Nora BouazzouniViolences en cuisine, Une omerta à la française

‘The customer is king, but we are nothing.’
‘In the kitchen, you have to sweat to succeed.’

For nearly two centuries, this myth has justified the normalisation of all kinds of violence – economic, physical, psychological, homophobic, racist, sexist, sexual. Is it any wonder that today there are 200,000 vacant positions when we discover the chilling gap between the front of house, the dining room and the kitchen?
Over a period of four years, Nora Bouazzouni collected hundreds of testimonies from restaurant employees. All of them denounce a well-oiled system that relies solely on the exploitation of workers, where many chefs rule by terror and reprimand with insults or the use of a tea towel.
Despite the staggering scale of the abuse, no one has really been held accountable. That’s because ‘haute’ cuisine is France, and France is ‘haute’ cuisine. Beware anyone who dares to challenge it. This book does just that.