Restaurant kitchens have long had a reputation for being a bit like pressure cookers. But now an exciting new guard of chefs are bidding goodbye to the stale, toxic working environments and building a more inclusive, welcoming space in the city's top kitchens
Restaurant kitchens are often portrayed as somewhat chaotic habitats, pirate ship-like places where chronically overworked underlings toil their way through 80-hour work weeks under constant stress and strain. Just tune in to Hulu’s wildly popular drama series The Bear and you will see the stereotype played out in full.
For the fine dining scene, that stereotype has often been rooted in truth. Earlier this year, the Financial Times lifted the lid on the alleged harsh conditions and gruelling workloads of New Nordic titan Noma's stagiaires (unpaid 'trainees'). Subsequently, Danish weekly Weekendavisen reported that the restaurant’s sister establishment, 108, had systematically underpaid foreign chefs for years. The beacon of Scandi fine dining has since vowed to change its ways.
In other parts of the region, things have changed already. In Stockholm, prominent chefs at the forefront of the city’s dining scene have waved goodbye to the punishing work hours and the toxic work culture that has defined the restaurant industry for so long.
“If you as a restaurant claim to be sustainable, and you don’t extend that sustainability to the staff, you’re doing a half-assed job,” says Elvira Lindqvist, head chef at Oxenstiernan in Stockholm. She made a name for herself as head chef at Fotografiska, which she placed at the forefront of Scandinavia’s most sustainable restaurants. Today, at Oxenstiernan, her staff works in two shifts to ensure a 40-hour work week.
If the industry is to stem the current flow of staff away from the sector, this approach is necessary, Lindqvist says.
“Today, the employees demand it. People want a life outside of work. We embrace it and welcome it. If the staff is treated well, they are more inclined to stay. And if your work is structured, and you are smart in what you serve, it is doable, also financially,” says Lindqvist, who coming up as a young chef experienced some of the crude behaviour portrayed in The Bear in real life.
She welcomes the ongoing debate around the working conditions at industry titans such as Noma: “If we really want this industry to be good, we need to expose the ones that don’t do well. We need to talk about them.”
The long hours and questionable working conditions in some places have given the industry a bad reputation, scaring people, not least women, away from the kitchens. Lindqvist says she and her industry colleagues generally struggle to find staff, however, as a woman it seems to be easier for her to find female employees.
“Women seem to want to work in female-led kitchens. I see a lot of kitchen teams with only men, led by men, and I hear male colleagues complaining that no women are applying to work in their kitchens.”
Given some of the recent headlines, this hardly comes as a surprise. As a young chef, Lindqvist says she had to work much harder as a woman to gain respect and male superiors would mock her with remarks like “let’s see how long you last”. But that has changed, she says. Her impression is that the archetypical portrayal of inhospitable working environments and screaming chefs is an increasingly rare sight in Swedish kitchens, although she notes that female chefs at the top level are still rare. Today, just 6% of Michelin-starred restaurants globally are headed by women.
One of them is head chef Florencia Abella at the helm of Ekstedt, one of Stockholm’s culinary institutions. Abella believes that long hours and a bad working environment will ultimately show in the food.
“If you are tired or mad at the people you are working with, it’s going to show on the plates. The focus is not going be the same,” she says.
Abella also works with two teams of chefs to ensure that they do not work more than 40 to 50 hours a week. Any overtime is paid, she says. As a young chef working in Japan, she says she witnessed superiors punching ‘disobedient’ chefs who didn’t comply with their orders. At Ekstedt, she wants to create an aggression-free environment.
“Sometimes you have to tell people to do things properly, but to throw pans and that kind of stuff is not stable,” she says. “You don’t need to overreact and be aggressive. That way you won’t have your staff for a very long time.”
As culinary director at TAK, the rooftop restaurant at Stockholm’s swanky Hotel At Six, Frida Ronge is also experiencing recruitment difficulties. More than ever, it is important for restaurateurs to offer staff decent working conditions, says Ronge, who claims that a 40-hour work week is indeed doable most times of the year. “We need to do better if we want to attract people to the business. We have fun and there’s good energy, but that’s not enough any more. People need to have the same rights as in other industries.”