Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about a legacy media outlet’s bizarre assessment of recent business failures on the West Coast.
New York Times reporter Julia Moskin has what seems to be a pretty good story. The Times online headline definitely doesn’t undersell it: “Punching, Slamming, Screaming: A Chef’s Past Abuse Haunts Noma, the World’s Top-Rated Restaurant.” Nor does the subheadline: “Dozens of former employees say René Redzepi inflicted physical and psychological violence on the staff for years.”
Yet leave it to the New York Times to take an apparently solid story and undercut it by inserting a totally unnecessary left-wing political tilt. For context on Los Angeles, where the Copenhagen-based Redzepi, the subject of the Times article, is opening a $1,500-a-meal, 16-week pop-up, the Times says, “Some local chefs have posted that they find it offensive that Noma is swooping in and drawing deep-pocketed diners, when Los Angeles restaurants are facing existential threats from climate change, inflation and immigration enforcement.” …
… If the Times were looking on a politically open-minded basis for factors threatening the Los Angeles restaurant industry, it might have mentioned what restaurant operators have described as the region’s “crime and homeless crisis.” It might have mentioned a series of increases to the minimum wage that took the statewide rate for fast-food restaurant workers to $20 an hour in 2024 and has moved the minimum wage up in the city of Los Angeles to $18.42 an hour in July 2026 from $16.04 an hour in 2022. It might have mentioned Governor Gavin Newsom’s failed leadership or the threat of a confiscatory wealth tax.
The Times could claim that it’s not offering its own analysis, just passing along what “some local chefs have posted.” But it doesn’t quote or link to any examples, and it doesn’t explain why harebrained social media posts should be passed along to Times readers, “some people are saying” or “I am hearing” style.
