Julia Moskin Transcript
Kerry Diamond:
Hi, everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe. I'm your host, Kerry Diamond. I'm the founder and editor of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Each week, I talk to the coolest culinary personalities around. The folks shaping and shaking up the food scene. The restaurant industry from fine dining to fast food is in flux, and that came into focus last week with the announcement that one of the most famous restaurants in the world, Noma in Copenhagen, will be closing at the end of 2024. Its chef and founder René Redzepi is one of the most influential folks in the culinary world, but even he is not immune to the challenges of running a restaurant.
"We have to completely rethink the industry," He told New York Times journalist, Julia Moskin. "This is simply too hard and we have to work in a different way." Julia Moskin broke this story and she joins us to share more. We talk about the impact of Noma and its labor woes, Hollywood's current fascination with fine dining, and whether fine dining matters or not in today's world. If you haven't read Julia's Noma story yet, the link is in our show notes. Julia, by the way, has broken some of the most important restaurant industry stories over the past several years. She is part of the team at the New York Times that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on sexual harassment issues in the workplace. We are honored to have Julia with us today.
Before we get to Julia, we have a little housekeeping. Our Jubilee conference is taking place Saturday, April 15th at Center415 in Manhattan. Jubilee is the largest gathering of women and creatives in and around the culinary space. This will be our 10th in person Jubilee. The day is filled with great talks, networking, beautiful food and drink, and lots of opportunities for connection, conversation, and community. Tickets are now on sale so visit cherrybombe.com for more, or click on the link in our show notes. Also, we have a brand new podcast debuting this Saturday. This is very exciting. It's called She's My Cherry Pie, and it's all about baking. Host Jessie Sheehan talks to some of the most talented bakers around and takes a deep dive into their signature bake goods. Subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Don't miss this Saturday slice of She's My Cherry Pie. Now, here's today's guest.
Julia Moskin, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Julia Moskin:
Thank you for having me.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's jump right in. What is going on with Noma?
Julia Moskin:
Noma has reinvented itself multiple times. Of course, that was my first thought when they came to me about this story. Noma 1.0 closed in 2017 and there was something of a Noma is closing frenzy at that time. At that point, they did announce that they were reopening and they did in 2018 in a totally different space, but this time was different. Now of course, it is entirely possible that two years from now, I will be writing a Noma reopens story. That just is not at all impossible.
René Redzepi is a person who embraces change, always has and, of course, has always embraced making those changes very publicly and the extent to which we can argue about the a extension, which that is a strategy or just his nature or something else altogether. But over the years, he has been very forthcoming with the press. Whether he's completely telling the truth about his feelings, his motivations. Obviously, there's been a lot of questions about that since the story was published on Monday. However, you can't argue that he is provoking conversations that need to be had.
Kerry Diamond:
Have you ever been to Noma?
Julia Moskin:
Yes, I have. Only once.
Kerry Diamond:
When was that?
Julia Moskin:
About 2009.
Kerry Diamond:
Can you tell us a little bit about what Noma is, what it started as and why it is so celebrated?
Julia Moskin:
Sure. Obviously, very few people of the world and even within the world of people who care about food like yourself have actually been to Noma. However, if you've been to a tasting menu, fine dining, ‘Nordic’ is the shorthand. Meaning that it's not Mediterranean is really all that means. With plates, they're very painstakingly arranged and you can see the tweezer work. The plates are not plates but they're rocks or they're seashells or they're clay. In some ways, you have experienced Noma. Because although René certainly did not create that style single-handedly, he really became the person who was the spokesperson for it, who pushed it onto a global level.
In Denmark, there is a strong culture of not sticking your head out, and the saying that ‘the nail that sticks out gets hit by the hammer.’ So he's always been very controversial within Denmark, but you cannot argue that this style of food, this ideology, which originated with this new Nordic manifesto from 2004 started a conversation about hyper-seasonality, looking for ingredients in new ways and new places. That certainly, I think, most of us who are interested in food have experience something like that.
Kerry Diamond:
How about its placement on all these lists? It's regularly at the top of every ‘best of’ list.
