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Marzia Coppa had an unusual reaction when her boss, the chef and owner of Dolce restaurant in Omaha, was named a semifinalist for a James Beard Award last year. The server said she was going to make sure that Anthony Kueper never won the medal, even if it meant submitting a report to the organization’s ethics committee.
Coppa didn’t have to. Someone else, according to former and current employees at Dolce, had already reported Kueper to the James Beard Foundation, which announced this year’s chef and restaurant awards on Monday night. “Thank God,” Coppa said. “I know I eventually would have called. There was no way I was going to let him win that award. There was absolutely no way.”
The server’s grievances against Kueper are many, but chief among them are Coppa’s allegations that the chef repeatedly touched and grabbed her during service. She alleged that one day, Kueper followed her into the restaurant’s small walk-in cooler and “just fondled me really super-fast, all up and down, and then ran out the door.” A cook in the kitchen at the time confirmed Coppa’s story, which Kueper denied.
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The foundation’s independent ethics committee, created in the aftermath of a 2021 internal audit of the group’s policies and procedures, was designed precisely for these kind of issues: to investigate claims that a semifinalist or finalist for a James Beard Award had violated the code of ethics. In the era of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and subminimum wage debates, these investigative procedures are meant to align annual award winners with the organization’s core values of equity, transparency, respect, integrity, community and passion, said Steve Koch, chair of the foundation’s governance committee.
In a high-stress industry with high rates of sexual harassment and wage theft, the foundation thought it would be irresponsible to give its prestigious awards to people who didn’t measure up to the standards, Koch said. The procedures were part of an overhaul meant to make the awards more diverse and equitable — and to weed out bad actors. The procedures are not perfect, Koch acknowledges. They are limited by time, money and the nonprofit group’s limited authority.
“We certainly don’t have any kind of official investigative power or subpoena powers, so there’s a limit to how far you can go in pursing things, but within those limits, we wanted to do the very best we possibly could,” Koch said in an interview with The Washington Post.
Two years into the group’s decision to pursue complaints against nominees, the process has come under heat from at least three chefs who have been caught up in investigations. Each chef compared the process to a trial, one in which they were not asked whether they wanted an attorney present. The foundation calls the investigations “fact-finding” missions, not legal proceedings, but the group follows some of the common standards of civil trials: Those under scrutiny do not have a chance to face their accuser, and the nominee is disqualified when the ethics committee “finds it more likely than not that the subject violated the Code of Ethics.”
Unlike a trial, there are no penalties or punishment for an ethics violation, other than a nominee losing a chance for a Beard medal, which has been shown to have an immediate, if short-term, positive impact on a restaurant’s reservations and sales. The foundation doesn’t change the semifinalist or nominees list when a chef or restaurateur is disqualified. The only way the public has learned of these investigations so far is from the chef or a news story. (This reporter twice served on a Beard regional restaurant awards committee.)
John Birdsall, a food writer and author of “The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard,” who has been a judge and won his own Beard medals, says he applauds the sentiment behind the new awards regime but says the foundation is undermining its own work.
“In this new iteration celebrating diversity and celebrating people who had seemed locked out of the James Beard awards for so many years, the organization seems to be making a sincere attempt to correct for past sins,” he said, “but with the same lack of transparency as in the bad old days.”
Timothy Hontzas, the chef and owner of Johnny’s Restaurant in Homewood, Ala., was nominated this year in the Best Chef: South category. Hontzas said he came under investigation for allegedly abusive language and behavior in the kitchen. The foundation eventually disqualified him after an investigation, though the organization did not provide the chef with the exact reasons.
Hontzas and his allies immediately objected, claiming the chef’s alleged violations didn’t merit disqualification. Hontzas claimed investigators never talked to his staff, and he never reviewed the final report before the foundation ruled on his eligibility.
Sam Fore was the only person of color nominated this year in the Best Chef: Southeast category. Her Kentucky-based business, Tuk Tuk Sri Lankan Bites, is a roaming pop-up whose food fuses Sri Lankan and American South influences. According to the New York Times, Fore came under investigation this year for allegations of bullying and targeted harassment based on her social media posts, including one in which Fore calls out victim blaming as part of a domestic violence campaign.
The foundation eventually cleared Fore for award eligibility, just days before the ceremony in Chicago. But Fore was still upset by the investigative process, which she equated to a “sloppy and unprofessional trial” in an email to The Post. She wondered aloud to the Times “how all I’ve done can be dismissed because someone on the internet called me a bully?”
Koch, the Beard governance chair, said it’s policy not to reveal how many ethics complaints the foundation receives about nominees. But he said most complaints are not anonymous — that a specific name is attached — and that anonymous complaints do not become full-blown investigations without corroboration. “If we can’t find something more than an anonymous complaint about somebody, that’s the end of it,” Koch told The Post.
Yet the idea that an anonymous tipster can bring down a nominee’s Beard award chances doesn’t sit right with some chefs, such as John Currence, chef and owner of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss., who posted a photo on Instagram after he destroyed his own Beard award in protest. “We’ve seen this over the years, with Yelp and the online restaurant review sites: Disgruntled employees or competitors can just go in and anonymously review a restaurant and can just stir stuff up for the sake of damaging competitors. I think it’s incredibly unfortunate,” Currence said in an interview.
