Ulises Menchaca was standing in his truck on a steep Silver Lake street, late for work.
Ahead, activists emerged from a tour bus to gather in front of the historic Paramour Estate.
Menchaca, a landscaper, had landed in the middle of a traffic jam caused by the latest referendum on the city of Los Angeles itself.
It was the opening day of Noma LA, a dinner series by Danish chef René Redzepi. For the next 16 weeks, the man behind one of the world's most famous restaurants would work with his 130-member team at the five-acre complex to create multi-course meals that cost $1,500 per seat.
“Imagine?” Menchaca, 52, said in Spanish when I explained the premise of Noma LA. Gardening tools weighed down the bed of his worn Ford Ranger. “I would have to work every day, all day, for three months to pay for that. And if I had that money, why would I spend it on just one dinner?”
The price is the least of Redzepi's sins. A recent New York Times article detailed allegations of abuse Redzepi inflicted on his workers, from not paying interns to beating workers, stabbing them with forks, and threatening their relatives with deportation.
The chef, who has admitted to his “thug” past before, posted an apology for the weak sauce on Instagram after the article was published. On Wednesday, hours after the protest, Redzepi announced his resignation from Noma via a self-pitying video featuring forlorn crew members urging them to “fight” for what he predicted would be “the restaurant of the decade.”
“It's a———!” Jim Longeretta yelled as he waited behind Menchaca in a luxury van when I asked him if he knew what was going on. Would you go to a Noma dinner if someone else paid for it?
“No way,” Longeretta replied. “Not with all the accusations right now.”
The bus finally parked down the hill. Holding signs that read “Noma broke me” and “Your kitchen is a crime scene,” about a dozen activists demanded that Redzepi meet with them and offer reparations to his victims.
A security guard stands at the gate of Paramour Estate in Silver Lake as guests enter for a lunch service at Noma LA's pop-up restaurant.
(Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles is a city of reinvention, where second chances are a civic sacrament and residents often overlook the flaws of celebrities. Redzepi had the opportunity to redeem himself with true contrition.
Instead, grim-faced men photographed protesters and the media. Employees looked through a wrought iron gate as Noma's former head of fermentation, Jason Ignacio White, read a letter denouncing Redzepi.
No one answered the intercom when White called. A curious employee refused to take the letter from him, but took a photo of him as he left it hanging on a door.
Security guards ordered the Latino workers to enter through a side entrance. When a New York Times reporter tried to interview a woman in a chef's apron and clogs carrying a bouquet of flowers, she ran back to her truck.
“Yeah [Redzepi] If he had paid attention to what's happening in the city, he would have taken his approach differently,” White said, referring to the fires and deportations that have hit Los Angeles. “He doesn't care about the people. He only cares about fame.”
I'm fine with people spending $1,500 on a dinner. It's their money, and many Angelenos love conspicuous consumption. I have no problem with chefs like Redzepi catering to the elite; chefs have been doing it for centuries. Unfortunately, their abhorrent behavior is all too common in the restaurant industry, from the best restaurants to the most humble street stalls.
My main problem is the arrogance of all this and the people who allowed it.
When Redzepi announced Noma's residency last summer, the Los Angeles food scene welcomed him like a culinary god. He was seen as someone kind enough to grace us with his aura, who would renew an economically and spiritually depressed scene with his gospel of foraging, locally sourced produce, food preservation, and seasonality—the so-called innovations my Mexican grandmothers practiced without widespread adulation or million-dollar budgets.
The gushing media profiles intentionally ignored Redzepi's troubled past and left out the cognitive dissonance of offering a $1,500 Mexican meal in a city with savage economic stratification and a Latino community under existential threat from President Trump's spate of deportations, whose restaurants have particularly suffered.
However, Noma LA sold out in 60 seconds. Its preliminary success and subsequent collapse is another criticism of those who think that welcoming big names and events (the World Cup, the Olympics) is the way to save ourselves.
How do you say “assholes”in Danish?
Last year, Redzepi told my colleague Laurie Ochoa that he chose Los Angeles for his first Noma pop-up in the United States because he “really fell in love” with the city. I should have known that Los Angeles is sick and tired of powerful people trying to cover up indefensible actions, whether it's Mayor Karen Bass and her handling of the Palisades fire or Trump and the state of this country.