Julia Moskin:
As we know and as we've written about extensively, those lists are complicated. Everyone loves a list. The New York Times has embraced all sorts of lists, 11 Takeaways From Prince Harry's Memoir and Seven Ways To Improve Your Relationships. Everyone loves a list. In particular, the World's 50 Best has become extremely powerful. The rise of World's 50 Best and the rise of Noma are absolutely inextricable. World's 50 Best was published by Restaurant Magazine as a PR stunt. It's a British industry magazine. This one guy, Joe Warwick had the idea and he gathered a bunch of people together and said really essentially as a popularity contest, "What's the best restaurant? What do you think is the best restaurant? What do you like the best?"
There were, at first, no criteria that were required. So it really was very much a case of chefs nominating their friends or the people that they liked the best or the people that they thought were doing the most interesting work, which absolutely is valid. But the World's 50 Best has turned into this massive juggernaut that drives a lot of tourism, and it has managed in extraordinary ways to unseat the Michelin guide as the global authority on what is a good restaurant. Michelin has long had its system of inspectors and it's very secretive. You could say, in some ways, that's just as arbitrary and that was very Eurocentric and very focused traditionally on crystal, on China, on linens, on certain amenities and whether there was a purse stool. And that was how you would get your three stars.
I would argue, and I'm sure that René Redzepi would as well, that moving away from that has been overall a great thing for global fine dining. It is still a somewhat arbitrary list. At first, the judges didn't even have to prove that they had been to the restaurant in order to nominate it for best restaurant in the world. Obviously, there is no best restaurant in the world, everybody knows this. But there is still the effort to categorize, the effort to make a list that if you want to, you could just check them off. Go to the Top 50 or go to the Top 20. I can't say I personally know anyone who does this, but they do exist.
Kerry Diamond:
What reasons did René give for the eventual closing of Noma 2.0?
Julia Moskin:
He strangely resisted calling it a closing at first, and the language that he used most was a different kind of restaurant organization. Now, what is a restaurant organization? We do not know. A restaurant inherently to me, I think to most people, involves the serving of guests at least on an occasional basis. Noma was already down to only being open four days a week for five services, which is a very small amount of time to be welcoming guests, serving guests. And the rest of the time was all this very intensive preparation for those few meals.
However, he said that for him personally, financially, that it just was too much, that it was too much work, it was impossible, which is a extremely debatable term. That it was impossible to pay his employees for the work that they were putting into it. It was impossible for him to sustain the level of intense perfectionism that is certainly part of what brought him to the point of being called the best chef in the world.
Kerry Diamond:
The word sustainability has been used a lot in connection with this but it's not sustainable in how we often think of sustainability in restaurants. It's human sustainability.
Julia Moskin:
It's very ironic because, of course, back to the new Nordic manifesto, that was all about environmental sustainability and animal welfare and not, of course, flying in branzino from the Mediterranean and truffles from Italy. That was an environmental movement that was very important in Denmark and really, that was the spark to the match of René's imagination. Like, "How do we do this without bringing these things in? What can we make with what we have?" That was very much the case in the first years of Noma. He was very strict about no lemons, no tomatoes, no olive oil. That really proved impossible.
Again, he himself said at a certain point, even though many people occasionally rediscover this and say, "Oh my goodness, Noma is using local ingredients only." And it hasn't been doing that for a long time. But the narrative of Noma has been very much that it uses only ingredients within, sometimes it's 200 kilometers, sometimes it's 500 kilometers. It's not really meaningful anymore. But that certainly was the idea. It's the same distance from Copenhagen as it is to Trondheim in Norway as it is to Rome. So how is that really a meaningful distinction? But the fact is that as René has said, Scandinavia is an ice block and the growing season is very short.
You can debate people have about whether leeks grow there very well, potatoes grow there very well. Now for René to have the quality and the quantity of leeks and potatoes that he wanted, did he sometimes buy leeks and potatoes from Belgium? Yes, absolutely. Does that make those non Nordic ingredients? I don't really think so. But that, for a long time, was the sustainability debate around Noma, was really very much about the ingredients. Then people started talking more about the stagiaire program at a certain point.
Kerry Diamond:
I think a lot of you out there know what stage is. But can you explain for those who don't?
Julia Moskin:
Sure. A stagiaire is essentially an intern and stage is French for it. It really just means a period of time that you spend as your internship. René himself was a stage at El Bulli, Ferran Adrià's restaurant in Spain. And that was a very formative experience for him. The stage program was part of Noma, I think, from the very beginning. At first, it was all Danish. I think teenage boys mostly, because you can start your culinary education in Denmark when you're still in high school. It's part of your vocational training. There was, I believe, a place for them to live and places for them to eat. And there were very few of them. That is how it was at the beginning.
