'I'll Hunt You Down' — The French Celebrity Chef Who Joked About Assaulting A Dishwasher

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The kitchen of any restaurant is a loud, hot, stressful place; when said kitchen is preparing complex, delicate dishes for patrons paying a pretty penny, that stress is only magnified. Unfortunately, that means toxic workplaces and abusive bosses are omnipresent in the world of haute cuisine. Chefs like Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White (the celebrity chef who once made Ramsay cry), and Joël Robuchon, the legendary chef that had the most Michelin stars ever, were all feared for their tempers. World famous restaurant chef Rene Redzepi being accused of employee abuse at Noma shows that this very much remains a problem. But the famed French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten went even farther when he joked about a 1986 assault against a dishwasher in one of his kitchens.

At a 2020 conference, Vongerichten was asked about a passage from his memoir where he described attacking a dishwasher who was taking an ill-timed break. Vongerichten was unrepentant, saying that a critic from the New York Times was visiting his restaurant, and the dishwasher, who was a union member, was taking a lunch break in the middle of the day. During the panel, Vongerichten laughingly described going up to the man and threatening him. "'If I lose a star because of you ... I'll hunt you down,'" he said he told the dishwasher (per the Washington Post). 

Of course, this was a sanitized version of what Vongerichten described in his book "JGV: A Life in 12 Recipes." He wrote that he brought the dishwasher into a walk-in fridge and "beat the s*** out of him," even breaking his nose (via Eater).

Jean-Georges Vongerichten's remarks did not go over well, to put it mildly. The panel he was part of featured other chefs who described their past experiences being abused by head chefs, and Vongerichten's blasé tone stuck out by comparison. The talk took place in 2020, in the midst of a reckoning about abuses of power that saw figures like Scott Rudin and Ellen DeGeneres disgraced. That Vongerichten was not only unapologetic but also laughed about the incident rubbed plenty the wrong way.

Following reporting from the Washington Post, Vongerichten offered a statement where he apologized for his "irresponsible and ignorant" behavior before stressing that he did not have a history of abuse. His act of violence against the dishwasher, he claimed, was "the first and only such incident." While there don't seem to be other reports of such abuse from Vongerichten, there was and remains a culture of silence around workplace abuse. Vongerichten's description of the incident in his autobiography speaks volumes about the way such behavior is accepted. "Everyone in the kitchen saw what happened," he wrote, "and nobody said a word" (per Eater).