Helen Rosner

It was, I think by any metric of art, successful art.

That's hard to say.

I think that the idea of a restaurant kitchen as a particularly toxic workplace predates Noma and is certainly not exclusive to Noma.

You know, like, we see, like, the bear exploring the really sort of darker, more painful side of it.

You think you're so tough?

Hans!

Hans!

We see a sort of semi-glorification of it in the work of Anthony Bourdain, where he had a very conflicted relationship to it.

Like he reveled in the kind of pirate shipness of cooking.

And he also, you know, later in his career, as he achieved more and more fame, looked on it with a lot of skepticism and was like, you know, we don't have to make being an abusive dick an essential part of our professional identities as cooks.

The model of fine dining is rooted in what's called the brigade system, which comes out of French fine dining and is modeled on military hierarchy.

So you have people who are each in charge of their own stations.

This is things like the sous chef, who is the number two to the chef de cuisine.

Chef just means chief, right?

Like the chef de cuisine is the head of the kitchen.

The sous chef is the assistant to that.

And then you have chefs who are in charge of different stations.

The garde manger is the person who's in charge of salads and raw vegetables.

The saucier is in charge of sauces and things like that.

This system is modeled on the French military.