But René was so enamored of the stage program. He really loved it. I think he did really love teaching at a certain point. So it just got bigger and bigger and it became this rite of passage that so many people had on their resume. Getting that stage at Noma and being able to afford that stage at Noma, which really was something that was restricted to a very privileged class of chefs, in that they have never paid them. To go to Copenhagen, one of the most expensive cities in the world at your own expense. Even for three months, if you're just starting out, is very costly and certainly not something that is available to everyone.
Some of them are not privileged. I should say that there are many people who just went and slept on park benches or in the restaurant even and the ritual of being young and working 18 hours a day was not only a hazing element of the restaurant business, but really also, that very intensive head down, there's absolutely nothing else that you're thinking about. Now that is a level of work that I would argue is unsustainable, that can't be your career.
But I certainly think that a lot of people learned an enormous amount during their stages at Noma. Especially when this style of cooking was still new, you really had to go there to see what he was doing. I think it's only in recent years that it evolved into more of an assembly line cog in the machine situation where as a stagiaire, you report to a chef de partie, which is the most junior chef in the kitchen. And each chef de partie I think has two to four stagiaires report to them. And they don't see René, they don't work with even the sous chefs. There are many kitchens.
It is certainly more efficient to have a stagiaire do one thing over and over for three months because the skills that are required to do the kind of work René does, you can't learn to do that in two days. It takes a while. Traditionally, a stagiaire would learn different skills during an internship in a French restaurant. You would live there, you would be provided with room and board. First, you would learn to cut lemons, then you would learn to chop parsley, then you would learn to make stock. You would be moved through various stages of education. Not deliberately, but the Noma program became something very different.
Kerry Diamond:
Your article revealed exactly how much they were relying on this unpaid labor. You pointed out that it has added to their bottom line, I think $50,000 a month.
Julia Moskin:
At least. Probably more.
Kerry Diamond:
For any restaurateur out there, I'm sure they're thinking $50,000 a month times 12 is a lot of money over the course of a year.
Julia Moskin:
It's not nothing. I don't really think that was the tipping point. Although many people have commented saying clearly once, he can't use unpaid labor. That was the problem. I think the problem was that whether his employees were paid or not paid, they were inadequately compensated for what they were doing. Even if they were paid for the eight hours of work per day that it is legal to be working in the EU [European Union], many of them were working 16 hours a day and it's all off the books. Noma doesn't participate, like many other restaurants, Noma's employees are not part of the Restaurant Workers Union and the Restaurant Workers Union is not in negotiation with Noma.
So it's up to each individual employee to negotiate their contract, which of course is somewhat unusual in a protective society like Denmark. A lot of it came out in 2013 when, I believe, it was a Danish newspaper published an investigation, and at that time, they said 60% to 70% of Noma overall workforce was unpaid. In fact, it appears to be less than that. There have been convulsions about this before, but I think that the atmosphere now around working conditions since the Me Too movement and the rise of this fine dining as something that is visible in popular culture are what made a difference now.
Kerry Diamond:
That's what you think was the tipping point?
Julia Moskin:
Yeah, absolutely. It's astounding to me how many comments referenced the menu as one way or another. Even some people saying, "I guess the chef must have seen The Menu," perhaps not realizing that the chef invented The Menu. And that in many ways, René and others like him, of which there are several, are the model for that character, the chef who is also a visionary and an auteur and possibly a dangerous lunatic.
Kerry Diamond:
I always read The New York Times' comments, but I also was struck by the number of commenters who referenced The Menu as if René had watched The Menu and then made this decision after watching the movie. We are talking about the movie with Ray Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. You've written about it, I saw it over the summer. I was traumatized by the movie. I don't know. I know you are a proper journalist and I don't know what your take on it was personally.
Julia Moskin:
Tell me more about your trauma.
Kerry Diamond:
For folks who didn't see it... I'll just say spoiler alerts because I'm going to talk about some things that happened and it will ruin it for you. The suicide in the very beginning, I just...
Julia Moskin:
That's very shocking.
