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By means of Megan Harwood Baynescost of living specialist
When chef Sally Abe was asked to replace her male colleague in cooking the aged tenderloin during a busy lunch shift, he responded by pouring a pan of boiling oil over her hand.
The man claimed it was an accident, something we all knew was a lie, Sally wrote in her memoir: A women’s area is located in the kitchen.
The book lifts the figurative lid on what it’s like to be a woman in male-dominated professional kitchens. With 16-hour days, rare toilet and food breaks and a culture where you don’t call in sick unless you’re on your deathbed, the story she tells is a brutal insight into the hospitality industry.
The book goes some way to explaining why only 17% of professional chefs in Britain are women and only 8% of Michelin-starred restaurants are run by women. Despite the playground insult that tells women and girls to “get back in the kitchen,” when they try to do that as a career, they face almost nonexistent maternity leave, white chefs who aren’t made for a woman’s body and a culture of hypermasculinity. .
Starting at the Savoy Grill, before moving to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s, Sally was often the only woman working behind the kitchen pass. She was also the only woman (as far as she knows) to ever work in the meat department at the latter.
It was often a ‘toxic work environment’.
“I think it’s quite shocking to people who have no idea what hospitality is,” Sally tells Money. ‘If you told someone in a regular office to fuck off, you’d be fired.
“But in the kitchen it’s just everyday life.”
‘They called me Meesrat’
The attack by her colleague was a rare moment when the mental insults turned into physical ones.
“I think that person was just a really terrible human being – and luckily you don’t meet too many of them on the road,” says Sally.
But what is all too common are the barriers women face when working in professional kitchens.
Sally was christened “Tit Rat” by her male counterparts.
“There was no real explanation as to why. I was the only woman working in one of the best restaurants in all of Britain and I was surrounded by men: it was hyper-masculine, super-fast and I held my own,” she wrote in her book .
‘My colleague told me to stay in the kitchen’
TV chef Judy Joo, co-owner of London’s popular Seoul Bird, was pushed away from the industry: she went to technical school and later worked in finance before making the career switch to cooking. But working in these male-dominated industries prepared her for what was to come.
“During my internship at Bell Laboratories, on my very first day, I asked where the ladies’ room was, and no one knew. I had to walk to another building with the auditorium to find the only one — that was wild,” she tells Money .
When she worked on the trading floor, she was the only female professional at her desk.
“While I never doubted my ability to do this work, it would have been great to have more female role models,” she says. “When you see women in leadership, it’s easier to imagine yourself there.”
Sexism in the culinary world is “almost expected,” she says, and as a result “it’s incredibly frustrating and belittling.”
‘Sometimes it only dawns on you later, and then you get angry and wish you had reacted differently at that moment. As women, people tend to doubt our abilities, while men – especially a white man – would. are not scrutinized in the same way for their experience or skills.”
She was recently told by a colleague to ‘stay in the kitchen’.
“He told me I was ‘not allowed to make any commercial business decisions for my company.’ I’m the CEO!
“I got an engineering degree from Columbia University and worked at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for five years before becoming a chef. My business and finance training is probably more rigorous than his! The nerve… so insulting! He doesn’t work with me anymore, to say the least.”
“Where are all the women?”
Dipna Anand was born and raised in the kitchen; her grandfather opened the first Brilliant restaurant in the Kenyan capital Nairobi in the 1950s. The Brilliant in Southall was founded in 1975 and is now run by Dipna and her father. The restaurant was once declared (by the man himself) the king’s favorite curry house.
“I grew up behind the counter trying to make myself useful while my parents ran the restaurant,” she says. “My brother and I stacked cans under the counter and waited for the customers to leave to set the tables.”
She knew from a very young age that she wanted to become a chef.
“My family asked me what I was going to do, and I said I wanted to be a chef, but they said, ‘Don’t you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an accountant?’ In my culture it wasn’t seen as the right thing to do,” she says.
When she first entered the industry, she says, she was “shocked” by how many men there were: “Where are the women?”
For the most part, she has held her own, but cooking is a physical job.
“I need help carrying the box of onions, or the masala, and the male chefs are happy to help me. But that’s the only difference between me and a male chef.”
She says traditional gender roles still influence professional kitchens, especially in the Asian community, where long hours, weekend work and late nights are barriers (she makes a point of asking female colleagues how they’ll get home when their service ends late at night). night).
“Even today, when it comes to balancing family and private life, women have more responsibilities and it is difficult for them to choose between their career and their family,” she says.
Women ‘pushed away from the heat’
Starting as a chef in the pastry kitchens of the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, Neuza Leal has risen to executive chef in two restaurants in London.
She says female chefs are often forced to work in the pastry and salad departments “to get away from the heat”.
“They think you’re not strong enough, and then you want to prove them wrong,” she says.
Early in her career, a senior colleague told her, “Just because of who you are, you’re going to have to work harder than most people in the kitchen, because you’re a woman, because you’re black, and because you’re young. “
Even now that she is a senior, “people don’t think I’m a chef, they always go to the male colleague who is near me.”
‘They ask to talk to my husband, not me’
For Anya Delport, the problems in the sector extend beyond the kitchen doors. The 34-year-old from South Africa founded Interlude, a Michelin-starred restaurant in West Sussex, with her chef husband.
“One of the biggest things I’ve had to deal with is customers reacting to me differently because I’m a woman,” she tells Money.
“There have been times when I have had to send certain staff members to a table because I felt like guests would have a better experience.”
Occasionally, customers have asked to speak to her husband instead of her.
She recently lost a pastry chef who moved to get closer to her husband: “I think sometimes society thinks that a woman’s career in a relationship is the one that needs to be sacrificed.”
But she remains hopeful that things are changing and that more women will emerge from the sector: ‘You don’t have to conform to what society thinks you should be.
How Gordon Ramsay helped Sally get over a burnout
During Sally’s time at Claridge’s she reached the brink of burnout, with Gordon Ramsay stepping in to get her therapy – something she describes as ‘life-changing’.
She repaid this by setting up her own employee assistance program as head chef at the Harwood Arms.
Sally is now a chef at the Pem, a kitchen staffed by women, where only one chef is a man.
“There is no ego, no one is competing and everyone just wants to do a good job,” she says.
“If you want, it’s really not that hard and I start at the top. If you’re a respectful boss and you lead with love, guidance and empowerment, then it just filters down. It’s probably easier to do that then to stand and yell at people all day.
“I tried that and it’s exhausting. I went home at the end of the day feeling like a terrible person.”
Judy, like Sally, is also optimistic about the future: “We all have to help each other and strengthen each other and be each other’s advocates. We will rise together. This is so important. I’m huge on mentorship; important.”