book. But the next time we consider a hyped restaurant with global headlines, we might read a little more before we type in our credit card numbers at the booking.
But we think this conversation deserves more than a swipe on Instagram. More than a headline that gets forgotten by the next meal. The roots of this run deep, all the way back to Escoffier’s brigade, through Bourdain’s glorified chaos, through every kitchen that treated punishment as tradition and called it discipline.
It is 2026. People are still working for free in some of the finest kitchens in the world. People are still being told that if they cannot handle it, they do not belong. People are still afraid to speak up because the industry will shut them out.
And people like us are still sitting on the other side of the pass, writing about how beautiful the plate looked.
Alton Brown once said, good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service. We would add to that: no dish, however extraordinary, should come at the cost of someone’s dignity.
You Too.
✽ The cover photo: The wall at Noma, Copenhagen.
