I left the fine dining world at the end of 2019, right before the pandemic. A year before, I had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a stress-induced pain disorder. Though I desperately tried to continue cooking professionally, it was becoming increasingly obvious that it simply wasn’t feasible. Even for completely healthy people, restaurants of the highest caliber are incredibly tough places to work, and the long hours and high-pressure environment were too much for my nerves. No medication in the world, my doctor said, would ease my pain if I continued to live such a stressful life. I read between the lines: My body was killing itself, all for minuscule details—like topping semifreddos with the ideal amount of foam—that simply did not matter.
You’ve likely heard by now that Noma, René Redzepi’s award-winning restaurant in Copenhagen, is shutting its doors for regular service at the end of 2024 as it transitions into a full-time food lab and occasional pop-up. Redzepi, who recently told The New York Times that running a fine dining establishment at the highest level was financially and emotionally unsustainable, seems to be realizing something most restaurant staffers have known all along: The business model that allows the world’s most exclusive restaurants to thrive was never viable.
It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. As a cook, I was fueled by a sense of urgency to accomplish the painstakingly detailed tasks on my prep list, racing to the finish line each day before service began. The stakes were high: Each and every element had to be consistent and flawlessly executed, lest I served a poorly filled macaron or curdled custard to a restaurant critic or a regular paying hundreds of dollars for the meal. It was exhilarating but brutally exhausting; each day, I rode the roller coaster of service, hoping not to fall behind as tickets came in. As a young cook, I thought I was living my dream. For clientele, dinner cost $425, and cooks like myself spent 70 hours a week plucking herbs, dehydrating purées, and simmering juices into reductions to make magic happen. Every day was a new chance to learn something from chefs I’d admired for so long, and every day I considered myself lucky to have the opportunity to work in such a prestigious establishment.
For all this, I was paid $15 an hour.
It’s been several years since I switched careers, and as I reflect on my time in the hospitality industry, I’m relieved to watch as the most exclusive, often most exploitative fine dining restaurants finally seem to be going out of fashion. It couldn’t come soon enough.
“I think we all know [these] restaurants can’t exist without a certain type of labor,” says Riley Redfern, a former chef at Eleven Madison Park and Coi, a now-closed two-Michelin-starred fine dining restaurant in San Francisco. “It’s completely unethical.” In 2021, The New York Times published a damning report on the sexual harassment and toxic work environment at Noma alum Blaine Wetzel’s idyllic Willows Inn on Lummi Island. Last year former employees described Eleven Madison Park as “farm to trash” and told Business Insider that the restaurant had axed plans to pay their staff a living wage. A three-part investigation conducted by Eater unearthed questionable labor practices at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. For people in the restaurant industry, these stories were nothing new—but they shocked the general public.
Noma began to pay its army of interns in October 2022, just a few months before Redzepi decided to stop operating the restaurant for regular service. While the paid internship program will continue in Noma’s next iteration, some chefs and critics reacted with scorn and skepticism to the idea that Noma couldn’t continue to operate without free labor. Back in July 2022, I wrote a story for Bon Appétit about the TV show The Bear and how a toxic kitchen culture depicted in the show reflected the real-life experiences of restaurant workers. On the heels of Noma’s announcement, I again spoke to current and former fine dining chefs, and their reactions were strong: Some found it laughable that Noma would rather close than figure out a solution to paying their staff equitably, while others were convinced that Redzepi wanted out before his reputation was tarnished by the “dirty little secret,” as one person put it, that his restaurant had been run on a huge amount of free labor for most its life.