Jason Ignacio White speaks to a group of protestors outside of Noma’s L.A. residency.
Photo: Hugh Merwin
Earlier this week, John Foss, a chef and boat captain from Alaska who also goes by the handle Johnny Fishmonger, was driving to Los Angeles. He’d planned to support former workers of Noma who were protesting conditions within René Redzepi’s fabled Danish restaurant ahead of its extended California residency. Foss was going to cook for the demonstrators. A tentative menu included grilled oysters and smelts, but he ran out of gas in Buellton, California, after driving hundreds of miles in his old Jeep and was last seen hanging a sign in Griffith Park at sunset that read “RENÉ, DENMARK CALLED … TIME TO COME HOME.”
Had he made it to Silver Lake earlier, Foss would have found 20 or so picketers and many members of the media congregated near the entrance to Paramour Estate, where Noma’s residency kicked off yesterday and where protests will take place for the foreseeable future. The crowd held signs at shoulder level — “UNPAID LABOR BUILT YOUR EMPIRE”; “NO MICHELIN STARS FOR VIOLENCE”; “RENÉ, YOUR ‘GENIUS’ IS BUILT ON OUR BROKEN DREAMS” — during speeches about amends and reparation.
The setting felt appropriately dramatic for such a showdown: Paramour has been called both a “fictional romantic fortress” by Los Angeles magazine and “too The Shining” by Rick Rubin. Pop culture has seeped into every yard of its velveteen decrepitude, and lore is baked into each of its 22,000 square feet. It’s a hotel and events venue and a former music studio, and it houses the marble-rimmed pool into which Britney Spears belly flopped a Porsche 928 in the music video for “My Prerogative.”
An hour before dinner service was set to begin, Redzepi posted a hastily produced but professional video of his own to Instagram in which he addressed his staff during lineup with a last-minute change: With strained eyes and the vocabulary of crisis communications, Redzepi told the assembled workers, “In order to make sure you guys are 100 percent feeling safe, I’m going to step away, okay?” Noma, and specifically this L.A. pop-up, he explained in the clip, will now be in the hands of its workers. (But will it? The clip included no talk of divestment, amends, or the slightest hint at who’s really in charge now. “You’ll see me around,” the chef added toward the end of the video.)
All of this was happening because of the New York Times’ landmark report on physical and psychological abuse at Noma during its 23-year history and also because of Jason Ignacio White, a former director of fermentation at Noma, who was leading a workshop in Nairobi last month when he decided, seemingly without much thought, to post his account of a traumatic burning accident from his time at the restaurant.
Noma has flatly denied White’s version of the particular event, but his messages nevertheless became catalysts for a standalone website and hundreds of other posts that have been viewed by millions; White is now in Los Angeles, as well, staying until Redzepi agrees to meet to discuss demands outlined in collaboration with One Fair Wage, a worker advocacy group.
Even before this most recent story, there was a 2023 Times story about the once-“rageful” Redzepi. Noma at Boiling Point, a documentary that showcases the chef’s anger, was just this past week both taken down from Vimeo and discussed in “Page Six.” Abuse is the main subject of a lauded Lucky Peach article by Redzepi, and in Jeff Gordinier’s memoir, Hungry — ostensibly a chronicle of Redzepi’s previous global pop-ups and genius — the chef’s penchant for bullying runs just beneath and parallel to the narrative like a fault line: “I used to be so angry in the kitchen. Insanely angry. A monster. I made a decision: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’”
So who is Jason Ignacio White, and how did this most recent wave of allegations manage to at last break through to widespread awareness? The former Noma employee (he was there from 2017 to 2022 with two gaps) is 39 and reportedly spent time in Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains during a hardscrabble childhood before moving to San Antonio. He is self-taught and says he’s not a chef. White also claims he never signed an NDA at Noma, which emboldened his first public posts about abuse within the complex.
Aaron Adams Casañas is the chef and owner of Astera, a Portland, Oregon, restaurant that serves high-end vegan tasting menus. Casañas, like others who turned a preoccupation with niche ferments into a full-time job, never worked at Noma but instead befriended White over Instagram. “Jason is incredibly generous with knowledge,” Casañas told me. “He literally sent me thousands of pages of notes and documents all about fermentation.” Casañas added, “Here’s the thing. If you have a restaurant where you have a grumpy chef, that’s whatever. But if you have a restaurant where you have a grumpy, physically abusive chef who is relying on tons and tons of free labor and then makes a fucking announcement that fine-dining is unsustainable, while he’s raking it in, that just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.” What’s White’s motivation? “I think Jason just wants to take them down,” Casañas ventured.
Does this reckoning register as vindication for White? “I mean, I didn’t know what victory looked like,” he said during yesterday’s protest, “which to be honest is something you should know when you go into something as big as this.” He went on, “But then the other side of it is that all the sponsors dropped out even before we even started the protest. We were hoping that would happen because of escalation. It just shows that people are listening and change is already happening.”
In an interview, Saru Jayaraman, the worker-rights activist and president of One Fair Wage, described pathways for Noma to make amends with workers. “If we don’t get to meet and talk through demands, generally the next step we take is to pursue people’s claims, for physical abuse, payment, harassment,” she said. “There are so many things people have come forward with that have legal repercussions that we could pursue if we’re not able to engage in a dialogue with the company.”
For now, nobody from Noma is talking. Instead, a mix of security and Paramour Estate staff could be seen peeking through the gaps in the compound’s gate. Earlier in the week, pickup trucks had clogged the Estate’s nautilus-shaped driveway. Workers tweaked fairy lights while others carted immense slabs of plate glass and calibrated coolant lines to supply outdoor refrigerators. They pumped air into a cluster of large inflatable mushroom sculptures and ferried an unending supply of ingredients from a hatchback into a nearby outbuilding. But a fleet of immaculately shined, “noma LA26”-branded Cadillacs — the official vehicle of the residency for a time — that had dotted the hill were suddenly gone along with the car brand’s corporate sponsorship.
Neighbors along Micheltorena Street had recently been noticing the glut of Noma L.A.’s official vehicles on standby up and down the hill. Redzepi “has not been the warmest and fuzziest of neighbors,” one resident told John Fulton, the author of the neighborhood-focused Eastside Rag Substack.
At some point during the protests, either another resident or someone from within Noma must have grown concerned and called the cops. “What’s going on in there, a restaurant?” the arriving officer asked.
“It’s a temporary restaurant for three months,” someone replied. The small gaggle of protestors raised their phones to try to get pictures of the first customers now arriving through the gates, and the mood intensified. The officer looked around to survey the scene and acknowledged the rising tension. “Maybe not three months,” he said.