Kerry Diamond:
I found that hard to take and watch and I didn't know it was coming or expected. I know a lot of people who take their jobs in fine dining incredibly seriously, and this was an example to me of how wrong it can go into the level of occult on the part of the diners and the employees and cult leader, for the chef. I just found it upsetting and also knowing that the industry as a whole is going through this major moment of change, it was a lot of what was on my mind on the big screen and I found it hard to take. Then knowing that they called it a black comedy, a satire, all of this, I was like, ugh. That seemed like just a very dark film in my mind.
Julia Moskin:
Yeah, really beyond a dark comedy, even maybe beyond black comedy. That is such a telling moment because until the moment where the young chef ends his life while his chef is berating him and telling him that he will never be at the level that he, the chef, is, that certainly ends the part where you think it's a fun romp. Before that, was a little cringey, you're... At least, I probably, Kerry, were embarrassed by the eagerness of the young foodie to show off that he knows what a Robot Coupe is and wanting to meet the chef and he's all excited. It's funny and that part really obviously was my favorite part of the movie.
But then the darker turns, whether they're real or not felt very real. I think they feel real to a lot of people in the industry. While perhaps no one has ever actually ended their life by gunshot in the dining room, it didn't seem impossible. There were certainly specific references to Noma in that film, especially the tortillas that are printed with the financial statements that are indictments of the tech bros. The fingerprints of Noma are all over that movie.
Kerry Diamond:
You've written about The Bear. We've interviewed some folks from The Bear. I've thought some parts of The Bear were like watching a documentary and found a lot of it hard to watch, but ultimately found The Bear cathartic in ways I did not find The Menu. Jeremy Allen White just won a Golden Globe, but in the category of Comedy and Musicals. And The Bear was up for a Golden Globe in the Comedy and Musical category. Why is the rest of the world taking all this so differently than some of us?
Julia Moskin:
That's a good question. I think that comedy is the way that this is being introduced to a wider audience. I don't think that the writers of The Menu or the writers of The Bear really came into those projects with an agenda of revealing what it's really like to work in a restaurant like that. Obviously, they felt it was important. It's a very big part of both films, even though most of The Bear takes place in the Italian beef sandwich shop, his trauma, his nightmare is in a fine dining restaurant just like Noma, just like Eleven Madison Park. They refer to him having worked at Noma. So it's clear that is a very important part of the psychology of being a chef.
Look, not everyone has to aspire to Noma level dining or even fine dining at all. There is room, as everyone knows, for all kinds of restaurants. However, people like René, people like Ferran Adrià, Alain Ducasse, Alain Passard, Thomas Keller, have really taken the notion of perfection really far in the last 20 years and created this whole visual language of fine dining. It used to be you would have a beautiful plate of canéles, of pike and a beautiful rose colored sauce non toi.
And it was lovely pink, beautiful, but it still looked like food and you might put a sprig of chervil on it, but did not have to look like something that had been in a rock pool at high tide or low tide or in a garden. All of these very transformational performative work with food, it's great, it's fascinating, it's really interesting, but it is increasingly, and I think this is part of what René was saying, divorced from cooking for people.
Kerry Diamond:
I have to note that you didn't include any women on that list.
Julia Moskin:
I should have included Dominique Crenn, who obviously was part of The Menu. She was their culinary consultant. Which I did think was very interesting I asked her this question, "Do you not feel that this film is actually mocking the style of cuisine that you do?" She said that she didn't think so but she did think it was really important that it was showing the work that goes into it. To her, that was more important than anything else. She's French, she felt very clearly it was a satire, and of course, you would understand that it's not real. But that was her first reaction and that was... It was not in the context of this conversation, it was months ago. And she said, "I really think I don't care because what I want is for people to see all the work that goes into this cuisine."
Kerry Diamond:
Why is Hollywood so taken with the restaurant world right now?
Julia Moskin:
I think it's a combination, a satire of fine dining. I'm not necessarily the right person for this. I would've been ready for that 10 years ago. But I think the idea, not so much of what is interesting, but of what gets green lit by major studios. I think 10 years ago, a satire of fine dining would not have been as meaningful. You have to know what the satire is satirizing in order to appreciate the satire. Again, while a lot of people don't go to these restaurants and indeed pride themselves on not going to these restaurants series like Chef's Table, Mind Of A Chef, René Redzepi was on Charlie Rose, there was a much higher level of interest from the mass media, and I think that's partly because the cuisine did become so performative. It was interesting.
