Helen Rosner

And it's called the brigade system.

I mean, it's right there.

And, you know, as a system, it's something that...

is not in universal adoption across fine dining, but it is kind of the substrate on which fine dining is built.

And the whole idea of everybody saying, yes, chef, in unison, sounds like military call and response because it is, because that's what it's modeled on.

And, you know, historically, this is certainly less, very much less the case in the last couple of decades, but historically, restaurant work was not...

something you went into if you were upper class it wasn't something you went into aspirationally it was it was an industry that took all comers and that didn't do background checks and that you know if you could just walk into a room and if you could scrub a dish you'd have a job so discipline compliance not talking back not pushing back not making any ripples became the way that these restaurants would function and they were you know multimodal beasts with dozens of people running around trying to execute tons of dishes all the time for a demanding clientele and that kind of

rigidity in structure certainly can produce a certain kind of product, but it also creates and enforces a certain kind of mindset, both in the people who are receiving the orders and the people who are giving them.

You know, I think that the restaurant industry is sort of in a perpetual state of reckoning and is also kind of at all times trying to figure out what it is and if it is even a coherent industry at all or just kind of a loose consortium of…

individual businesses.

You know, I think that the Me Too movement and that era of workers feeling empowered to speak out was pretty extraordinary.

And if it didn't massively, dramatically shift the way that business is done in the restaurants, it certainly moved the needle a little bit.

And so what we have seen over the last few years is a much stronger, much more focused culture of workers standing up for themselves.

And I think the part of what makes this NOMA story really interesting and really complicated is that the abuses that were outlined in this, you know, blockbuster New York Times report took place between 2009 and 2017, nearly a decade ago.

And that doesn't minimize abuse.

their horror, that doesn't minimize the nature of the abuse.

But it does, I think, tell us something that this took place in a slightly different social environment.

In an environment where people who were coming to NOMA, who were seeking out proximity to the creativity, the innovation, the excitement, the prestige, might not have felt as confident as people now might be

to push back or to say no or to intervene or to leave and say something immediately in public.

The way that the landscape has shifted, I think, is also that consumers, that people are more receptive to hearing these stories.