Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Comments About Hitting Employee Reignite Conversations About Kitchen Abuse

March 04, 2020 Admin 0 Comments

In a panel at the Philly Chefs Conference, the Jean-Georges chef said he wasn’t sorry he once beat up an employee

The seventh-annual Philly Chefs Conference took place over the past few days, with notable chefs and food experts (including a few from Eater) converging to discuss hot topics in the food industry, including sustainability, diversity, and workers’ rights. But one high-profile chef’s comments also highlighted how, despite great strides in combating abuse in restaurant spaces, the trope of the head chef with the “bad temper” is still alive and well, reigniting the conversation about normalized abuse in restaurant kitchens.

In a panel about food memoirs led by Esquire food and drinks editor Jeff Gordinier and featuring chefs-authors Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Kwame Onwuachi, and Phyllis Grant, Vongerichten was asked about a passage in his new book JGV: A Life in 12 Recipes that details how he beat up an employee while working at Restaurant Lafayette in the Drake Hotel in 1986.

In the book, Vongerichten recounts how Sam, a dishwasher, would take daily breaks for 45 minutes at noon, a time when the restaurant was busy. Vongerichten writes that he begged Sam to stay one day, but “he didn’t give a damn, he was union.” So at the end of service, Vongerichten asked his chef de cuisine to watch the door as he invited Sam into the walk-in refrigerator, where they argued, and eventually Vongerichten “beat the shit out of him,” breaking his nose in the process. The next day, Sam was transferred, and Vongerichten wrote the two are still friends. Vongerichten also wrote that he was “not proud” of his violence, and that he was shocked he was not fired for his behavior. “Everyone in the kitchen saw what happened, and nobody said a word,” he wrote.

At the panel on Sunday, Maddy Sweitzer-Lamme reported in a recap for Philly Mag that “Vongerichten said that he does not [regret his actions], that he was glad he did it because he felt the dishwasher’s poor work ethic was getting in the way of what he was trying to accomplish in that restaurant.” Sweitzer-Lamme says that Gordinier was the one who asked if Vongerichten had any remorse, and that “people were generally taken aback” when the answer was no. Food writer Lukas Volger, who also attended the panel, said “my row certainly tensed up, and it was a major topic of conversation at dinner afterwards.” (Vongerichten also reportedly described feeling like “Christopher Columbus” when traveling to Thailand.)

Sweitzer-Lamme’s recap of the event, published yesterday, amplified the comment to a wider audience, who considered Vongerichten’s blasé comments — especially within the context of ongoing conversations about workplace harassment and abuse in the restaurant industry — particularly disturbing, and emblematic of how some kitchens might not be changing.

The traditional structure of a restaurant kitchen has its roots in European military traditions, which, as Samuel Ashworth wrote for Eater, “forged chefs who could take the heat, and it broke those who couldn’t.” Violence, belittlement, and pain in the professional kitchen were normalized — they were signs the hierarchy was working, and that the people who survived were wholly dedicated to the job. The system has fueled the fetishization of the chef who achieves perfection by enacting a “bad temper,” who throws plates when the steak is overdone, who screams and hits out when a sauce breaks, who demands the only answer to any request, no matter how unreasonable, be “yes, chef.” It is perhaps unsurprising that this tradition excuses abuse.

Increasingly, chefs are balking that the only way for a chef to be successful is to be exacting and cruel. (Onwuachi addressed his own experiences with abuse while working in a fine dining kitchen in his memoir, Notes From a Young Black Chef. “As I’ve opened my own kitchens, at times I’ve certainly been guilty of regurgitating the habits I learned at Per Se,” Onwuachi wrote. “But when I grow enraged, I also try to remember how it made me feel to be yelled at on the line.”) Some restaurant groups are actively working to improve employee’s mental health and well being, or at least to address the double standard of how men and women are treated in the kitchen. Other chefs are grappling with how they might have upheld or participated in toxic culture in the past, in an effort to improve conditions in the future.

But as Volger tweeted, Vongerichten “seemed to be expecting to get a laugh” in not showing remorse, signaling that he perhaps views breaking an employee’s nose because he took what sounds like a work-mandated break as excusable, or at least understandable. In 2018, Vice published an article saying the restaurant industry is “done with angry chefs,” noting how younger chefs, and specifically women chefs, are less interested in carrying this violent tradition forward. Vongerichten’s comments prove we’re not quite done yet.

• Five Ideas Worth Spreading From Philly Chef Conference 2020 [Philly Mag]