A meal at Noma, one of my sources said, "You don't go to Noma to learn to cook." But I would also even argue you don't go to Noma to eat. It is a performance. It is absolutely an experience of performance art that is not really designed to be haute couture. Nobody wears that stuff that you see on the runway, but it all trickles down. It makes people think it moves the culture in different directions. It refers to previous iterations, it projects into the future, and I really hope that one of the takeaways from this whole conversation that I feel like hopefully the industry is having is that there is a place for that. It's not just vanity, it's not just showing off for rich people. It is an art form. And of course, not everyone can go there, but it's like with fashion, we could all just wear sweatpants all the time and live perfectly good lives. But it's much more-
Kerry Diamond:
I think it's moving in that direction.
Julia Moskin:
It's a much more interesting world if we care about what we eat.
Kerry Diamond:
A lot of folks are saying this is the beginning of the end of fine dining. Do you agree?
Julia Moskin:
I think that's silly. I think there will always be fine dining. I do think that in the same way that people buy fair trade bananas and organic milk, I hope that what happens is that people think about the cost of their meal and whether that is a service surcharge on the bill, whether that is some sort of stamp of restaurant sustainability, which probably would be much too complicated. But even just thinking about it, paying attention, asking yourself those questions when you go to a restaurant and you spend money, "Where's that money going?" I think you're entitled to expect at least if you're spending, not $500 but even $100, you're entitled to know that the ingredients are treated well and that the employees are treated well.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you think René will tackle this as part of Noma 3.0? Tackle the sustainability issues that we've been talking about? I should read the statement he himself put out there. He said, "Our goal is to create a lasting organization dedicated to groundbreaking work and food, but also to redefine the foundation for a restaurant team, a place where you can learn, you can take risks and you can grow. That's vague but it's a statement nonetheless.
Julia Moskin:
He doesn't say anywhere in that statement, "And the end result of all of this is a plate that we will put in front of guests." They've been very clear that they will continue to serve guests sometimes, but they are not saying that the end goal of Noma 3.0 is to fully reopen as a restaurant or open new restaurants or turn into... It's certainly possible, I can certainly see René doing this and saying, "We are opening a chain of sustainable mushroom restaurants. We have done the work, we've done the research, and now we know that is the most sustainable way to operate."
Kerry Diamond:
What are some of the things you're expecting from him in this next chapter?
Julia Moskin:
The interest in a restaurant being a place that creates food products rather than serving food is something that certainly a lot of restaurateurs are thinking about. Restaurants, as we have now learned, are not pandemic-proof, they're not climate-proof, they're not recession-proof. Certainly, almost anyone can put out a line of sauces, a line of condiments. But what I think of is what David Chang of Momofuku has done in the pandemic, which is a real pivot, they closed a number of restaurants during the pandemic, as did many of these high-end chains, but really in order to focus on developing products that don't exist on the market right now which are very much tied to the Momofuku brand.
Sure, they started with salts. Everyone has salt. But now they're doing noodle packets, ramen packets. Now that obviously is an extremely high tech operation. Nissin and Top Ramen are these enormous companies that have been doing this for decades. The technology of creating everything, from the noodles to the flavor packet, to the packaging, to the shipping, it's all very complicated and it's much harder than just putting some tomato sauce in a jar. That's what they've been doing. They have also created a upscale restaurant level, it says, in fact, restaurant grade, on the little Momofuku soy sauce.
Now whether Americans are ready to pay $8 instead of $4 for eight ounces of soy sauce, we don't know that yet. Because it preserves the Momofuku brand. He is not doing tomato sauce, for example, but... And it's also very fresh and it's a way of getting Momofuku into people's homes. As we all know, that really is the way to get people to think... It's one thing to go to a restaurant, it's one thing to be on vacation. But when the Momofuku brand is in your pantry every time you open the door, that's really different.
Kerry Diamond:
Do you expect him to spend much time trying to solve the human sustainability issues we talked about? What you know about him after covering him all these years, do you think that's of interest to him?
Julia Moskin:
I think he certainly wants to continue to be a mentor and a teacher. I think that is important to him in terms of his legacy. I think he has realized that he has not succeeded at that endeavor in the way that he may have imagined that he did. Sure, hundreds of people have come through the Noma kitchen, but the number of people who really worked with him closely, who were personally inspired by him, it's a fraction. It's not a tiny fraction, but it is a fraction.
