"'Financially and emotionally, as an employer and as a human being, it just doesn’t work.' A newly empowered generation of workers has begun pushing back against that model, often using social media to call out employers.... Recent films and TV series like 'The Menu,' 'Boiling Point' and 'The Bear' have brought the image of armies of harried young chefs, silently wielding tweezers in service to a chef-auteur, into popular culture.
In a 2015 essay, Mr. Redzepi admitted to bullying his staff verbally and physically.... Namrata Hegde, 26, had just graduated from culinary school in Hyderabad, India, when she was chosen as an intern in 2017... [S]he flew to Copenhagen to live and work at her own expense for three months. For most of that time, Ms. Hegde said, her sole job was to produce fruit-leather beetles, starting with a thick jam of black fruit and silicone stencils with insect parts carved out. Another intern taught her how to spread the jam evenly, monitor the drying process, then use tweezers to assemble the head, thorax, abdomen and wings. Ms. Hegde repeated the process until she had 120 perfect specimens; each diner was served a single beetle in a wooden box.... Ms. Hegde said she was required to work in silence... and was specifically forbidden to laugh."
Writes Julia Moskin in "Noma, Rated the World’s Best Restaurant, Is Closing Its Doors/The Copenhagen chef René Redzepi says fine dining at the highest level, with its grueling hours and intense workplace culture, has hit a breaking point: 'It’s unsustainable'" (NYT).
As for what all is in Noma's model, I don't know but it includes "grilled reindeer heart on a bed of fresh pine, and saffron ice cream in a beeswax bowl." Maybe I need to watch "The Menu," which HBOmax has been pushing lately:
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