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I'll never forget my first day in a kitchen.

“Can you carry three plates? No, chef. Well get the f**k out of my kitchen.”

Thirty minutes later I was back in there carrying three plates in the scrappiest way possible. It got the job done. I loved that chef. The culture though, that's a different conversation.

I've been thinking about that a lot this week watching the Noma story unfold. A chef who built the most celebrated restaurant in the world, who knew better than most what needed to change in his industry, who literally founded a nonprofit to fix it and when the moment came, blocked the comments and cried on Instagram.

There's a lesson in there for every brand that thinks reputation is something you manage rather than something you ear

Happy Easter to everyone celebrating. Put the phone down, eat well, and enjoy the people around you.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Noma was the restaurant that made Copenhagen a destination, that convinced the food world that Nordic wilderness — fermented this, foraged that, pine cones cleaned by unpaid interns working sixteen-hour days — could carry the same weight as a Burgundy cellar or a Japanese knife tradition. The mythology was total and carefully tended: Redzepi on the 2013 cover of Time magazine under the headline The Gods of Food, five rankings as the best restaurant in the world, three Michelin stars, a Danish knighthood from Queen Margrethe II. Each credential raised the stakes of what Noma was promising — not just a restaurant anymore, but proof that fine dining could be morally evolved, aware of its own contradictions, actively fixing them. The higher the accolades climbed, the more fragile the whole construction became.

And alongside it all, a nonprofit Redzepi had founded called MAD, its mission, in his own words, would you believe, "to help chefs and food professionals lead the change that their industry needs." That promise was built on something unsustainable. Nobody inside was willing to admit it.

When the New York Times published its investigation on March 7th, the portrait that emerged was of a man who would crouch under kitchen counters while customers dined in the next room, jabbing his staff in the legs with his fingers or whatever utensil happened to be nearby — crouching so the guests wouldn't see. Thirty-five former employees described eight years of punches to the face, bodies slammed against walls, threats to blacklist people from restaurants worldwide, threats to have families deported. One former employee wrote of panic attacks in the night, of leaving the career she'd loved because the trauma and the certainty that nothing would ever change had finally become heavier than the work — and of watching others stay anyway, because they needed the paycheck, or the reference, or both.

Jason Ignacio White, former head of Noma's fermentation lab, described watching Redzepi drop his own child to choke a team member over a strawberry. Alessia, now cooking in London, remembered standing in the kitchen through all of it. “Going to work felt like going to war. You had to force yourself to be strong, to show no fear,” she said.

One chef, when the story broke, offered something that sits differently from the rest of the testimony. He just went down the line and punched us in the chest. It was hell, but I learned so much that I can't say I regret it. The suffering and the gratitude, offered up together, inseparable — as though this is simply how excellence gets made. This is what the mythology produced: not just abuse, but a culture so normalized that even its victims couldn't fully name what was wrong.

👉 Read the full analysis

When the internet gets unbearably loud, we start looking for a pulse. We look for comfort in fellow designers and makers who still give a damn about the craft and share the same stubborn values we do. To kick off our Nice Things series, we dug through our agency folders to pull the work that made us smile, made our hearts race, made us suddenly crave pizza, and reminded us why we even like doing this for a living.

We spend our days pushing flat pixels around a glowing glass rectangle. But looking at the links we obsessively saved this February, a clear pattern emerged: we are desperately craving things with physical gravity. Things you can actually drop on the floor and hear a thud.

👉 What made the list this month

Ten years ago, a dentist who wanted more patients had one realistic path. Yellow Pages listing. Referral network. Maybe a local radio spot if the budget stretched. The category determined the channel, the channel determined the format, and the format determined who paid attention. That was the ceiling — not because it had to be, but because nobody had thought to question whether it did.

What changed isn't the dentist. The same footage — a guy in scrubs in his office talking about toothpaste on an iPhone, no lighting rig, nobody's permission — now sits in the same feed as a Balenciaga campaign, a geopolitical crisis, and someone's wedding. The algorithm has no opinion about category prestige. It only cares whether people stop scrolling, and watching a credible expert finally answer the question you've been quietly carrying around turns out to be one of the most reliably compelling things a screen can show you.

What most businesses miss is that the local algorithm is actively working in their favour. The platform needs people to stay, and showing a home inspection video to someone in Dallas-Fort Worth who just put in an offer on a new build, or a plumbing video to a homeowner in Richardson whose water pressure has been dropping for three weeks, is exactly how it does that.

👉 Read the full analysis

A crew member's Old English Sheepdog wandered onto a Dulux shoot in 1961. The director kept the footage. Sixty-five years later, that happy accident remains the most valuable brand asset in British paint and possibly British advertising.

The new campaign, created by Ogilvy UK and directed by Si&Ad through Academy Films, introduces Dorothy, a 21-month-old Old English Sheepdog who can shake Dulux paint colours from her shaggy coat. She hasn't mastered the power yet. Colours fly everywhere — across her owner Lily's new flat, over one unfortunate delivery driver. But Dorothy hones her craft over the years, and the film tracks Lily and Dorothy's life together through the rooms they transform: becoming a pet parent, kickstarting a side project, starting fresh after a breakup. Each milestone marked not with ceremony but with a fresh colour on the walls.

Why it matters: The film taps into a cultural shift: traditional milestones — marriage, children, first home — are happening later than in previous generations, if at all. Dulux wanted to celebrate the alternative moments that actually define how people live now.

👉 Watch the campaign