And I think that learning that so many people have such unhappy memories of their time there really has been a wake up call for him because I think he lives in a bit of a bubble and in Copenhagen, he is an enormous star. Now, does he drive around in a Jaguar? No. He's always on his bike. He lives very modestly. He has essentially transformed the tourism economy of Denmark and possibly all of Scandinavia. And people are very deferential to him. So I think that he has not heard a lot of the bad news about how people think of him and the organization.
Kerry Diamond:
It was interesting to me to see on his Instagram account he was actually going in there and having a conversation with some folks who are being critical of him.
Julia Moskin:
He always engages with the press and with the public. Again, I don't know if it's a strategy, but I think it really works for him. There are countless chefs who I have interviewed who have refused to go on the record about any kind of industry-wide human resources problem because they know that as soon as they speak out about it, then they become a target and the people who have worked for them will come after them. Maybe they should do it anyway, but they don't. Maybe that would happen, maybe it wouldn't, but they don't take the risk.
I do give René credit for just facing up to it. Who are we to say that it's not working for him? It is working for him. He is changing the conversation. I think what he is saying with this closing is that's what he wants more than anything. He doesn't want to cook even anymore. Sure, maybe he wants to taste some garums and dishes, but he's not saying that he's going to lead the kitchen or be there every day. He seems like he's going to have more of an oversight role like a chief creative officer. But I think that he genuinely thinks, "Let's try this."
Kerry Diamond:
I know you are not in the business of making predictions as a rule, but anything you are anticipating for 2023 in the restaurant world?
Julia Moskin:
I think what will happen and what has been heartening to see on social media this week is many restaurateurs coming back and fighting against the narrative that fine dining is unsustainable. Certainly, I've gotten a lot of flack about focusing on this one essentially negative story and letting Noma drive that narrative that fine dining is unsustainable because they say fine dining is not unsustainable. Fine dining at that level may be unsustainable. Fine dining at Noma might have been unsustainable, but let me show you how I'm doing it. And I think that is what the industry really has needed to do, is to just have a much more open conversation about best practices, and I think that will continue. I finally think that will continue.
When I wrote about The Willows two years ago, that's a small restaurant that is in the Pacific Northwest that doesn't have a global profile. The Willows was on many on the top of many best restaurants in the US lists. And I had 30 sources going on the record about the abusive working conditions there and they came out and it didn't seem to make a difference. The restaurant did not close. People kept going there. That is why it was so important to publish this Noma story in the way that we did because I knew that while that wasn't the conversation starter that it should have been, that Noma and the closing of Noma and the acknowledgement, whether it's real or real to René or economically real, we simply don't know. We don't have those numbers. We do not know what his personal income is or what he considers sustainable.
What we do know is that talking about best practices in any industry is always a good idea. I do think that this story hopefully will begin that conversation in a way that perhaps others have not, and that I'm not taking personal credit for that. That is the power of the reach of the times, but also the fact that it was read by two million people in 24 hours really is heartening to me and indicates that there is a level of public interest, public concern. Of course, everyone loves to hate on rich people food and make fun of reindeer hearts and duck brains and say, "That's disgusting. I would never eat that. What's wrong with the cheeseburger?" But it was very good to see restaurateurs coming out and saying, "This is how I do it. This is how I do it. This is what I think is wrong." And that can only be good for the industry.
Kerry Diamond:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. You might not know this, but Cherry Bombe started as a print magazine back in 2013, and it is still the centerpiece of everything we do. It's print only, meaning you won't find the content on our website. It's a little old school, but that's how we like it. You can purchase an issue at cherrybombe.com or at your favorite bookstore, magazine shop or specialty store like Golden Fig Fine Foods in Minneapolis, Bold Fork Books in Washington D.C. and the Heath Newsstand in San Francisco.
Back to Julia Moskin. I asked Julia if she could stick around and tell us a little bit about herself and her career because we get a lot of questions about working in food media. She agreed, but Julia doesn't necessarily consider herself part of the food media. Let's hear what she had to say.
Julia Moskin:
The food media tag is complicated. Many people see the food media as being people who take free meals and people who are enthralled to chefs. Being a food reporter at The New York Times is different. We are expected to maintain the same distance from our sources as any other beat. I don't go to a lot of conferences, I don't go to restaurant opening parties, I don't go to book parties so I actually don't know a lot of people in the industry very well. And that is, I think something that's just a little bit different about working at The New York Times, which is, of course, an incredible privilege as a writer of any kind.
