Fine Dining is Unsustainable

The headline in the New York Times announced that Noma, the restaurant rated #1 in the world, is closing — and its celebrated chef Rene Redzepi declares fine dining at the highest level is unsustainable.

Sea Bass En Croute - Restaurant Paul Bocuse

Finally. Someone at the top of the restaurant field calling out the obvious. I read Julia Moskin’s article and began to ask myself, what do we do with that? Where do we go from here? Is this type of dining becoming obsolete or irrelevant? And what about the rest of us?

I am no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of a restaurant, but the food industry and fine dining on the Michelin-star level has been part of my life for more than 30 years. I met my husband while working in the pastry kitchen at Grand Hotel Stockholm, one of Scandinavia’s top hotels. He was 25, French and had just come from working at Restaurant Paul Bocuse — working, not staging — and was consulting in the French dining room there. He had been Chef de Partie Saucier in one of the most prestigous Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. At that time, he had been cooking for 11 years, being shuttled from one fine-dining establishment to another by the Michelin-star mafia. It was his entire world and it has shaped who he is.

All this to say, I understand the origins of this culture, the values of this culture and how it operates. It holds perfection as its’ highest ideal . It is highly labor intensive. It operates under the assumption that one should be grateful to “touch the King’s ring” and so working 16 hour days for nothing is acceptable.

People go to work in these environments and then go and recreate them in their own spaces all over the world. This is an excuse given by some sucessful chefs for their bad behaviour and toxic work environments.

One of the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the lifting of the veil on toxic work environments. The restaurant industry was hit particularly hard because workers came to realize they had options. Toxic work environments would no longer be tolerated. Talented workers left the industry in droves.

I look back on the past 40 years and wonder what the next shift will be. Chef Redzepi was right on when he said this is unsustainable. Labor, the heart of the restaurant industry, must become central to mission of any hospitality business in order for it to survive. Fine dining has taken that part of the equation completely for granted. So where does that leave us?

What has been at the center of fine dining is creativity. Chefs like Redzepi and Dan Barber have sought a way to sustain that creativity by altering the model. The Noma Project represents one attempt. After the pandemic, Dan Barber reopened Stone Barns promising a change in focus. Whether it will work, financially and culturally, has yet to be seen.

For fine dining, the ingredients are everything. I did the books for a very high end restaurant that spent $2000 a week on sea urchin. The servers made more money than the owner, while the kitchen staff was underpaid or unpaid. The owner was hailed as a genius. I couldn’t understand that model and left as soon as I could.

My only hope was that those young people working for nothing would soon learn the value of their labor, see the hypocrisy of it all, and transform the industry. I’ll be right there alongside them.