Kitchens are an illustration of extremes. The flat, absorbent quiet of a restaurant during prep hours gives way to the raucous chaos of service. The frantic, second-by- second barrage of hot and cold side manifests as an articulate marriage of flavors and textures on the plate. The punctilious formality of the military-inspired kitchen brigade gives way to an unbridled kitchen filled with testosterone-fueled twenty-somethings with sharp things and fire at their disposal. It's regarded as the "hospitality industry' even though most employees work evenings, weekends, holidays and special occasions. When I entered the kitchen, the extremes didn't stop there. I wandered as a fresh-faced grad into a kitchen where there was not another woman to be found. The executive chef was tyrannical and hyperbolic, with a reputation for tantrums and tirades during service. The sous chef was —as is described by more than one of his female coworkers—a dirtbag with substance abuse issues. Speculations on what my underwear looked like and group conversations amongst the male staff about masturbation at work created a work environment where I felt not only slightly like the odd one out. While both of my chefs were wildly talented with food and had awards to validate them, it eventually stopped being enough to outweigh the environment they incubated in their kitchen. Jen Agg published a memoir earlier in the year, I Hear She's a Real Bitch. In an Op-Ed for the Globe & Mail, she writes, "I have learned why kitchens actually remain such tough environments – and not just for women, but especially women." The default "bro-ish" culture, as she describes it, requires women and minorities to play along or face exclusion. But could the hyper-masculinized “bro” space of a kitchen be redeemed by the leadership of a woman. Some would say so. Anecdotally, I’ve been inundated with stories of the redemptive leadership of women. But how true is this not just from my own vantage point, as a pastry cook, but from the female chefs who have fought uphill for their positions.
Though enrollment in culinary schools sees a fairly equal divide among men and women, in the industry women only make up for around 20%. What is happening in that time? There’s either a closure that is failing to occur or, perhaps, there’s a disillusionment that is hard to overcome. That disillusionment is a tough obstacle to overcome for any culinary graduate. With programming like the Food Network and memoirs like Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, the cult of the celebrity chef has caused enrollments in culinary schools to skyrocket. Le Cordon Bleu American campuses have seen profits up 46% since 2008. At the Culinary Institute of America, female enrollees actually outnumber male.
So what is happening in that moment between education and industry? Many of the female chefs I spoke to who came up in what are referred to as the ‘early days’ speak often of when they were young cooks, when the verbal abuse and sexual harassment just ‘rolled off their backs’, where they rolled with the punches. Erin Vickars, a private chef on a sailing charter called Passing Cloud that sails the Haida Gwaii islands off the West Coast of Canada says, “I’ve been treated poorly in kitchens working with boys, I’ve had sous chefs throw me into walls, like bang up my knives, try to light my stove on fire and sabotage my station. I’ve seen it all. “ When gender comes up in a kitchen, sometimes it is aggressive, out in the open, unapologetic. But at other points it is microaggressive. “And I just got tired of listening to them talk about lips and arseholes,” Dawn Doucette recalls. “I just had to bring up a story of a pap smear and that would shut them right up.”
Doucette was on the fourth season of Top Chef in Canada, an elite chef competition show for professional chefs to compete for $100,000 and a GE Monogram kitchen valued at $30,000. It was the “Battle of the Sexes” season. Doucette was approached by the producers of the season to compete. She trained under the legendary California chef Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café. Seven men, seven women representing award-winning restaurants across the country. It was an even match, right? “The final four chefs were all men from Ontario,” Doucette sighs. “You can’t tell me they weren’t looking for something in particular.”
On more than one occasion, they told me stories of being passed over for promotions when they were the most qualified candidate simply because they were in their “childbearing years” and the threat of them potentially wanting to leave even for a nine month maternity leave, would be too much. Battles for women’s chef jackets to wear instead of men’s or a tampon dispenser next to the condom dispenser in the co-ed change room. Battles that put you at odds with yourself. As though it should be so small and you just should be able to put up with it.
So how do you not just survive as a woman in these environments but thrive? Outdo? Outperform? Women have to try that much harder and we have to be willing to concede that much easier. All the women I interviewed spoke about having to have a work persona where they consciously lowered their voices, spoke in short sentences, were more direct with any and all questioning.
Erin Vickars described her leadership style as androgynous. “You’re gender neutral. I would lower my voice. I would communicate differently, speak in a more succinct way. Approach the guys in the kitchen in a different way than I would approach the women. I thought why can’t I just be me? Why’s that not okay?”
The kitchen is not a ‘feminine’ place when we are talking in terms of what is classically deemed feminine. This is not a glamorous job and it takes a personality to match to make it. Dawn Doucette described Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café as ‘very intense and eccentric.’ Erin Vickars interned under Dominique Crenn at Atelier Crenn also in San Francisco. “Like fierce, badass in the kitchen. Like scary. I would not want to be in a kitchen where you’re a cook and I’m a cook and I had to keep up to you. Badass. And you kind of have to be.”
Ana Roš of Slovenia Hišo Franko was awarded “Best Female Chef in the World” by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and reignited the debate one whether we should have a category for “female chef”. The corresponding category is not ‘Best Male Chef in the World.” But as Erin Vickars contests, the refusal of the ‘female chef’ title can be just as spurious.