Food journalist Hanna Raskin, whose newsletter the Food Section focuses on Southern cuisine, noted that anonymous tips in a situation like Fore’s could be weaponized.
“What looked like correctives to a foundation based in New York City were likely to play out very differently in the South,” said Raskin, who won a media award this year and has served on the foundation’s restaurant and chef awards committee. “I’m not at all surprised that in a place which codified white supremacy, someone would try to scare off a woman of color competing against four White men.”
Kueper, the Omaha chef, said he was determined to find out who his accuser was. He said he threatened to sue the Beard’s investigation firm if it didn’t reveal the name of the person who filed the complaint against him. He said he found out the person’s identity but wouldn’t share it with The Post, saying only that the tipster was a former sous-chef who now works at a hunt club outside Omaha.
When contacted by The Post, former Dolce sous-chef Kris Cohen, now executive chef at a hunt club outside Omaha, would not say whether he filed the complaint, but he did round up nine current and former Dolce employees, not including himself, who were willing to talk about the alleged abuses and harassment they say they endured at the restaurant.
Kueper told The Post that he was investigated for slapping a former line cook, a young protégé whom one former employee said the chef had taken under his wing to teach him the skills needed to work in a fine-dining restaurant. Kueper acknowledged the slap, but equated it to a wake-up call because he said the cook was barely functioning and argumentative. Kueper said the Beard Foundation eventually disqualified him over the incident. He called other allegations a conspiracy against him by chefs who dislike him.
“I open-hand slapped him, told him to get his s— together,” Kueper recalled. “It shocked him. It was like a reboot.”
But the line cook, a third-generation Japanese American man who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation, recalled the scene differently. He said the incident occurred at the end of the shift when Kueper came into the kitchen, intoxicated, and hugged the cook from behind at the saute station. The cook said he told Kueper that he was going to get burned with hot oil if he didn’t stop hugging him, and said Kueper took the comment as a threat, not a caution, and spun the cook around.
“He slapped me in the face,” the cook said. “Then he asked me, like, what I am going to do about it because I’m his little Asian b—-.” Cohen, who said he was working only a few feet away from the cook at the time, corroborated the slap and slur.
“He treated me as if I was his property,” the cook added. He said he has left the restaurant industry because of the incident.
Kueper acknowledged the slap but denied making any racial slurs.
Several employees, including Cohen and Coppa, say Kueper sometimes would drink as much as a fifth of booze a day. They also say he has done drugs in the restaurant, including marijuana and cocaine. Several employees said Kueper inhales nitrous oxide from small whipped-cream canisters, a drug known as “whippets.”
“We had to hide the NO2 cartridges up in weird areas — on the line, off the line, wherever — to be able to have those because he was doing whippets in the office,” said former cook Ryan Roumpf.
Kueper said he does “smoke weed” and has had “a couple of beverages during shift, but never to the point where I would pass out or log out, per se.” He denied any use of cocaine or whippets. He says he has a strict no-cocaine policy in his restaurant. “I’ve seen so many cooks — so many great people — destroy their lives on this stuff,” he said.
Cohen and other former employees say Kueper’s worst behavior would occur when he was intoxicated or high, or both. Coppa, the former server, said Kueper would try to grab or fondle her so often that she had developed a code phrase with former sous-chef Andrew Juarez, who corroborated her recollection. “If I said . . . ‘Hey, you want to get Taco Bell?’ that meant don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone in the restaurant with him.”
Roumpf, Cohen and other employees said they have seen the chef grope, fondle and flirt with female servers. One server suffered a spider bite on the back of her upper thigh, recalled Juarez. He said he heard Kueper tell the server, “I’d suck the venom out of that.” Cohen said he had heard about the incident from multiple people.
Kueper denied the spider-bite story or harassing his female staff. “I have a flirtatious nature to me, but I don’t blur lines,” he said.
When Kueper was intoxicated, Cohen and other former employees say, he would make racist comments, sometimes about diners. One night a Black family was eating at Dolce, Cohen recalled. “He started going off about how this wasn’t a welfare restaurant. That they’re probably going to be trying to pay in food stamps, that he doesn’t understand why there are so many n-bombs trying to come into his restaurant,” Cohen said, describing Kueper’s use of the n-word. Another cook who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he also remembered Kueper’s use of the n-word that evening.
Kueper denied the incident, including the use of the racial slur.
Kueper’s drinking would sometimes trouble his staff enough that they would use their vehicles to block his car, so he couldn’t drive home, several people said, including Cohen. (Kueper said this happened only once.) Multiple sources, including Coppa, also say Kueper has sold marijuana out of his restaurant, an allegation that the chef initially denied, then later said, “Maybe one person bought it on occasion.”
Some of the allegations against Kueper could raise ethical issues for the Beard Foundation as it investigates nominees. The organization doesn’t publicly share information on what its investigations find, Koch said, nor does it usually expand the scope beyond the original complaint. But what if the organization discovers that a chef may be doing something illegal? Would the foundation have an ethical obligation to report that?
Koch said the foundation has not yet encountered such a situation. “We will cross that bridge when we come to it in terms of that complicated intersection,” Koch said.
Emily Heil contributed to this report.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/06/07/james-beard-award-nominee-investigations/