The resignation of Danish chef René Redzepi from his much hyped and honored NOMA restaurant in Copenhagen over charges he does not deny of bullying his staff for years has sent shock waves through the industry. His behavior was one of those dirty little secrets that staff dare not speak about for fear of firing, and, as with the Epstein files, people who knew the truth are saying they had no idea what was going on.

Redzepi’s  behavior went beyond unleashing a fierce temper––hardly rare among chefs––to acts of punching and slamming and sticking forks into worker’s bodies, according to a report by Julia Moskin in the New York Times this week, based on interviews with dozens of former employees.

“Going to work felt like going to war,” Alessia, a former cook at NOMA told Moskin.  “You had to force yourself to be strong, to show no fear.”

The repercussions were immediate: In Los Angeles where Redzepi was doing a sold-out pop-up series of dinners for $1,500 per person, sponsors began to pull out and protesters arrived outside the door. But the story has opened the rotted door to a perennial problem that was once an entrenched tradition of chefs abusing their staff, going back to the Middle Ages when cook’s guilds had access to unpaid interns called stagiares who worked for room and board in hopes of joining the guild. That practice has gone on into the last century when young cooks eager to work in a prestigious kitchen did so for next to no pay.

Back in 1933 George Orwell (left; author of 1984) wrote of his agonizing stint as a plongeur––dish washer–– at a restaurant in Paris where abuse was part of the routine. The chef would rant at his cooks, in order of their place on the line, the cooks would berate the service staff and the staff would rage at the scullery maid and the dishwashers, with everyone cursing at the top of their lungs.

 Pierre Franey (right), the esteemed French chef who became a Times food columnist, once told me how at a very high-up restaurant in France, the chef would abuse everyone constantly. One night he slapped Pierre across the face with a spatula. “It stung like hell and brought tears to my eyes,” he recalled. “I threw down my hat and apron and went upstairs to my locker and planned to walk out the door. But the chef came running up after me and shouted, ‘Why are you leaving, Pierre? You’re one of the only people I like here!’ I went back downstairs and went to work. That was the way it was.”

Chefs of every stripe from just a generation ago remember such treatment, silently suffering to keep their jobs. Star chef Gordon Ramsay, who has made a TV career out of screaming at cooks on “Hell’s Kitchen,” told of how his master, the tyrannical Marco Pierre White (below), in London literally had him cowering in a corner of the restaurant more than once. A manager named Carl Bruggemeir, who worked for restaurateur Warner LeRoy, owner of Tavern on the Green, told me he threw a steak he thought was not thick enough straight at his chest. “I just picked it up,” he said, “changed my shirt and went back on the floor.”

The once famous, now infamous. Mario Batali and his reptilian partner Joe Bastianich were notorious for drunken behavior that eventually revealed Batali’s sexual harassment. And as Anthony Bourdain described the atmosphere at the New York restaurant Les Halles, the common language of the kitchen was largely billingsgate.

Because of the Batali accusations in 2017, shivers went up the spines of chefs well known for their brutal management style, not least because Human Resources and restaurant workers unions  laid down the rules about abuse, lest a staff member sue the chef or restaurateur. Open kitchens where guests can see and hear what’s going on behind the cook stations are also buffers for bad behavior.

Good managers are now expected to take staff complaints seriously and to remind belligerent chefs to keep a lid on their anger, like a pot boiling over.

It’s highly unlikely all such bad behavior has disappeared from the back of the house, just as it’s naïve to think that the behavior of the sleazy stocks and bonds characters in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” was exaggerated––according to my friends in the industry it was not. The TV show “The Bear” shows that the loyal opposition, the staff, can be every bit as rough and tumble on a new young chef.

Restaurant kitchens are often said to be pressure cookers, both literally and figuratively, where mistakes can mean cuts and burns and inefficiency can cost profits. It’s an environment where knives are flashing, flames are flaring and pans of hot liquids get spilled. Tantrums will occur, the lingo can be as rough as on stevedores’ docks.

You won’t hear about all that from the harried restaurateur or manager up front, who must put on a face of calm cordiality. Behind the kitchen door you do not hear the shouting, the cursing, the glasses smashed against the wall  or the pots banged down out of frustration.

Yet clearly Redzepi’s behavior went beyond the usual abuse found in kitchens. He and others like him would claim that it is their monomaniacal insistence on an unachievable perfection that causes them to be the way they are. But like all people who live within a tornado of rage, they need to get some help, some counseling and  be brought down to earth before they do any more damage.

I do think this incident with Redzepi will have a widespread effect in the industry because, from investors to customers, no one wants to be associated with the worst aspects of a bad kitchen. At its most basic, nobody wants to fear an outraged chef spitting in the soup.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

       Katie thought it was time to call Alan Dobell.
       “Listen, Alan, this Epstein story has tentacles that reach into the British royal family. One of the men Epstein fixed up with underage girls was Prince Andrew, Elizabeth’s son. He apparently and brazenly traveled all over the western hemisphere with her.”
       “How old was she?” Dobell asked.
       “Sixteen, seventeen.”
       “And this information comes from what source?”
       Katie knew that a prostitute, even one on the inside of Epstein’s mansion, wasn’t going to be enough for her editor.  
     “And you believe this prostitute? Any other evidence? Photos?”
       “Apparently it was part of Epstein’s modus operandi to make sure he got photos of everyone at his parties hanging out with the girls. That way he could always keep them silent.”
       “And where are those?”
       “I don’t know, Alan, I’m just finding these things out now. I do know that when I visited Epstein in his office here in New York the room was lined with photos of important men.”
       “Any of them with these girls?”     
         “I didn’t get close enough to see.”
       Katie heard Dobell sigh deeply.
       “Listen, Katie, I suspect you’ve got a real story here, a sleazy one but a story nonetheless. Even so, I’m still not sure this is for McClure’s unless there’s a financial angle, men in power trading influence for sex, that kind of thing. But I’ll do this: Take another week or so and see if you can nail anything down that someone could take into court. I mean it's not like everybody doesn’t already know that Epstein’s some kind of libertine. But it’s only if he’s trafficking underage girls that it becomes a real crime. You’ve got to get one of the men, or maybe several, to tell you what was going on in his homes, and whether any of them knew those girls were underage.”
       Katie said thanks and that if she didn’t have anything on firmer grounds in a week, she’d drop the story.
       “You coming back to New York soon?” asked Dobell.
       “That depends if I’ve exhausted the possibilities down here. I’ll let you know if I am.”
       Dobell hung up, leaned back in his chair, swiveled around once and said to himself, “I really hope she finds something.”

