“Blue Hill” near New York
Star chef Dan Barber wants to change the world with his restaurant – but the truth is different
Dan Barber, Executive Chef of “Blue Hill”
© Courtesy Everett Collection/ / Picture Alliance
It sounds too good to be true: a chef who wants nothing less than to change the world with his fine dining restaurant. However, former employees say the story is not true.
Chef Dan Barber has turned the gastronomy world upside down: he is considered a “cooking philosopher”, a “prophet of the soil”. On countless stages he has told the story that you don’t have to choose between a good meal and sustainable agriculture. That goes hand in hand, is his opinion. If all chefs worked with farmers, he says, you could create dishes so delicious that Americans would stop factory farming.
Barber’s message has brought him fame and the admiration of numerous well-known figures, from Ruth Reichel to the Obamas. In 2014 he became internationally famous with an episode of the Netflix series “Chef’s Table”. It looked very different behind the scenes back then, as a detailed report on “Eater” shows. The reports spanned more than 19 months of research, interviewed more than 70 sources and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, emails and photos. This report focuses on working conditions and the practice of storytelling.
The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is a nonprofit farm and educational center that opened in 2004 on a former dairy farm about 30 miles north of New York City. Attached to it is a restaurant. The Rockefeller family is behind the concept. They chose Dan Barber, who was running Manhattan’s “Blue Hill” at the time, to run the restaurant.
It wasn’t long before Barber became a farmhouse icon in New York City and beyond, when processing whole animals and fermenting turnip greens were still a fringe staple in the restaurant business. At “Blue Hill at Stone Barns” he wanted to take the “farm-to-table” approach to the extreme: the farmers should work together with the chefs to optimize the taste of the products. The chefs should cook what is best for the ecology of the local farms.
Pressure, exploitation, abuse
Barber is going through the roof with his concept. He receives two Michelin stars, he fights for a place in the top ranks of the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants”. The wealthiest and most famous people in the world come to him. A dinner at the Blue Hill currently costs between 348 and 398 US dollars (equivalent to between 340 and 390 euros).
Every radish, every carrot on Barber’s plate tells a story of how it’s produced, how it improves the way we farm and the way we live. The chef works hard to improve the food system. Unfortunately, that ambition doesn’t extend to the area over which he has the most control, Eater reports: the working conditions of his employees.
Former chefs, waiters, managers and interns tell Eater that the kitchen culture at Blue Hill at Stone Barns is characterized by unrelenting pressures that come with 70-hour weeks and minimum wages. Numerous ex-employees describe how Barber or other senior Blue Hill executives yelled at them or publicly humiliated them for even small mistakes.
One employee even speaks of sexual abuse by a kitchen worker. Why do you put up with something like that? Many of these former employees believed in the restaurant’s mission. But they soon realized that Barber was only telling a story that was too good to be true. Many stories about the food that was served were misleading, and the employees felt uncomfortable because they still had to tell Barber’s story. Not all products were sourced as locally as the concept envisaged. Sometimes you just turn a blind eye. You didn’t hide anything, you just took a shortcut, so the tenor.
“There are only stories”
Confronted with the allegations, Dan Barber speaks only through a spokeswoman. Speaking on the Time Sensitive podcast, Barber said: “I need to raise money, so I’m out there fundraising, and that’s storytelling. That’s all there is. I just finished talking about facts tell, but the fact is, we live in a post-truth world, don’t we? Facts don’t matter. There are only stories, that’s all. And that’s what I do.”
Sources: eater