Every year after the Michelin guide announces its selection of starred restaurants in France, journalist Nora Bouazzouni receives a flurry of angry and resentful messages.
It’s become an unexpected consequence of her burgeoning reputation as one of the most influential whistleblowers of France’s restaurant industry.
The messages come from despondent restaurant staff, livid at seeing abusive, toxic chefs who have made their lives hell elevated to hero status with the awarding of one of the highest accolades in the industry.
“It’s really the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Bouazzouni tells CNN.
Since 2017, the French food journalist has reported on toxic restaurant culture in kitchens across France. But it was her latest book “Violence in the Kitchen” published in May, that blew the lid off the story, exposing the extent of physical, emotional and psychological abuse in kitchens across France: open secrets in the industry, little-known to the general French public. In short, few emerge unscathed.
“The testimonies that struck me the most were those that very quickly aimed to dehumanize people in the kitchen,” Bouazzouni says. “Because it’s by dehumanizing people in the kitchen that they can be exploited.”
Toxic kitchen culture is hardly unique to France and has been exposed and denounced for years in Anglophone and European countries.
But Bouazzouni’s work has helped spark a national reckoning in France and has reached the ears of the country’s top lawmakers: On July 7, a motion to create a commission of inquiry into violence in the kitchen was tabled in the French National Assembly.“Indeed, behind the smooth and idealized images of the profession as presented in various entertainment programs hides a rigid, almost military and brutal hierarchical organization,” the motion reads. “The working conditions of the kitchen ‘brigades’ are often degrading, stressful, even violent. Yet silence reigns…”
The mention of the “military and brutal hierarchical organization” is noteworthy as it refers to the system codified by French chef, restaurateur and writer August Escoffier in the late 19th century. Inspired by his time in the military, the kitchen brigade, as it’s known, was modeled after the army, in which rank and hierarchy determines the chain of command. At the top of the food chain are the chef de cuisine and sous-chef, followed by the chefs de partie, who are responsible for specific stations (sauces, seafood, cold dishes and so on), junior cooks or commis and trainees.
