A change in the kitchen

A wave of female chefs like Lauren DeSteno is rising through the culinary ranks. More than ever, women fill the jobs that will produce the next generation of restaurant leaders. The New York Times article by: Julia Moskin

Last week at Marea, a New York haunt of the powerful and the polished, Lauren DeSteno moved up from executive sous-chef to chef de cuisine. It may sound like a mere tweak of a title, but in a small way it is revolutionary.

The promotion puts her in charge of one of the highest-earning kitchens in New York, where four male sous-chefs and 20 other cooks report to her. And though previous generations of female chefs had to fight past widespread sexism and a locker-room work culture to reach the top, at 31 Ms. DeSteno is calm, confident and entirely unsurprised by her success.

Ms. DeSteno is living an idea whose time may have finally come: that one’s sex has nothing to do with the real work of a chef. In baby steps, the American restaurant kitchen, a high-pressure arena that still bears the image of the tough-talking, pot-throwing male cook, is beginning to reflect that idea, especially in the places where the most promising young chefs try to get a foot in the door

“In a good kitchen,” she said (and she has worked at some bad ones), “male and female really doesn’t matter anymore. You get the work done, you handle yourself professionally — because kitchens can still be crazy places — and you go home.”

A leading kitchen run by a woman is no longer newsworthy. But it is not quite commonplace, either; the tag “female chef” is still applied to Anita Lo, Barbara Lynch, April Bloomfield, Dominique Crenn (the first woman in North America to have a restaurant with two Michelin stars) and dozens of others. Certainly the most visible chefs are men, a fact made clear in November by a Time magazine spread that showcased its choice of the world’s most influential chefs, with not a woman among them.

But even though male chefs are still more prevalent in professional kitchens, particularly at the highest and lowest rungs of the industry, a new vanguard of American women like Ms. DeSteno is coming up right behind them. More than ever, women are filling the second- or third-tier jobs (chef de cuisine, executive sous-chef) that will produce the next generation of leaders in the nation’s best restaurants, according to statistics and interviews. And more women are entering the pipeline at elite culinary schools.

The reasons are many: High-end restaurants, which like others have historically lagged in providing health insurance, paid vacations and competitive wages for their employees, are becoming more corporate and professional; even a T-shirt-wearing, cheerfully profane chef like David Chang has a human resources team and offers paid maternity leave. An exploding food industry has created many new entry points for women, who once were largely limited to the “pink ghetto” of the pastry chef; that part of the business alone has grown so much in prestige and profitability that opportunities there have snowballed. And women themselves are pushing for the jobs, conditions and recognition they want.

“A lot of jobs have tough schedules; a lot of jobs are physically demanding,” Ms. DeSteno said. “Nurses work weird hours. Police officers have hard jobs. You deal with it.”

Tracking restaurant workers by gender is not easy in a $683 billion industry that employs about one in 10 of all Americans. Many of those are part-time or transient workers, and even the most expensive restaurants have extremely high rates of job turnover, as a new national study showed last week. But recently, some of the country’s fastest-growing and most carefully run restaurant companies — including Union Square Hospitality Group, Barbara Lynch Gruppo, Altamarea Group, the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group and Think Food Group — provided a head count of men and women cooking in their restaurants, from line cooks to executive chefs. (Front-of-house employees like waitresses and managers were not included.)

The numbers showed that 30 to 50 percent of the culinary staff in all those groups are women. And those companies run many kitchens where the next generation of chefs most want to work, places like Animal in Los Angeles; Lucques in West Hollywood, Calif.; Gramercy Tavern and Del Posto in New York; Toro and Menton in Boston; Minibar in Washington; Michael Mina in San Francisco; and Le Pigeon in Portland, Ore. One-third may not seem a large proportion, but chefs say it is a quantum leap from even the recent past.

Continue reading: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/dining/a-change-in-the-kitchen.html