René Redzepi, the chef behind Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant once crowned the best in the world, is facing allegations of abuse, intimidation, and public humiliation. According to an investigation carried out by the New York Times, employees were punched in the face, slammed into a wall, and threatened with having their family deported. Anyone who has followed modern restaurant culture will struggle to be surprised. Yet Redzepi was not sold to the world as an old-style tyrant, but instead as the opposite: the progressive future of fine dining.

That image was central to Noma’s mystique. This was the enlightened kitchen, a place of hyper-seasonal cooking, ethical ingredients, foraging, fermentation, and the new Nordic way. It rejected the cruelty of foie gras and the hierarchy of the kitchen brigade, with its military terminology and epaulets.

Nothing captured this image better than Ali Sonko, Noma’s Gambian kitchen porter. When Noma won the World’s 50 Best Restaurants award in 2010, Sonko was meant to collect it on the restaurant’s behalf. Then, when visa issues prevented him from doing so, the team appeared on stage in T-shirts bearing his face. Two years later, he accepted the prize in person. In 2017, he received a stake in the business. It was perfect symbolism: the humblest figure in the brigade lifted up as proof that this was a kinder, more democratic institution.

I ate at Noma in 2016 and found the place suffocatingly self-regarding. We were welcomed by a throng of silent kitchen staff staring creepily at us at the entrance; after someone in my party was sick at the table, the restaurant still insisted on taking us on a tour of the building to admire its own virtue. Their self-congratulation was more important than our comfort.

Looking back, the signs of what was really going on behind the scenes were there. In 2008, Redzepi was filmed screaming at chefs in the documentary Noma at Boiling Point. In 2015, he wrote an article for Lucky Peach in which he said: “I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career.” Roughly half the kitchen consisted of unpaid interns covering their own living costs in Copenhagen. The allegations now emerging span from 2009 to 2017, when Noma was being celebrated as the most enlightened food destination in the world.

It turns out that it is just another version of a familiar modern story. The institutions that boast the loudest about their virtues often have the most to hide. The louder the public display of kindness and progress, the more likely it is to be hiding something behind the scenes.

Just take Barbara Lynch, one of Boston’s most successful chefs, who Time once named one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World”. She’s a progressive dream: a working-class lesbian with a child, and one of the earliest voices speaking against sexism and abuse within America’s male-dominated restaurant industry. Yet when two of her chefs died of drug overdoses within weeks of each other, she went to a staff meeting intoxicated. A chef challenged her, she fired him on the spot and later, in a public shouting match, she threatened to put his head through a window.

We should not be shocked that kitchens can be abusive. Auguste Escoffier wrote that his first boss couldn’t govern a kitchen without “a shower of slaps”. Closer to home, Marco Pierre White has pelted chefs with glass bottles, and Clare Smyth has openly acknowledged physical abuse of staff.

But what Redzepi did was different. He tried to hide it, and sold the world the same tyranny softened by foraging, equality talk, and fashionable political sentiment. Noma matters because it isn’t merely a story of one bad chef, but of a whole cultural type: the institution which mistakes virtue-signaling for virtue. The old kitchen brute was at least honest about power. The new one performs sensitivity in public then, in private, throws a saucepan.