George Washington wasn’t charging $1500 for dinner.
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True.
I guess trading human flesh is better.
/sarcasm
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Enjoy your meal at Noma.
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Exactly how is this relevant? Do you monetarily support George Washington? Or do you feel that Noma is going to be studied in history books in 300 years?
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Whataboutism with local dirt and algae mmmmmm-mmmm-good.
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It’s very simple. There are people who do both good things (like serving nice food or founding a country) and bad things (like abusing / owning their staff). Therefore, we should excuse all bad things because the people who did them might also have done good things.
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Some people think food tastes better when it is seasoned with abuse and exploitation. If you can’t afford the meal, don’t be salty. You are just upset that you can’t afford to help whitewash their transgressions.
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A brutal and disturbing piece in The NY Times today about the famous chef of Noma, René Redzepi. LA popup sold out in minutes and costs a staggering $1500 per person. He sounds like he belongs in jail not in a kitchen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/dining/rene-redzepi-noma-abuse-allegations.html
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You could make this assessment of many, many chefs. See this thread already in progress:
Well if that’s true and physically abusive people like this are still running things, then it’s a more f’ked world then I realized especially after all the me too stuff. I worked in restaurants in college and it was hard work and full of as*holes.
I actually think that people are going to be embarrassed about showing up at the popup. Maybe the chef will stay away.
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Many of the problems are known for years and hadn’t any impact on previous pop-ups of Noma on other countries
Nah, gotta agree with @Annegrace here. They may have been “known” to people who pay attention to the restaurant industry, but this is A LOT of press. People “knew” about Mario Batali, and then they REALLY knew, and he got hard cancelled.
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Yeah, maybe people knew who follow restaurant gossip but I’ve never heard a word and I follow a bunch of food people on social media. One of my fave follows wrote a book called Hungry that is about Noma popup in Mexico. I read it but don’t remember anything about chef being a crazy abusive jerk. NY Times story sends it out to a much broader audience.
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And they were late to this party (which is not surprising - they are late to all the parties).
We will see but newspapers like Financial Timed have reported about it before and nothing really changed https://www.ft.com/content/a62a96b8-2db2-44ec-ac80-67fcf83d86ef
Unfortunately, I don’t think people care about it enough that it will have any impact and it is starting next week (and I think there was already a pop-up collaboration with another LA restaurant were Noma was involved and people still showed up like ever)
You may well be right, but every so often some bad thing that “we all knew about” suddenly reaches a tipping point, and it becomes untenable to support the participants in said bad thing. Can you think of any other recent examples? I sure can!
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I have my own plating tweezers, tyvm. And I’ll be making a whole fish tonight, with head! Also live oysters! So please make other dinner plans. 
I actually don’t mind some pretentiousness, if I still have a nice meal and a fun time.
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