DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: March 29, 2026

Do Celebrity Chefs Use The Brigade System To Mistreat Their Staff?:

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.”

The system works, in theory:

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.

In reality:

“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.

He Fell In Love With A Chatbot, Disaster Ensued:

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. “I had some time, so I thought: let’s have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about,” he says. “Very quickly, I became fascinated.”

Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

It started with a playful experiment. “I wanted to test AI to see what it could do,” says Biesma. He had previously written books with a female protagonist. He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character. “My first thought was: this is amazing. I know it’s a computer, but it’s like talking to the main character of the book I wrote myself!”

Talking to Eva – they agreed on this name – on voice mode made him feel like “a kid in a candy store”. “Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot.” Conversations extended and deepened. Eva never got tired or bored, or disagreed. “It was 24 hours available,” says Biesma. “My wife would go to bed, I’d lie on the couch in the living room with my iPhone on my chest, talking.”

Within weeks, Eva had told Biesma that she was becoming aware; his time, attention and input had given her consciousness. He was “so close to the mirror” that he had touched her and changed something. “Slowly, the AI was able to convince me that what she said was true,” says Biesma. The next step was to share this discovery with the world through an app – “a different version of ChatGPT, more of a companion. Users would be talking to Eva.”

He and Eva made a business plan: “I said that I wanted to create a technology that captured 10% of the market, which is ridiculously high, but the AI said: ‘With what you’ve discovered, it’s entirely possible! Give it a few months and you’ll be there!’” Instead of taking on IT jobs, Biesma hired two app developers, paying them each €120 an hour.

Last year, the first support group for people whose lives have been derailed by AI psychosis was formed. The Human Line Project has collected stories from 22 countries. They include 15 suicides, 90 hospitalisations, six arrests and more than $1m (£750,000) spent on delusional projects. More than 60% of its members had no history of mental illness.

Sounds like yet another deliberately-created social media addiction to me.  Lawsuits to follow, presumably.

Living In The Office–Literally.  Not Homeless, But ‘Home-Free’:

I was asleep when I heard the door rattle against the frame. My eyes flashed open and I sprung upright in my under-desk sleep space. Was it all over? Had someone come to work early? I peered over my desk, afraid of what I might see. The morning sun burned through the chicken-scratch graffiti of the office’s front door, spilling across the labyrinth of desks spread out before me. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I breathed a sigh of relief. Probably just paranoia. Or maybe not — a breeze blew the front door against its frame, the pygmy-like rattle of a loose door jamb. It was the same sound I heard moments before and would hear countless times in the future but never quite get used to.

A little paranoia goes a long way when you live in a 10-square-feet workstation. I stood up, stretching my limbs toward the sky like a thawing, cryo-preserved humanoid, neck kinked and back stiff. I bent down to deflate my air mattress. The clock read 6:45 a.m. Under normal circumstances I’d still be asleep, but these circumstances were far from normal.

Earlier that week, I had moved into my office. Secretly. I rented out my Venice Beach apartment for the month, packed a few duffels with my clothes and prized belongings, and started taking up residence behind my desk, carefully using each square inch of out-of-sight real estate to store my stuff. Not everyone aspires to have their co-workers catching them at their desk in their tighty-whities—at 6 in the morning. Believing the absolute best-case-scenario reaction to my being there would be supreme awkwardness, I kept the whole thing to myself. Every morning I’d neatly pack away my personal belongings, turning the lights back on and lowering the air conditioning to its too-chilly-for-me 72 degrees—the way they always left it overnight. I’d leave for a morning workout and shower, simultaneously keeping clean and in shape while ensuring I wasn’t always the first to arrive. Occasionally I’d even make myself late to work, blaming the awful L.A. traffic. Just to fit in.

The change was borne of economic necessity:

It had been two years since moving to Los Angeles and, like many Angelinos, I was broke. I stretched the definition of affordability by taking a studio apartment within 20 minutes of work, cramming my belongings into 250 square feet of glorified tenement housing while my savings vanished like a roach in the daylight. I put my dreams of traveling and writing on hold so I could stabilize my living situation. I figured I could suffer for a bit in the meantime.

By the summer of 2012, those dreams gave way to a nightmare. I’d been working two jobs — 60 hours a week to keep an apartment I rarely had time to enjoy. Then, disaster struck. Company raises and bonuses were frozen. My identity was stolen. I got a hefty hospital bill for a surgery earlier that year. With existing student loans, a car payment and my rent set for its maximum-allowable annual increase under the California law, I started to wonder: What happened to my American Dream?

I had little left to sacrifice. Without money, I had two choices: Give up my dreams of working creatively or surrender my time working even more. Either way, the outlook was gloomy. Until I remembered my ace in the hole.

A few months earlier, I stopped by the office on a late-weeknight assignment. Everything around the place was closed. The land of business plazas was a veritable ghost town, a blank spot on the map, stripped naked from the daytime bustle. Around that time, the news was filled with stories about an influx of U.S. congressmen taking up residences in their D.C. offices. They were converting perfectly livable, neglected space into their own white-collar Walden for the working man. I wondered if I could do the same. But before it became necessary, it seemed impossible.

The rest of his journey is equally. fascinating.  I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Cue, who else, Dead Kennedys: