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Redzepi, who was in his mid-twenties when Noma opened, became one of the food world’s biggest stars. (Noma is a portmanteau of Nordisk mad, or Nordic food.) In doing so, they invented New Nordic, a hyperlocal, eco-conscious food movement that set the culinary world alight. Then, in 2003, two Danish chefs called René Redzepi and Claus Meyer opened Noma, a fine-dining restaurant that used only ingredients local to the Nordic region. “Like, fuck, finally someone is saying something.”Įven 20 years ago, there weren’t many good restaurants in Copenhagen, and certainly nothing that could generate a lively food-tourism industry. “The feeling was victory,” one chef at a prominent Copenhagen restaurant told me of the outpouring on social media. Suddenly, the whole restaurant industry was watching. One person wrote in about a chef who used to throw his staff’s phones in the deep-fat fryer, another about her experience of being sexually assaulted by a prominent sommelier, another about a chef who kept a gun in his drawer at work to shoot rats in the restaurant elevator, reams and reams of accusations that Dunbar reposted to her Instagram stories. Stories poured in about abuse of all forms: sexism, racism, homophobia, bullying, dangerous working conditions. “I thought, what could happen, if I did that?” “It provoked me.” Later that night, she started posting on her Instagram page, soliciting anonymous accounts from anybody who felt they had been mistreated while working in Danish restaurants. “All of the hurt, all of the trauma that I’ve gained working in the restaurant industry was being shown as entertainment,” she said when we met in a café in Nørrebro as February rain lashed the windows. Watching the video, something in Dunbar snapped. He’d fitted a gun-shaped attachment to the top of a champagne bottle and was squirting white frothing jets of wine into one diner’s mouth, while saying “on your knees”. In the clip, a waiter performed wildly for consenting guests. A video posted by a pair of Copenhagen-based food influencers came up, showing their dining experience at one of the city’s Michelin-starred restaurants. In Copenhagen, at last, someone is trying to make us listen.Ī month or so before my visit, a woman named Lisa Lind Dunbar, who had spent the past 15 years working in Danish restaurants, was scrolling through Instagram. The story of what happens on the other side of the kitchen wall. And then there is the story that you, as a diner, are never supposed to hear. The first is in the dining room, a perfectly choreographed show of luxury and excellence, a performance so fine-tuned, down to the decor, the staff uniforms, the music, the crockery, that in some ways the food itself is the least important element. In fine-dining restaurants, two stories are being told. “This is the only thing that I allow myself, to buy a coffee on my day off,” they said, “because I cannot afford anything else.” After we had been speaking for half an hour about their struggles to feed themselves on low wages and having their work hours constantly cut at short notice, they looked down at their empty mug.