Editor’s Note: Saru Jayaraman is the co-founder and president of One Fair Wage and the director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America” (New Press, 2021). The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. Read more opinion articles on CNN.
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In 2017, a professionally trained chef from India was working as an intern at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that has frequently led a list of the world’s best and has announced that it is closing to diners next year to reinvent itself as a food lab. As an intern, the New York Times reported, Namrata Hegde’s only task was to make 120 fruit-leather “beetles” every day. She was told not to laugh or, for that matter, make any other noise. All of which would be bad enough had Hegde been paid. But she was an unpaid intern at a restaurant that charged $500-per-person for its dinner menu.
Her story is part of a much broader narrative about fine dining, and about the restaurant industry at large. As Imogen West-Knights reported for the Financial Times in June of last year, at Noma and other fine dining restaurants in Copenhagen, “two stories are being told. The first is in the dining room, a perfectly choreographed show of luxury and elegance” and the second, the one diners are never supposed to see, is “the story of what happens on the other side of the kitchen wall.” West-Knights’ reporting acknowledges that it would be unfair to “point the finger exclusively at Noma” (which denied many of the characterizations of its working conditions in her piece) or at intern labor in particular, but also paints a vivid picture of the financial and mental-health toll experienced by many restaurant workers at the center of the boom in Nordic fine dining.
This isn’t a new problem, nor is it limited to Nordic culinary circles. It’s truly international, and it’s been going on for a long time. In 2017, with the release of the World’s Best Restaurants list (the top five of which at the time were located in New York City, Italy, Spain, France and Peru), Eater pointed out that many of them could not function without unpaid work. And as recently as this month, New York Times food critic Pete Wells – in noting the impending closure of Noma – said, “Most of the overkill…
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