Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.
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I don’t have a Noma story. What I have is a small, ordinary example of how the restaurant’s name travels — and what it does when it lands somewhere else.
A few years ago I quit a job because the chef’s behavior toward me was unacceptable — call it verbal abuse, call it tacky assholery, either way. When I told the GM I was leaving, he said: “I don’t think you understand. He comes from Noma world.” I pressed him: did he mean the chef had been so abused himself that he didn’t know any better? Or that he’d earned the right to act this way on account of his professional credentials? He thought about it. “Uhh, both I guess?” He told me he’d handled the situation. When I asked how, he couldn’t say. The restaurant closed a few months later.
This is what the culinary world is reckoning with right now. Not just René Redzepi, but everything that radiated outward from him. Julia Moskin’s investigation in the New York Times opens with a scene: Redzepi, angered that a prep cook was playing techno in the kitchen, punched the cook in the ribs and refused to let anyone back inside until the cook declared, loud enough for all to hear, that he liked giving DJs oral sex.
As a frequent recipient of homophobic humiliation attempts, and an occasional DJ, I find this an extremely rich text. Listening to techno in the prep kitchen is apparently gay enough to get you a literal public beating in a restaurant built on tweezed flower petals and cloud foams. Plus, who has time to go down on a DJ when you work 16-hour days for line cook wages? I’m also curious to know exactly what Redzepi had him say. Was it “I like sucking DJ dick”? I guess it doesn’t matter.
The NYT report goes on: bullying, threats to blacklist employees, threats to have workers’ families deported. Redzepi’s response was a four-page Instagram post in which he said he doesn’t “recognize all the details in the stories” but expressed remorse for those who suffered under his leadership.
Some members of the industry rallied behind him, as Gourmet reported. Tom Aikens: “We all have ghosts from the past…You may cross the line of normality, it happens, it’s human nature to be competitive.” Albert Raurich, former head chef at elBulli: “Bravo, René!” Mike Solomonov: five hearts. Pierre Thiam, Justin Pichetrungsi, CJ Jacobson, Top Chef alums Tristen Epps, Shota Nakajima, and Shirley Chung — support, hearts, applause emojis, likes. The warm embrace of the industry’s most visible chefs, delivered via Instagram within hours.
Meanwhile, sponsors moved faster than the apology. AmEx pulled out. Cadillac’s name disappeared from the Noma website. Crisis PR, reportedly, landed in the hands of Risa Heller — whose prior clients include Harvey Weinstein, Mario Batali, and Anthony Weiner — who responded to Chris Crowley’s direct question about her involvement by saying “How can I help?” and ultimately dodging him.
Danish food media had been sitting on versions of this story for years. It took the American press to surface it. Also worth noting: noma-abuse.com is documenting 56 testimonials spanning 20 years. The site launched this week.
I’m not surprised by the Times’ revelations. Those of us who’ve spent time in the industry over the last twenty years are well aware that this is how things often go. What’s notable is how this particular restaurant’s reputation built a network of people who reflexively explain away abuse rather than name it. Those years ago, when I brought this to my manager’s attention, he deflected without thinking. He reached for “Noma world” before he’d bothered to consider what I was saying. The credential didn’t explain anything; it just filled the space where an explanation should have been. That’s how prestige laundering works at the operational level: it doesn’t require anyone to be cynical or even conscious. You just reach for the name, and the name does the work. The industry response this week — the hearts, the “we all have ghosts,” the Bravo — is the same mechanism at scale. If you’ve organized your professional identity around surviving a system, naming that system risks devaluing the thing you worked so hard to build. So you post the hearts instead.
I wish the response from the industry was somewhere closer to: “I like sucking DJ dick.”
Here’s what I’m paying attention to this week.
