Fine Dining and the Ethics of Noma’s Meticulously Crafted Fruit Beetle - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/24/dining/noma-fruit-beetle-fine-dining.html?te=1&nl=from-the-times&emc=edit_ufn_2023
By Tejal Rao
Jan. 24, 2023
Since I read this month that Noma would pivot from a full-time restaurant to a kind of food laboratory and pop-up, I’ve been thinking less about the chef René Redzepi and more about Namrata Hegde, an unpaid intern who worked in his Copenhagen kitchen for three months, making fruit beetles.
Every day, as she told The Times, she spread the jam out, let it set and carved it into various shapes using stencils. She assembled those shapes to form a trompe l’oeil beetle: a glossy, three-dimensional creature made out of fruit leather. Most days, before dinner service, she assembled 120 perfect specimens and pinned each one in a glass box, ready to serve to diners. All the while, she said, she was “forbidden to laugh.”
In the past, Ms. Hegde’s labor might have been obscured or even dismissed, but in the middle of what felt like a shifting sentiment against the cult of fine dining, it became a crucial detail. It illustrated the unglamorous drudgery of high-end restaurant kitchens, and sounded more like another tedious day at the factory, another lonely shift on the assembly line.
Maybe it’s not what most people imagined when they thought of this supposedly glamorous world. But at the most extreme and competitive end of fine dining — let’s say, 100 or so restaurants around the world — there’s a fruit beetle on every menu. Not an actual fruit beetle but a number of mind-boggling, technique-driven, labor-intensive dishes. Trophy dishes.
How do they do it?
There’s no way around it. This kind of endless grind requires an immense amount of labor. The more workers in the back, willing to do the grunt work necessary, the more elaborate that vision of fine dining can be, like a large-scale art studio.
Many fine-dining restaurants rely on free labor to compete at this level — and have faced criticism for it. Reporting last June in The Financial Times detailed the immense power that Copenhagen restaurants hold over an unpaid, international work force, drawn to the city’s constellation of star restaurants and vulnerable to dangerous working conditions and bullying.
It seemed impossible — if one of the best restaurants in the world couldn’t make their business work, then what restaurant could? Over a decade later, after spending the maximum years possible at the top of the list and earning three Michelin stars, Mr. Redzepi called the old fine-dining model “unsustainable” and left many wondering the same thing about his restaurant. Does its pivot mean the end of fine dining? Probably not, no.
We’ve been here before. What feels different this time is the seismic cultural shift in our tolerance for the idea of auteur-chefs who make cooks suffer for their art. In The Atlantic, the chef Rob Anderson wrote that “the kind of high-end dining Noma exemplifies is abusive, disingenuous, and unethical.” And in a story for Bon Appétit magazine, Genevieve Yam wrote that it was a good thing if the Nomas of the world were closing because “if restaurants can’t figure out a business model where they pay and treat their staff fairly, they simply shouldn’t exist.”
#Ethique #Restauration #Travail #Sur-exploitation #1% #Marché_de_riches