Ever since I read last month that Noma would be transitioning from a full-time restaurant to a kind of food lab and pop-up, I’ve been thinking less about René Redzepi, the chef, and more about Namrata Hegde, an unpaid intern. who worked in his kitchen in Copenhagen making fruit beetles.
Every day he would spread the jam, let it harden, and carve it into various shapes using stencils. He would assemble those shapes to form a trompe l’oeil beetle. Most days he has assembled 120 perfect specimens and placed each one in a glass case, ready to serve to diners. In the meantime, he told her, he was “forbidden to laugh.”
Amid what seemed to be a shifting sentiment against the cult of fine dining, Hegde’s work illustrated the unglamorous monotony of high-end restaurant kitchens.
At the high end of haute cuisine—some 100 restaurants around the world—amazing, technique-based trophy dishes are served.
It was the melon caviar at El Bulli, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. The glistening flesh fruit on Fat Duck, in the English countryside. The impeccable broken egg in Mugaritz, in the Basque Country.
Season after season, kitchens that perform at a certain level are expected to outdo themselves, come up with even crazier and more interesting dishes and perfect more eccentric presentations.
This requires an immense amount of manpower. The more workers in the back, the more elaborate that vision of fine dining can be.
Many fine dining restaurants rely on free labor to compete at this level and have faced criticism for doing so.
Before Noma began paying its interns in October, the program would recruit 20 to 30 unpaid full-time cooks at a time, who could then put the stay on their resumes. (In January, when he announced that Noma would cease regular service in two years, Redzepi said the restaurant was no longer working financially for him.)
In 2010, after winning first place on the annual list of the 50 Best Restaurants in the World as many times as possible, Ferran Adrià, chef at El Bulli, announced his own hiatus and turned towards a kind of culinary school or food laboratory. . It was the same year Noma first broke through to Number 1. Adrià, whose kitchen had been a magnet for unpaid interns, said he and his business partner had been losing half a million euros every year.
It seemed impossible. If one of the best restaurants in the world couldn’t make their business work, what restaurant could? More than a decade later, after spending as many years as possible at the top of the list and earning three Michelin stars, Redzepi called the old model of haute cuisine “unsustainable” and left many wondering the same thing about his restaurant. Does his twist mean the end of haute cuisine? Probably not.
We have been here before. What feels different this time is the cultural shift in our tolerance for the idea of chef-authors making cooks suffer for their art. In an article for Bon Appétit magazine, Genevieve Yam wrote that it was a good thing the Nomas of the World were shutting down because “if restaurants can’t come up with a business model where they pay and treat their staff fairly, they just shouldn’t.” exist”.
There is a more humane type of haute cuisine, whose goal is to make people feel special with simpler, more affordable menus, but it gets far less attention.
Haute cuisine is not really the problem. The problem is that in too many restaurants where food and service are constantly being tweaked and refined, the ugly old conventions of the business are rarely reinvented or repaired. They just replicate, over and over again, like so many identical fruit beetles.
By: Tejal Rao
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6561896, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-08 00:00:07
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