Chef in International Culinary Competition Celebrates With a Racist Selfie

December 04, 2019 Admin 0 Comments

Gianluca Gorini later apologized to “all those who have felt offended”

Since 2013, the Gelinaz! Shuffle has had chefs swapping places at their restaurants all around the world in what the website over-enthusiastically calls an event “even more exciting than swapping wives and husbands in the late 60s.” This year, things were different— chefs instead swapped recipes and were challenged to remix dishes from restaurants and cuisines they were likely unfamiliar with, in their own kitchens. It sounds like fun! But then, Chef Gianluca Gorini of Michelin starred-restaurant daGorini in Italy, was assigned recipes from Victor Liong of Lee Ho Fook in Melbourne, Australia. Which Gorini took as license to post a really racist photo.

The Instagram post, now deleted but captured by Jen Agg, shows Gorini and the kitchen staff (along with a child) wearing Asian conical hats and some of the staff pulling back the corners of their eyes. The blatantly racist gesture, as Agg points out, garnered a lot of likes as well as critical comments. By this morning, Gorini deleted the post, and replaced it with an apology accompanied by a photo of him basically going “aww, fiddlesticks” and looking like a kid who accidentally glitter-glued his art project to his desk.

“The shot in question was dictated by the excitement and enthusiasm that the confrontation with a new culture has generated in our daily work,” he wrote, “Now I realize, that I probably don’t know the subject of the question well enough and that I have underestimated its meaning.” He also tags Liong, and invites him to Italy to cook with him in his restaurant. Liong doesn’t appear to have commented on the situation publicly.

Gelinaz! as an organization revels in the language of chef badassery, calling this year’s Shuffle “small, humble but fucking daring turning point of an era,” and bemoaning the “Instagram(mable) junkies [and] PR-crackheads” that influence the food world. It also doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to equity. Its annual dinner has been criticized for not including many women chefs, and in 2013 at least, that was compounded with the event featuring hired topless women.

When asked about the lack of gender diversity in 2015, organizers Andrea Petrini and Alexandra Swenden said “we don’t want to feel socially pressured about this question,” and that “you don’t choose your friends and family by their gender at first,” echoing every time a marginalized person has heard they are somehow “not the right cultural fit” for what has traditionally been a white, male dominated industry. This year, the Gelinaz! Shuffle has 32 women chefs (just over 21 percent), and only one chef from the entire continent of Africa.

As an organization, Gelinaz! has also yet to publicly comment.