The Brigade System Helps Restaurants Succeed. Does It Also Lead to Abuse?

 

 

“Allegations against Noma’s chef have spurred debate over whether a 19th-century model for organizing kitchen staffs breeds physical and psychic violence.

 

In an early episode of “The Bear,” Carmy tries to bring order to his dysfunctional restaurant by imposing a traditional work structure called the brigade system. “This is what real kitchens do,” he tells the staff, explaining that every cook will have a defined role and will report up the chain of command.

 

What follows is a guerrilla campaign of mockery and sabotage from employees who liked the old chaotic workflow just fine.

 

Not everyone loves the brigade system. Its detractors have come out in force this month, spurred by a New York Times report on allegations that the chef René Redzepi punched, slammed and screamed at workers for several years at Noma, his restaurant in Copenhagen.

 

The brigade, a production line marked by division of labor and a pyramid management structure, is followed today by Noma and most other fine-dining restaurants. Its critics say it breeds the kind of physical and psychic violence that was once an accepted fact of life in kitchens but in recent years has been spilling into public view.

 

“The brigade system pushes abuse down the line and pushes credit up the line,” said Saqib Keval, an owner and a chef of Masala y Maiz, a restaurant in Mexico City that aims for a less top-down approach. “The chef-leaders become these fearless martyrs who get all the credit for the labor of the team. And the team is the one always at fault and most at risk.”

 

At times, abuse travels down the line in an appallingly literal way. Robin Burrow, an associate professor of organization studies at the University of York, in England, who has written several studies of kitchen behavior and misbehavior, recalled interviewing a veteran of one restaurant where there was a set ritual of punishment for errors.

 

“What do we do when someone makes a mistake?” the chef would ask. The crew would sing out, in unison, “Punch them in the face!” At this point, the chef would point to one person who had to deliver the punch to the unfortunate cook who had erred.

 

“There’s a perception that if the chef de commis makes a mistake, it’s the chef de partie’s fault — the next level of the hierarchy should have been policing it,” Dr. Burrow said. “There’s individual ownership, but there’s also a degree of collective responsibility as well.”

 

When the French chef Auguste Escoffier first laid out his vision for the brigade system in the late 19th century, face-punching was not necessarily part of the workflow. Escoffier had been an army chef during the Franco-Prussian War. His military service gave him a chance to make several innovations in the preparation of horse meat; more lastingly, it shaped Escoffier’s views on how large groups could be made to work efficiently and harmoniously toward a single goal.

 

French kitchens in Escoffier’s youth were often dark, disorderly and drunken. A cook would make an entire dish from scratch, resulting in duplication of effort at almost every stage.

 

Escoffier’s goal was to mold this uncouth and unruly mob into a profession. In his kitchen, everyone wore clean uniforms. Drinking was banned. So was shouting; quiet had to be maintained so cooks could hear the orders as the chef called them out.

 

“His idea was to civilize the kitchen,” said Luke Barr, the culinary historian who charted the birth of the system in “Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, the Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class.”

 

Mobilized into a brigade, cooks became specialists. Some picked thyme and chopped celery. Others turned the rotisserie. Fish cooks sautéed one trout after another. Sauciers whisked so many pots of beurre blanc they could do it in their sleep. Sous-chefs and chefs de partie inspected the work and synchronized the action so that every plate destined for a single table could sail out to the dining room at the same moment.

 

“It changed how quickly food could come out, and changed the consistency,” Mr. Barr said. “If you have this kind of system, then every time an order goes out it is identical.”

 

Escoffier’s reforms were so effective that today it is rare to find a high-performing kitchen of any size that doesn’t follow the brigade system in some way.

 

“The group organization makes the seemingly impossible possible,” the chef Christian F. B. Puglisi wrote last week in a full-throated, lyrical defense of the brigade system in his Substack newsletter, “A Chef’s Perspective.”

 

Because Escoffier’s system is so widely used, though, it can be hard to separate it from other elements of fine-dining kitchens. When a chef stabs a cook in the leg with a barbecue fork, as Mr. Redzepi has been accused of doing, is he perverting the purpose of the brigade? Or is he following it to its logical conclusion?