“Do I say that I’m a female chef not because it’s reductive but because of all the complexities of what that entails?” Does this self-analysis and hyper-introspection cause female chefs to be more intentional in many other aspects of their job? Is that why, anecdotally, female chefs are regarded as more constructive in their feedback and that kitchens run by female chefs seem to be more calm? Female chefs have to think so much about coming across as “shrill” or “bitchy”. But none of the women I spoke to learned their leadership style from a woman. Female chefs made up by far the minority of the chefs that they had worked for. More than one of them had mentors who were men that broke the machismo mold. Pairing a leadership style that breaks from the testosterone-fuelled method of the kitchen with the hyper-aware analysis of being a female in a male dominated industry makes for not a flawless but a more complex one, a more well rounded one. And, I believe, to be a successful chef you need both sides.
What I feel I have come away understanding is that it is not only the woman that you look up to that is important, but the women you work alongside and the representation you experience that is more important, and in some ways, more redemptive.
*unpublished.
Though enrollment in culinary schools sees a fairly equal divide among men and women, in the industry women only make up for around 20%. What is happening in that time? There’s either a closure that is failing to occur or, perhaps, there’s a disillusionment that is hard to overcome. That disillusionment is a tough obstacle to overcome for any culinary graduate. With programming like the Food Network and memoirs like Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, the cult of the celebrity chef has caused enrollments in culinary schools to skyrocket. Le Cordon Bleu American campuses have seen profits up 46% since 2008. At the Culinary Institute of America, female enrollees actually outnumber male.
So what is happening in that moment between education and industry? Many of the female chefs I spoke to who came up in what are referred to as the ‘early days’ speak often of when they were young cooks, when the verbal abuse and sexual harassment just ‘rolled off their backs’, where they rolled with the punches. Erin Vickars, a private chef on a sailing charter called Passing Cloud that sails the Haida Gwaii islands off the West Coast of Canada says, “I’ve been treated poorly in kitchens working with boys, I’ve had sous chefs throw me into walls, like bang up my knives, try to light my stove on fire and sabotage my station. I’ve seen it all. “ When gender comes up in a kitchen, sometimes it is aggressive, out in the open, unapologetic. But at other points it is microaggressive. “And I just got tired of listening to them talk about lips and arseholes,” Dawn Doucette recalls. “I just had to bring up a story of a pap smear and that would shut them right up.”
Doucette was on the fourth season of Top Chef in Canada, an elite chef competition show for professional chefs to compete for $100,000 and a GE Monogram kitchen valued at $30,000. It was the “Battle of the Sexes” season. Doucette was approached by the producers of the season to compete. She trained under the legendary California chef Judy Rodgers at Zuni Café. Seven men, seven women representing award-winning restaurants across the country. It was an even match, right? “The final four chefs were all men from Ontario,” Doucette sighs. “You can’t tell me they weren’t looking for something in particular.”
On more than one occasion, they told me stories of being passed over for promotions when they were the most qualified candidate simply because they were in their “childbearing years” and the threat of them potentially wanting to leave even for a nine month maternity leave, would be too much. Battles for women’s chef jackets to wear instead of men’s or a tampon dispenser next to the condom dispenser in the co-ed change room. Battles that put you at odds with yourself. As though it should be so small and you just should be able to put up with it.
So how do you not just survive as a woman in these environments but thrive? Outdo? Outperform? Women have to try that much harder and we have to be willing to concede that much easier. All the women I interviewed spoke about having to have a work persona where they consciously lowered their voices, spoke in short sentences, were more direct with any and all questioning.
Erin Vickars described her leadership style as androgynous. “You’re gender neutral. I would lower my voice. I would communicate differently, speak in a more succinct way. Approach the guys in the kitchen in a different way than I would approach the women. I thought why can’t I just be me? Why’s that not okay?”
The kitchen is not a ‘feminine’ place when we are talking in terms of what is classically deemed feminine. This is not a glamorous job and it takes a personality to match to make it. Dawn Doucette described Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café as ‘very intense and eccentric.’ Erin Vickars interned under Dominique Crenn at Atelier Crenn also in San Francisco. “Like fierce, badass in the kitchen. Like scary. I would not want to be in a kitchen where you’re a cook and I’m a cook and I had to keep up to you. Badass. And you kind of have to be.”
Ana Roš of Slovenia Hišo Franko was awarded “Best Female Chef in the World” by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and reignited the debate one whether we should have a category for “female chef”. The corresponding category is not ‘Best Male Chef in the World.” But as Erin Vickars contests, the refusal of the ‘female chef’ title can be just as spurious.
“Do I say that I’m a female chef not because it’s reductive but because of all the complexities of what that entails?” Does this self-analysis and hyper-introspection cause female chefs to be more intentional in many other aspects of their job? Is that why, anecdotally, female chefs are regarded as more constructive in their feedback and that kitchens run by female chefs seem to be more calm? Female chefs have to think so much about coming across as “shrill” or “bitchy”. But none of the women I spoke to learned their leadership style from a woman. Female chefs made up by far the minority of the chefs that they had worked for. More than one of them had mentors who were men that broke the machismo mold. Pairing a leadership style that breaks from the testosterone-fuelled method of the kitchen with the hyper-aware analysis of being a female in a male dominated industry makes for not a flawless but a more complex one, a more well rounded one. And, I believe, to be a successful chef you need both sides.
What I feel I have come away understanding is that it is not only the woman that you look up to that is important, but the women you work alongside and the representation you experience that is more important, and in some ways, more redemptive.
*unpublished.