However, that's all Redzepi has done since the damning New York Times revelation. Meanwhile, his cult is such that his defenders brand his alleged victims as weak-willed crybabies.
Even more pompous is the philosophy of Noma LA. It was one thing for Redzepi to showcase the wonders of Nordic cuisine at his exclusive Copenhagen restaurant. It's quite another to land somewhere and deign to tell natives that you can elevate their cuisine, as when he completed a successful run with Noma on the Yucatan Peninsula in 2017: The late Times food critic Jonathan Gold praised the effort and concluded that “beauty and conflict are often intertwined.”
Noma's website states that its staff will spend their time in Los Angeles “cooking, listening, learning, and building a body of work rooted in this place.” For whom? Certainly not for Angelenos, who know what defines their metropolis culinaryly, from pupusas to Tommy's chili burgers, from Persian food in West Los Angeles to regional Chinese cuisine in the San Gabriel Valley.
While Redzepi boasted about walking down Sunset Boulevard from Chinatown to Santa Monica to absorb the city, he must not have absorbed one important fact: Los Angeles doesn't need a stranger telling us how cool we are. We already know it.
Rene Redzepi, chef and co-owner of the Danish restaurant Noma, photographed in 2021 in Copenhagen.
(Thibault Savary / AFP via Getty Images)
Redzepi is not completely disoriented. It has partnered with smaller local restaurants and nonprofits to improve their bottom line and get them noticed. His team also plans to publish a coffee table book about Los Angeles culture. I was invited to contribute an essay and I declined, knowing that I would like to write a column about Noma in Los Angeles
I didn't imagine I'd be writing about how Los Angeles defeated Redzepi.
White and the other activists finished their speeches and then began a cacerolazo – a type of Latin American protest where people bang pots and pans together. Two LAPD patrol cars arrived to meet with angry Noma employees who demanded that the cops shoo people away from the driveway. Officer Manny Gomez politely asked everyone to stay on the sidewalk.
“What is all this about?” Gómez asked me as we stood in the shadow of a cargo truck. He shook his head and said, “Wow, that sounds a little expensive” when I mentioned the price of Noma LA.
He declined to comment further, so I asked him a better question: “What's your favorite taco place?” After all, cops always know the best places to eat.
“21 and San Pedro… Everything you need!” Gómez immediately responded as protesters shouted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” in a fleet of electric Cadillac Escalades driving the first round of Noma LA diners to lunch. White's letter to his former boss remained untouched on the door.
Gómez's recommendation reflected an LA that Redzepi could never hope to channel, where we freely share what we love because we want it to succeed. Where we don't hide behind high walls, apologists and exorbitant prices.
I left the Noma protest and drove 20 minutes to El Grullense, a taco truck with an adjoining dining room near the Santee Educational Complex. I ordered a carne asada fat burrito that came with two delicious salsas and a roasted jalapeño. Add some tangerine flavored Jarritos and my lunch was $15.
A hundred of those would buy me a night at Noma LA Dame El Grullense.
The lunchtime crowd (high school students, workers, elderly) waited patiently for their orders.
Guillermo Rojas Ortega and Juan Villaseñor went with a carne asada burrito, an al pastor burrito and two head tacos. Friends scoffed when I told them where I had just been.
“$1,500?!” said Rojas Ortega, a 37-year-old truck driver from Watts. He repeated the figure in Spanish, as if saying it in another language could help him understand it better. “Does it at least go to charity?”
“That's nonsense…” Villaseñor, a 40-year-old electrician, responded when I said no. “There is no money for the poor in the neighborhood, but do people go to that?”
They were even more upset when I mentioned Redzepi's alleged abuse.
“Hell no!” -exclaimed Rojas Orega-. “What does it have to do with community?”
“Even though that sucks, they still go for the food? That's stupid,” Villaseñor said.
Their burritos and tacos were ready. Before the two began, I asked them if they had a message for Noma diners.
“Whoever sees him,” Villaseñor said of Redzepi, half jokingly and half jokingly, “should punch him.”