To have the kind of institutional support to be able to write that Noma story, we have lawyers, we have editors, we have investigative experts. That is really a very different kind of work than the way that most of us food writers start out. And you certainly don't become a food writer because you think you are going to win a Pulitzer Prize. That could never happen. But you would never go into it with that reason. I started a long time ago. I wrote my first restaurant review, I think, in the 1990s. That was for a giveaway paper called The New York Press where you did not have to have any particular qualifications. You just had to write a letter saying, "Tell us why you're qualified to be a restaurant critic."
That is really what started it for me. Now, obviously, it's very different. Now I, of course, get this question all the time, too. You have to develop your voice long before you have a venue for a publication. It's a bit like being a stagiaire. It's not very rewarding and not very remunerative but if you're going to be a food writer, people are going to look for your work. Whether that's on your blog or your newsletter or on medium or Substack or whatever it is, you have to put in that time before you are going to get a job.
Kerry Diamond:
When did you know you wanted to be a journalist?
Julia Moskin:
I did not know I was going to be a journalist, and when I was hired at The New York Times, I had never worked at any other newspaper, which was very rare at the time. I was working in book publishing, I had grown up in New York. I was named after Julia Child. I had a lot of food experiences, mostly because my family was just very interested in food. My parents were newlyweds in the '60s when Julia Child's books came out. They cooked their way through. It was very Ina and Jeffrey Garten and very Julie and Julia. So I did not have any particular qualifications. I have only worked in the front of the house in restaurants.
But at that time, it was more important to have knowledge of food. You were supposed to know the difference between eggs florentine and eggs benedict and Chicken Kiev and Chicken Cordon Bleu. Those things were on their way out but there was still a perception that you had to know the cannon of French food, which I did mostly just from reading. I worked at Kitchen Arts and Letters when I was in high school, and just a willingness to be opinionated. At that point, most people just didn't know very much about food and did not have opinions about it and hadn't cooked very much. I think I just happened to cook a little bit more than many of my peers because all of...
It was the '70s and all of our mothers were out shopping at the co-op and discovering themselves and going to consciousness raising groups, and a lot of them weren't cooking dinner in the way that they had traditionally. But my mother did and she taught me very early on... Both of my parents did, really. I grew up in a time when a lot of my friends just had frozen fried chicken for dinner and didn't know how to cut an onion. So I had a little bit more knowledge than the other people who would've been doing my job. Now, everyone has so much more knowledge.
Kerry Diamond:
That is true. What were some of your first assignments at The Times?
Julia Moskin:
The first article I ever wrote was about... I believe it was an apple shortage in the Hudson Valley. The other privilege, an enormous privilege, that I had is that I grew up in a house where The New York Times was read every day, and that was important then because you had to be able to write in a ‘Timesian’ voice. I did not know that I could do that. I had not been a journalist. But somehow because I had grown up with The Times in my house every day, when I sat down to write that article, it just came pouring out of my fingertips. I did not know that I could do that but I did know basics of who, what, where, when, why, and what is the voice. It's a very neutral...
The Times is much more voice-y now. They let us be a lot more chatty. But at that time, it was still formal with a lot of numbers and quotes from experts about what was going on with the apple harvest. Most of the early stories were like that. But The Times style section, which is what Food falls under, has an incredible history starting from the early '80s of reflecting culture and being willing to engage with it in a serious way. The food section when it was still a freestanding section long before cooking came along and became this unbelievable wonderful money maker for The New York Times, the food section made no money. We had no advertisers. There were a couple of supermarkets. There just was not a natural way to make money. But the restaurant review at that time was the centerpiece of the food section. The Sulzbergers were very interested in who was the restaurant critic and what was going on with New York restaurants. It was...
Kerry Diamond:
The owners of the New York Times.
Julia Moskin:
Yeah. That I think is what saved the food section and made it possible for it now to develop into what it is.
Kerry Diamond:
Your specialty over the past several years has really evolved to become these very complicated stories, these very complicated investigations into things happening in the world of food. How did that evolve?