 

“I can’t sit here and tell you that brigade systems aren’t effective in certain ways,” said the chef Eric Huang, who has cooked in big New York City kitchens that follow the Escoffier model.

 

“The problem is that they’re so effective that they deprioritize compassion, empathy and emotionally intelligent leadership.”

 

Mr. Huang, who now owns Pecking House in Manhattan, said that in high-pressure kitchens, cooks are promoted to management jobs based on their technical chops. People skills, meanwhile, are rarely mentioned, let alone rewarded.

 

“That’s why things can get very toxic very easily,” he said. He recently wrote that in his time at Eleven Madison Park, from 2016 to 2020, he experienced “real physical violence,” including “chefs grabbing me by the collar, squeezing my arm till it hurt, shoving me, throwing plates at me.” The restaurant did not respond to a request for comment.

 

While some restaurant companies, following the lead of other industries, have embraced management training and put in place ways for employees to give feedback to their bosses, most independent restaurants lag behind. The leadership ethos in many kitchens is largely unchanged from Escoffier’s day.

 

“How can I be a more thoughtful leader, how can I hear others, manage my own triggers and get the best out of everyone?” said Jenny Dorsey, a Singapore-based chef and food researcher who has written about restaurants’ resistance to ideas from outside. “That is not the growth that the brigade system is defining as important.”

 

Of course, a strict top-down brigade is not the only way to structure a kitchen. There are small mom-and-pops where Mom and Pop do everything; restaurants where everyone eats the same thing and the cooks work more or less the way you do when you invite friends for dinner; highly collaborative kitchens and anarcho-syndicalist collectives.

 

At Masala y Maiz, Mr. Keval and his partner, Norma Listman, avoid keeping people in specialized jobs. Everyone in the kitchen takes turns working at every station over the course of a month.

 

“We’re constantly rotating so there’s not this hierarchy of one station is more important than another, or being a line cook is more important than being a prep cook,” Ms. Listman said.

 

Many chefs were forced to rethink their organizations during the pandemic. Workers and customers fled crowded cities. Traffic from overseas travelers and conventioneers dried up. The Red Light, Green Light changes to indoor-dining rules forced restaurateurs to adapt and adapt again.

 

As hiring picked up, restaurants brought on younger workers whose idea of work-life balance leans strongly toward the life side of the scale. Both trends helped loosen the framework of the brigade, said Lilly Jan, a lecturer in food and beverage management at Cornell University’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration.

 

“The structures are becoming flatter,” Dr. Jan said. But any kitchen where multiple tasks have to be coordinated needs some form of hierarchy, she said, and hierarchies create “opportunities for malpractice. That’s not limited to the brigade system.”

 

Top-down leadership structures are common in many businesses, yet chefs seem to be far more prone to slapping and kicking their underlings than, say, doctors or head librarians. Dr. Burrow said his research suggests that abuse in the restaurant industry has less to do with organizational charts than with other factors, like the physical isolation of kitchens and a culture in which an ability to absorb suffering is rewarded.

 

Some who have followed the charges against Mr. Redzepi and other prominent chefs point out that bad actors in large, highly organized, globally acclaimed kitchens are more likely to be exposed than those in small, chaotic, obscure ones.

 

“The abuse of power can happen inside highly defined structures, and the abuse of power can happen in environments where there is little or no structure,” said Dan Simons, an owner of the Founding Farmers chain of restaurants in the Mid-Atlantic States. “This is about who gets in power.”

 

Mr. Simons, who frequently talks in public appearances and on his podcast about mental health and good management, believes that respectful workplaces can be cultivated through, for example, holding classes on “culture, character and professionalism.” He also believes that businesses should put checks and balances in place, such as anonymous reporting systems that encourage workers to speak up without fear.

 

He bristles at the suggestion that somehow the brigade forces chefs to slap other cooks around.

 

“There’s no requirement that to run a restaurant you need to be an abusive jerk,” Mr. Simons said.” [1]

 

1.  The Brigade System Helps Restaurants Succeed. Does It Also Lead to Abuse? Wells, Pete.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Mar 25, 2026.