General Discussion

Culture of the Kitchen: René Redzepi

Published August 19, 2015

https://madfeed.co/2015/08/19/culture-of-the-kitchen-rene-redzepi/

I started cooking in a time when it was common to see my fellow cooks get slapped across the face for making simple mistakes, to see plates fly across a room, crashing into someone who was doing his job too slowly. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be called a worthless cunt or worse. It wasn’t uncommon to reach for a pan only to find that someone had stuck the handle in the fire and then put it back on my station just to mess with me. I watched chefs—mine and others—use bullying and humiliation to wring results out of their cooks. I would think to myself: Why is that necessary? I’ll never be like that. But then I became a chef. I had my own restaurant, with my own money invested, with the weight of all the expectation in the world.

And within a few months I started to feel something rumbling inside of me. I could feel it bubbling, bubbling, bubbling. And then one day the lid came flying off. The smallest transgressions sent me into an absolute rage: Why the hell have you not picked the thyme correctly? Why have you overcooked the fish? What is wrong with you? Suddenly I was going crazy about someone’s mise en place or some small thing they said wrong. This was how I had been taught to cook, and it was the only way I knew to get a message through. I can’t say that it didn’t work for a time. Noma has succeeded beyond whatever I could have imagined for it. And, concurrently, the cooking profession has been lifted out of the blue collar into something extraordinary. The level of respect that cooking and cooks receive is really astounding.

The very act of cooking draws people into our world and our profession: they want to transform ingredients, they want to feel how lovely it is to make an omelet or cook a crème brûlée correctly for the first time. The public expects more from us now. Questions arise: Is there still room for guys like me, who started before this new era? What about the French armies we trained in, the regiment we still follow? How can we rectify the screaming and shouting and physical abuse we’ve visited on our young cooks? How do we unmake the cultures of machismo and misogyny in our kitchens? Can we be better Perhaps, the real question is this: Do we want to be better?

I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career. I’ve yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times. For some reason, I’m particularly bothered when I remember a girl from Colombia who was working for us, whom I really liked. One night, we had some big-time guests in the restaurant—journalists from somewhere I can’t recall. I had given her directions and she had said, “Yes, Chef,” and then when it was time to do her task, she didn’t do what she was told. This happens. People say “yes,” but they have a thousand things on their mind and aren’t paying attention. I went completely crazy. I pulled her out of service, and I screamed at her: “What the fuck are you doing? Go home.” It was a really bad moment. I tried calling her to apologize, but even after we’d spoken, I could feel that the air still wasn’t clear. Later that night, as I was walking home with Christian Puglisi, who was the sous chef at the time, he turned to me and said, “I have to tell you, Chef, you stepped over the line. I owe it to you to tell you that.”

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