       Katie told David everything she’d learned from Susannah.  “Well,” he said, “she’s right about nobody in a court room taking her seriously, and she would get ripped apart by the defense.”
      “I wonder if we can find this girl Virginia Roberts, if that’s her name. Guess we can ask Ramona.”
       “Guess we can. And if she is a local girl there’s got to be some records of her in town. I’ll ask Terry to check.”
       “Good idea,” said Katie. “Okay, you call Terry and I’ll contact Ramona. See you at dinner, eight o’clock in the lobby?”
       “Make it seven o’clock in the bar.”
      Katie wondered if Sanchez would take her call on a Sunday afternoon after her caipirhiñas and TV shows, but she dialed her number.
       “Quién es?” came Sanchez’s voice on the line.
       “Ramona, it’s me, Katie Cavuto,” and without waiting for Sanchez to reply said, “I had a good talk with Susannah, and she gave me a lot to go on. You mind if I ask you about one thing she told me?”
         Sanchez said nothing, so Katie asked, “Do you know of a girl named Virginia Roberts who was supposed to be hooked up with Prince Andrew of the British Royal Family?”
      Sanchez laughed. “Everybody knew about Andrew, and everybody knew he was screwing with Virginia. Some of the men were amazed how—what do you say?—blatant he was. But no one said anything. She was another of Ghislaine’s girls, same routine as with Susannah. But Virginia was already a girl in trouble. She had a bad family, ran away, lived on the streets, but she looked so good it didn’t matter, and I doubt Andrew even cared about her background.”
       “Do you know if she’s still here in Palm Beach?”
       “Last I heard she flew off to Thailand to train at some massage therapy school Jeremy wanted her to go to. Jeremy was very big on massages, and that’s how Ghislaine got these girls to let down their guard. Ghislaine is just another pervert but with a British accent.”
       It all sounded exactly as Susannah had told it about herself.
       “And that’s the last you heard of her?”
       “That’s the last I heard. I don’t think she came back here. If she did I would have heard she was back with Jeremy or at some brothel.”
       Katie thanked Sanchez and asked if she could call again.
       If Roberts were still in Thailand it was going to be difficult to trace her unless she could somehow get information out of the Transportation Security Administration. Maybe David could find out. Meanwhile David had phoned Terry Rush, who said he couldn’t find out anything on a Sunday, so David thought, “Fine, I’ll just have a relaxing evening with Katie.”
       They met at the bar of the hotel, whose restaurant was nothing special, so they went to Joe’s Stone Crab on Miami Beach, a tourist-driven restaurant that dated back to 1913 and was made a historic landmark as of 1975.  Once called Joe’s Diner, it was now a big two-story place made to look like a southern mansion, one with a red-and-green neon sign reading “JOE’S.” David didn’t bother to call ahead, even though he knew the restaurant didn’t take reservations, which could make the high season wait at the maître d’s stand interminable unless that same maître d’ was slipped a sizeable tip up front to move a party up the wait list.
       When they arrived the waiting space was indeed packed with hopeful diners, some of whom had flashed a twenty-dollar bill only to be sniffed at by the maître’d, who had the slick appearance of a man who had somehow come to prominence in Miami Beach society on the basis of mere tradition at Joe’s.  In fact, one local journalist wrote that the maître’d at Joe’s was more powerful than the mayor of Miami Beach.
       There was a line of about eight people standing directly in front of his host station, some looking like supplicants, others sure they would proffer a sufficient monetary homage to him to receive a table more or less quickly. When Katie and David got to the front of the line, David said, “The name is Greco. I think you got a call from Detective Rush?”
       The host’s eyes fluttered for a moment then he said, “But of course, Mr. Greco, Right this way,” and the couple was shown to a good table towards the bar, under high chandeliers and under an enlarged photo of the place from the 1920s.    
       “I’m impressed,” said Katie as she was cordially seated at a table for four. “Terry put in a call?”
       “I did some favors for Terry when he worked under me in New York.”
       “Noblesse oblige lives on,” she said as the waiter unfolded her napkin.
     David ordered a caipirhiña for himself and a Hemingway daiquiri for Katie.
       “I suppose the thing to order here are the stone crabs,” said David, “but I’m told the side dishes are terrific, too, and we should get the bisque and the conch fritters to start with.”
       The drinks arrived and the couple clinked glasses and enjoyed the ice cold cocktails before Katie told David what Sanchez had said about Virginia Roberts.
       “You know anyone in the TSA who could track her down in Thailand?” she asked when the starters arrived.
       “Nobody down here, but up in New York, yeah. He’s going to bitch about me not being retired but—”
       “—But you did him some favors when you were working there.”
       “I did,” said David. “Hey, these fritters are terrific. Try one. I’ll call the guy. Probably Terry knows someone down here who had to stamp her passport if she left out of Miami.”
       “As well as stamp it if she came back.”
       “Exactly. Oh, here come the stone crabs.”
       Set on a platter with clarified butter and shell crackers, with fried sweet potato chips and cole slaw on the side, the stone crabs were jumbos and full of sweet meat. David helped crack them for Katie, and they enjoyed them with a bottle of California Chardonnay.
       Both were delighted to have a night away from the investigation but by the same token looking forward to Monday morning when they could proceed further.
       The meal ended, David did tip the maître d’ fifty bucks, and they drove back across the Causeway to their hotel. Katie went upstairs to go over the day’s notes, while David went to his room to watch a basketball game. The Knicks were playing the Heat. He put his mobile phone on the night table then noticed a small gift box tied with string on the bed. He sat down, kicked off his loafers, picked up the box, untied the string and opened it. Out fell a very large black spider that moved quickly towards him. David sprang back across the room as the creature scuttled across the bed. David picked up his shoe and slammed the hairy body again and again, its insides soaking the bed cover.      
         David was breathing hard and sweating. He picked up the phone and called Katie.
       “Yeah, David, what’s up? Why are you panting?”
       “You remember that scene when James Bond finds the tarantula in his bed?”
       “Yeah, it was in Dr. No, wasn’t it?”
       “Yeah, well, I just met his  brother.”

 
 © John Mariani, 2024