Julia Moskin:
Most of my first 10 years at The Times was devoted to stories that I loved doing. What are the best Jamaican patties in all of New York City? Or what is Funfetti? Or where does all this sushi come from? Or what does it mean when they say that an oyster is wild on a menu? All of these just questions that I had always had as a curious eater, and I got to go around and answer them. That kept me going for a very long time. The beginning of my life as an investigative reporter obviously started when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey pushed publish on their Harvey Weinstein story. The impact of that obviously was felt throughout The Times, throughout the newsroom.
It was very clear that everyone's job was to find the Harvey Weinstein on their beat, who is the worst kept secret in whatever you cover. It was not very difficult to find our way to Mario Batali, his friends and investors and co-conspirators at The Spotted Pig. I was working very much in tandem with Kim Severson, who has been a journalist for 30 years and certainly had done those kinds of stories before. I don't think either of us had... I don't think anyone had the sense of what it would be like to work with women who were survivors. It's such a different muscle listening to people, letting them tell their stories. Obviously, you don't take notes when someone is telling you something that happened to them and you're the first person they've ever told. That is a huge responsibility.
We just felt our way through it together. We have a lot of support in the newsroom, mostly from other female reporters. I have to say that the still then male dominated editorial structure was one where we would have to argue that having your breast felt was "bad enough" to be something that to mention in a story. That was what a lot of the early conversations were, "Is it bad enough?" And that was something that I'm really grateful that we did together. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, we haven't been able to work together in that same way for the last few years. Certainly, doing it alone is a lot harder.
Not to overstate, it's such a privilege to be able to work with people who are being so brave. There's nothing in it for them. There's no benefit, really, except for the pride and respect that comes. That does come with being a whistleblower. And I think that overall, I can't think of anyone who's ever regretted going on the record in one of these stories, which I am very proud of. It seems like the least that we can do if they are willing to have that be the thing that comes up for the rest of their life. When someone Googles their name, what we do doesn't seem very important compared to that.
Kerry Diamond:
Julia, how has this changed you as both a journalist and a person? These have been such intense stories. The Me Too story you referenced, the sommelier story that you wrote.
Julia Moskin:
It certainly has made me realize that in some ways working in media is a very privileged field. I, as a young wannabe book editor, experienced my share of unwanted advances, but nothing like what goes on in the restaurant industry. Nothing physical, nothing abusive, much less the kind of sustained harassment that really wears people down. I think the strangest thing to me is the realization that the men who are offenders. I'm really not talking about Noma here. There is never been any suggestion made to me that at Noma or really anywhere else in Copenhagen, that this is a big problem the way that it was at The Willows, the way that it was at Babbo, the way that it was at The Spotted Pig.
That the men do not have any sense of what it's like to take that experience forward into your life as a woman. They think they did something bad, they think they are engaging with that offense but they do not think that the women who they have touched, the women who they have hurt, the women who they've manipulated, they think that they are somehow free once all of this comes out because the men feel like now they're the victim. Not in a self-pitying way but it's very clear to the world that those women did nothing wrong. And yet the extent to which women who have gone through those experiences feel that they have done something wrong and the way that it permeates. Of course, this is not only in the restaurant industry, but as a journalist and as a person, I think I didn't understand that until I was able to do this work.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. I hope you realize how much we appreciate the work you do. I know how hard what you do is and so many of us out there appreciate it and you are really contributing. I know this isn't your goal but you are really contributing to the important change that's happening in the industry. So thank you on behalf of a lot of us.
Julia Moskin:
It's certainly not what I expected. I thought I'll go and write about pancakes and pizza and barbecue. It has been an amazing surprise so thank you.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you for your time today. Thank you for the story. It's one that we'll all be watching. It's an evolving story so we'll be interesting to see what happens over the next two years. As you alluded to, it could be anything.
Julia Moskin:
Absolutely.
Kerry Diamond:
All right. Thank you, Julia.
Julia Moskin:
Thank you, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Julia Moskin of The New York Times for stopping by. Be sure to read her Noma story, if you haven't already. Want to hear from other New York Times reporters and editors? We've had great chats with The Times food folks, including Nikita Richardson and Florence Fabricant. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Also, be sure to sign up for the Cherry Bombe newsletter over at cherrybombe.com, and stay on top of all Cherry Bombe happenings, podcast episodes, and events. Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our theme song is by the band Tralala. Thank you to our friends at CityVox for their help with today's show. Our producer is Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. And to Joseph Hazan, we hope you're feeling better. Thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.