Noma's $1,500 dinner is the opposite of LA

Ulises Menchaca was sitting in his pickup truck on a steep street in Silver Lake, late for work.

Ahead of him, activists stepped off a tour bus to gather in front of the historic Paramour Estate.

Menchaca, a landscape gardener, had found himself in the middle of a traffic jam caused by Los Angeles' recent referendum on itself.

It was the opening day of Noma LA, a dinner series by Danish chef René Redzepi. Over the next 16 weeks, the man behind one of the world's most famous restaurants worked with his 130-person team on the five-acre site to prepare multi-course meals for $1,500 per seat.

“Introduce?” Menchaca, 52, said in Spanish as I explained the premise of Noma LA. Gardening tools weighed down in the back of his worn Ford Ranger. “I would have to work every day, all day, for three months to afford that. And if I had that money, why would I spend it on just one dinner?”

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 to stabbing them with forks to threatening their family members with deportation.

The chef, who has previously acknowledged his “bully” past, posted a weak Salsa apology on Instagram after the article was published. On Wednesday, hours after the protest, Redzepi announced his resignation from Noma through a self-pitying video in which deserted crew members looked on as he urged them to “fight” for what he predicted would be “the restaurant of the decade.”

“He’s a———!” cracked Jim Longeretta, waiting in a luxury SUV behind Menchaca, when I asked if he knew what was going on. Would he go to a Noma dinner if someone else was paying for it?

“Absolutely not,” Longeretta replied. “Not at the moment with all the allegations.”

The bus finally parked down the hill. About a dozen held signs reading “Noma broke me” and “Your kitchen is a crime scene,” demanding Redzepi meet with them and offer reparations to his victims.

LA is a city of reinvention, where second chances are a civic sacrament and residents often overlook the failings of the famous. This was a chance for Redzepi to redeem himself with real contraception.

Instead, men with grim faces took photos of critics and the media. Employees peered through a wrought-iron gate as Noma's former fermentation manager, Jason Ignacio White, read a letter denouncing Redzepi.

When White called, no one answered the intercom. A Looky-Loo employee refused to take the letter from him, but took a photo of him leaving the letter hanging on a door.

Security forces directed Latino workers to enter through a side entrance. When a New York Times reporter tried to interview a woman in an apron and clogs holding a bouquet of flowers, she ran back to her van.

“If [Redzepi] “If he wasn't paying attention to what was happening in the city, he would have done things differently,” White said, referring to the fires and deportations that have plagued LA. “He doesn't care about people. He only cares about fame.”

I'm okay with people spending $1,500 on dinner. It's their money, and too many Angelenos love conspicuous consumption. I have no problem with chefs like Redzepi catering to the elite – chefs have been doing it for centuries. His despicable behavior is unfortunately widespread throughout the restaurant industry, from the finest restaurants to the humblest street stalls.

My main problem is the hubris of it all – and the people who made it possible.

When Redzepi announced Noma's residency last summer, the L.A. food world largely hailed him as 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, local produce, food preservation, and seasonality—so-called innovations that my Mexican grandmothers practiced without much admiration or million-dollar budgets.

Ebullient media reports willfully ignored Redzepi's troubled past and brushed aside the cognitive dissonance of offering a $1,500 Mexican meal in a city with wild economic stratification and a Latino community whose existence is threatened by President Trump's deportation tide and whose restaurants have particularly suffered.

Nevertheless, Noma LA sold out within 60 seconds. Its temporary success and subsequent collapse is a further indictment of those who believe that welcoming big names and events – the World Cup, the Olympics – is the way to save us.

How do you say “pendejos” in Danish?

Last year, Redzepi told my colleague Laurie Ochoa that he chose Los Angeles for his first Noma pop-up in the US because he “really fell in love with the city.” He should have known that LA is tired of powerful people trying to whitewash indefensible actions, whether it be Mayor Karen Bass and her handling of the Palisades fire or Trump and the state of this country.

But that's all Redzepi has done since the damning New York Times expose. His cult is now so big that defenders dismiss his alleged victims as weak-willed crybabies.

Noma LA's philosophy is even more pompous. It was one thing for Redzepi to showcase the wonders of Nordic cuisine at his posh restaurant in Copenhagen. It's quite another to land somewhere and tell locals he can improve their cooking, like when he completed a successful Noma run on the Yucatán Peninsula in 2017 – the late Times food critic Jonathan Gold praised the effort, concluding that “beauty and conflict are often intertwined.”

Noma's website says its staff will spend their time in LA “cooking, listening, learning and building a body of work rooted in this place.” For whom? Certainly not for Angelenos, who know what their metropolis is all about in terms of cuisine, from pupusas to Tommy's chili burgers, from Persian food in West LA to regional Chinese cuisine in the San Gabriel Valley.

While Redzepi bragged about walking Sunset Boulevard from Chinatown to Santa Monica to take in the city, he may have missed an important fact: LA doesn't need an outsider telling us how great we are. We already know.

Redzepi is not completely clueless. He has partnered with smaller local restaurants and nonprofits to increase their profits 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 but declined as I knew I wanted to write one to the column via Noma in LA

I didn't think I would write about how LA beat Redzepi.

White and the other prosecutors finished their speeches and then began one cacerolazo – a kind of Latin American protest in which people rattle pots and pans. Two LAPD patrol cars rolled up to meet with angry Noma employees, who demanded that police shoo people away from the driveway. Officer Manny Gomez politely asked everyone to stay on the sidewalk.

“What’s this about?” Gomez asked me as we stood in the shadow of a truck. He shook his head and said, “Wow, that sounds pretty expensive,” when I mentioned Noma LA’s price.

He declined to comment further, so I asked him a better question: “What’s your favorite taco place?” After all, police officers always know where the best place to eat is.

“21st and San Pedro. …Everything you need!” Gomez immediately responded as protesters chanted “Shame! Shame! Shame!” shouted. in a fleet of electric Cadillac Escalades chauffeuring Noma LA's first round of lunch guests. White's letter to his former boss remained untouched at the gate.

Gomez's recommendation reflected an LA that Redzepi would never achieve, where we freely share what we love because we want it to succeed. Where we don't hide behind high walls, apologists and inflated price tags.

I left the Noma protest and drove 20 minutes to El Grullense, a taco truck with an attached dining hall near the Santee Education Complex. I ordered a fatty carne asada burrito that came with two delicious salsas and a grilled jalapeño. Add a tangerine flavored Jarritos and my lunch was $15.

A hundred of them would buy me a night at Noma LA. Give me El Grullense.

The lunchtime crowd—high school students, workers, the elderly—waited patiently for their orders.

Guillermo Rojas Ortega and Juan Villaseñor went with a carne asada burrito, an al pastor burrito and two tacos de cabeza. The 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 number in Spanish, as if saying it in another language would help him understand it better. “Does it at least benefit a charity?”

“They’re cops—” Villaseñor, 40, an electrician, replied when I said no. “There is no money for poor people in the neighborhood, but people go there?”

They became even more outraged when I brought up Redzepi's alleged abuse.

“Hell no!” Rojas Orega exclaimed. “What does it have to do with community?”

“Even if the food sucks, do they still go out to eat? That's bullshit,” Villaseñor said.

Their burritos and tacos were ready. Before the two chatted, I asked them if they had a message for Noma guests.

“Whoever sees him,” Villaseñor said of Redzepi, half jokingly, half not, “hits him.”