A world-renowned chef is stepping down from his position after being accused of violently abusing staff for more than a decade.
René Redzepi, founder of the Danish restaurant Noma, announced his resignation on Wednesday after a damning New York Times report revealed how he allegedly bullied and physically assaulted at least 30 employees between 2009 and 2017.
‘The recent weeks have brought attention and important conversations about our restaurant, industry, and my past leadership,’ he said in a statement.
‘I have worked to be a better leader and Noma has taken big steps to transform the culture over many years,’ the restaurateur continued, acknowledging: ‘I recognize these changes do not repair the past.
‘An apology is not enough; I take responsibility for my own actions.’
‘After more than two decades of building and leading this restaurant, I’ve decided to step away and allow our extraordinary leaders to now guide the restaurant into its next chapter,’ the celebrity chef said in a statement, adding that he has also resigned from the board of the nonprofit he founded in 2011.
The announcement came as Noma was set to debut a luxurious residency in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, which Redzepi said will continue as planned despite protests over its opening.
‘Noma’s mission for the future is to keep exploring ideas, discovering new flavors, and imagining what food can become decades from now,’ he concluded. ‘Noma has always been bigger than any one person. And this next step honors that belief.’
Celebrity chef René Redzepi announced on Wednesday he is resigning amid abuse allegations
Noma, which was originally based in Denmark and ranked first five times on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants List, was scheduled to begin a residency in Los Angeles on Wednesday
The master chef also shared a video to social media showing him announcing his resignation to his staff members at the eatery.
‘I’m sorry everyone’s in this situation, I really, really am,’ he said in the video posted to Instagram.
‘I don’t think this represents our team,’ Redzepi continued. ‘I am so proud of where we are as an organization – it’s just we’re in the belly of the beast here.
‘In order to make sure that you guys are feeling 100 percent, I’m gonna step away, OK?’ Redzepi asked, rhetorically.
After then telling staff members that it would be up to them to continue Noma’s mission, he insisted: ‘I’m not running away from any responsibility on how I have been, I am not. I know how I have been.’
‘We will get through this, we will get through this,’ the chef told the staffers, whom he called his ‘family.’
‘But because it’s so focused on me, I have to remove myself.’
He then asked his staff to ‘please, please, pleas fight, be in this, find strength in each other as a team, and know that I’m doing this to protect everyone here.’
The celebrity chef concluded his message by insisting the culture at the restaurant has changed since the employees claimed they were abused and ‘that is not who we are.’
‘There are many sides to this – it’s not one sided,’ he said, noting that he is now going to plan ‘the next phase.’
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Redzepi has bee accused of bullying and physically assaulting at least 30 employees between 2009 and 2017
Redzepi’s resignation comes after protesters took to the streets to denounce his Los Angeles pop-up
Redzepi’s resignation comes after protesters took to the streets to denounce his Los Angeles pop-up, spurred on by the former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, Jason Ignacio White.
‘For years, the culture surrounding René Redzepi and Noma has been celebrated without confronting the harm many workers experienced behind the scenes,’ he said.
White claimed to have ‘witnessed intimidation, unpaid labor, and a culture that pushed people beyond their limits while expecting silence in return’ at the restaurant.
He has been sharing accusations sent to him by former employees for the past month, as well as derogatory pictures about Noma, on a public social media profile.
One of the most recent posts on February 27 showed a text message thread that featured an anonymous worker who said working at Noma was ‘the worst two weeks of my life.’
The worker claimed that Redzepi had punched him in the stomach for ‘not picking the herbs right’ in 2012.
Those claims echoed the ones made in the Times article, in which a chef only identified as Alessia said that ‘going to work felt like going to war.’
‘You had to force yourself to be strong, to show no fear,’ she added.
Jason Ignacio White, the former head of Noma’s fermentation lab, urged workers to protest Noma’s LA pop-up
Former Noma employees alleged that the acclaimed chef repeatedly punched and publicly shamed members of his staff (Photo of Noma workers in Copenhagen in 2021)
In one incident, Redzepi was said to have repeatedly ridiculed a sous-chef in front of about 40 uniformed cooks. Public shaming like this was reportedly common.
He allegedly punched the employee in the ribs several times and did not stop until the chef told the group that he liked performing oral sex on DJs.
The violent confrontation was allegedly triggered by the chef playing techno music in the kitchen, a genre Redzepi disliked.
Another chef named Ben further claimed that no one in the kitchen was exempt from Redzepi’s alleged physical abuse.
‘He just went down the line and punched us in the chest,’ the former Noma worker said. ‘Even the interns who had been upstairs picking elderflowers.’
Redzepi was also accused of having interns work demanding 16-hour days while they went unpaid.
‘René raised a generation of bullies, and they bullied us,’ Mehmet Çekirge, a Noma intern in 2018, said.
That allegedly included an American chef Blaine Wetzel, who was accused of physical and verbal abuse after leaving Noma to open a separate restaurant.
In 2015, Redzepi wrote that he had ‘been a bully for a large part of my career’ and a ‘terrible boss at times’
When the allegations first emerged, Redzepi said he did not ‘recognize all details in these stories’ but that he saw ‘enough of my past behavior reflected in them to understand that my actions were harmful to people who worked with me.’
The Danish celebrity chef apologized and said he had ‘worked to change.’
‘Over the past decade that has meant therapy, deep reflection, and stepping away from leading the day-to-day service,’ he said. ‘I have found better ways to manage my anger, and I am still learning.’
Redzepi previously wrote in 2015 that he had ‘been a bully for a large part of my career.’
‘I’ve yelled and pushed people,’ he said. ‘I’ve been a terrible boss at times.’
He added then that he wanted to ‘change things’ in his profession, which included his restaurant.
‘When we started trying to change the culture at Noma, we did it for the sake of our own happiness,’ Redzepi wrote. ‘I didn’t expect that it would also make us a better restaurant. But it did.’
A spokesperson for the restaurant also told the Daily Mail that it faced a ‘turning point’ in 2022, after which the company has implemented ‘substantial changes’ to its leadership, structure, workplace practices and employee safeguards.
These include creating a dedicated HR office, establishing fully-paid internships and a four-day workweek.
The spokesperson also added that the company has hired an outside firm to audit and independently review its practices, and said that in Los Angeles, every one of its local hires is making more than minimum wage and is being offered health insurance at no cost from the first day of their employment.
