Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef's Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World's Top-Rated Restaurant

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/dining/rene-redzepi-noma-abuse-allegations.html

https://archive.ph/aaxDL

Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef’s Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World’s Top-Rated Restaurant
Dozens of former employees say René Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff for years.
By Julia Moskin
March 7, 2026 Updated 3:59 p.m. ET

On a February night in 2014, in the middle of a busy dinner at the acclaimed Copenhagen restaurant Noma, the founding chef, René Redzepi, ordered the entire kitchen staff to follow him outside into the cold.

He was shoving a sous-chef in front of him, a young man who had put on techno music, a genre that Mr. Redzepi disliked, in the production kitchen. Far from the dining room, it was where unpaid interns worked 16-hour days, performing tasks like picking herbs and cleaning pine cones to adorn Mr. Redzepi’s celebrated New Nordic dishes.

Mr. Redzepi taunted the chef over and over as about 40 cooks, in short sleeves and aprons, formed the usual circle around the two men. It was not the first time they had been forced to participate in a public shaming, according to two chefs who were present.

Mr. Redzepi escalated the attack, punching his employee in the ribs and screaming that no one would go back inside until the chef said, loud enough for all to hear, that he liked giving D.J.s oral sex. His co-workers stood in silence until he breathlessly complied. Then they filed back into the kitchen and returned to work.

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