This is a terrible essay. It states two facts about Noma and its founder:
1) Noma relies on 30 unpaid interns.
2) René Redzepi "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." and asked "How can we rectify the screaming and shouting and physical abuse we’ve visited on our young cooks?"
The rest of the essay is just random conjecture or anecdotes about the restaurant industry at-large. No substantial insight into the workings of Noma is given.
So I can't speak for the practices at Noma, but I used to work fine dining (front of house) for an upscale restaurant group based out of NY. There was a young man who started working prep / Garde Manger when he was around 15. He was a great worker, got put on the line, and around his 19-20 birthday the restaurant owner sat him down and asked him his goals. No idea the conversation, but it must have gone well because a week later he was on a plane to England to staj at The Fat Duck (three Michelin star, at time one of the top if not the top restaurant in the world). Not sure of the deal entirely, but my impression was his plane, lodging, and food (when he wasn't eating at the restaurant) was all paid for by our restaurant group. Probably a small stipend as well as he didn't come from money and had minimal means.
I think if we look historically, this sort of arrangement was a lot more common in the past. The top restaurants and chefs would sort of send their talent to other places to pick up new techniques. It was very much a rite of passage. Now it seems like everything, our late stage capitalism has bastardized it into more of a sweatshop mentality. Instead we have swarms of individuals out of cooking school sending their resume off to all the top restaurants. Chefs can then offer them unpaid internships with the promise 1 out of 20 may get a paying job if they are good. If anyone complains then there is another 100 resumes to choose from. Sad...
The news isn't just that Noma abused the practice of internships, it's that people have decided that interning at these high end restaurants is no longer worth it.
In the old days, a few years at the high end then a year at a Noma-esque place and investors would line up for you to recreate it in your hometown.
Nowadays that's not the case. While the remaining fine dining restaurants are busy enough, it's still not the same as before and prices aren't high enough, considering inflation.
That's why Noma is closing, Manresa closed, Faviken closed (before COVID even, but the writing was on the wall then too), a bunch of David Chang's restaurants closed, and countless other less famous spots.
Of course, people still need to eat and odds are the economics are still good enough for plenty of restaurant concepts. But you need to find efficiency and Noma was anything but efficient (30 interns SMH).
It would be very interesting to see a comparison of the finances and business models of different types of restaurants. Restauranteurs talk about rent and labor as their primary expenses, such that it’s hard to gauge how Noma or similar restaurants were in any way unique in their operating challenges. These “restaurants" seem like they have more in common with performance art or a gallery such that one wonders whether a traditional dinner service, at any price, can ever make business sense.
Noma's financials are public because Denmark requires all companies to make their records public. It's profitable, but paying interns min wage will eat away about half their profit. Paying all their staff a living wage wouldn't be profitable at all.
To look at what more sustainable restaurants look like, look at high end French restaurants. Unpaid internships are all but illegal in France (can't last longer than 2 months, can't do duties that paid staff would otherwise do), worker protections are much stronger and as a result you've got higher prices for less courses and far fewer staff per cover.
>To look at what more sustainable restaurants look like, look at high end French restaurants.
I guess that's what I don't quite understand about these restaurants - apparently Noma was $500/plate, and still couldn't make it work financially even with free labor. So are these types of restaurants just horribly mismanaged or is there more to the story as to how a $15/sandwich place can stay open for years but $500/plate you go broke?
60 cooks and 30+ waiters serve around 100 guests. That's how. Labour is expensive.
A more "normal" but still "fine dining" spot will serve 100 guests with 10 cooks and 10 waiters. And the prices look cheaper but with a la carte offerings often lead to higher check averages especially with wine.
Noma has taken it to an extreme because, well, they had an endless supply of free labour.
Plus Noma attracts tourists. They spend the minimum. All the high end French joints have regulars (billionaires, politicians, etc...) that'll drop $10k on wine to help the bottom line...
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] thread1) Noma relies on 30 unpaid interns.
2) René Redzepi "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." and asked "How can we rectify the screaming and shouting and physical abuse we’ve visited on our young cooks?"
The rest of the essay is just random conjecture or anecdotes about the restaurant industry at-large. No substantial insight into the workings of Noma is given.
In the old days, a few years at the high end then a year at a Noma-esque place and investors would line up for you to recreate it in your hometown.
Nowadays that's not the case. While the remaining fine dining restaurants are busy enough, it's still not the same as before and prices aren't high enough, considering inflation.
That's why Noma is closing, Manresa closed, Faviken closed (before COVID even, but the writing was on the wall then too), a bunch of David Chang's restaurants closed, and countless other less famous spots.
Of course, people still need to eat and odds are the economics are still good enough for plenty of restaurant concepts. But you need to find efficiency and Noma was anything but efficient (30 interns SMH).
To look at what more sustainable restaurants look like, look at high end French restaurants. Unpaid internships are all but illegal in France (can't last longer than 2 months, can't do duties that paid staff would otherwise do), worker protections are much stronger and as a result you've got higher prices for less courses and far fewer staff per cover.
I guess that's what I don't quite understand about these restaurants - apparently Noma was $500/plate, and still couldn't make it work financially even with free labor. So are these types of restaurants just horribly mismanaged or is there more to the story as to how a $15/sandwich place can stay open for years but $500/plate you go broke?
A more "normal" but still "fine dining" spot will serve 100 guests with 10 cooks and 10 waiters. And the prices look cheaper but with a la carte offerings often lead to higher check averages especially with wine.
Noma has taken it to an extreme because, well, they had an endless supply of free labour.
Plus Noma attracts tourists. They spend the minimum. All the high end French joints have regulars (billionaires, politicians, etc...) that'll drop $10k on wine to help the bottom line...