Chef jobs; not a woman's place?

Not a woman's place?
Chef jobs are a bitter choice
Carol Ness, S.F. Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, November 14, 2003
URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/14/BAG5U321F11.DTL

More than 300 female chefs, caterers and other food professionals will converge on Nob Hill Saturday to celebrate 10 years of work to secure their place in restaurant kitchens. But behind the Women Chefs and Restaurateurs agenda of workshops, cooking and eating -- lots of eating --lurks a serious question:

Where is the next generation of superstar female chefs?

"I'm going to be asking that question," said Joyce Goldstein, who helped found WCR when she ran the highly regarded Square One restaurant in San Francisco and will give the keynote speech at this weekend's conference at the Mark Hopkins Hotel.

Goldstein, now a cookbook author, cooking teacher and consultant, was one of a heady crop of San Francisco female chefs who sauteed and sauced their way into prominence in the 1980s.

Led by the late Barbara Tropp, China Moon chef-owner, the women banded together to change the male-dominated world of professional cooking, where chefs routinely bullied, harassed and drove out women who ventured into their domain. WCR now has more than 2,000 members nationwide -- chefs, caterers, food writers, purveyors and others in the restaurant world.

To a huge extent, women have succeeded in tearing down the barriers to their success, graduating from the top culinary schools in record numbers. The California Culinary Academy in San Francisco has 1,500 students, twice as many as just 2 1/2 years ago, and half are women. At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., a record 35 percent of 2,200 students are women.

"But the number (of high-level female chefs) has stayed about the same,'' said Goldstein. "The playing field is leveler, but not everyone is playing."

Most of the best-known local chefs, women such as Nancy Oakes of Boulevard, Judy Rodgers of Zuni Cafe and Traci Des Jardins of Jardiniere and Acme Chophouse, hit the stoves some years back.

That's not to say young women aren't making names for themselves. In the Bay Area alone, there's Melissa Perello at Charles Nob Hill, Roxanne Klein at Roxanne, Justine Miner at RNM and Elizabeth Falkner at Citizen Cake, plus others.

But the number hasn't hit critical mass. Food and Wine magazine's 2003 list of the 10 best up-and-coming chefs included no women for the first time in recent memory. The Chronicle's annual Rising Stars selection almost always includes one, but almost never more.

WCR membership lists make it clear: Many female cooks choose careers in catering, home cheffing, running food businesses, working for food companies and writing about food rather than working toward heading up a large kitchen.

It used to be that outright bias kept women from chef jobs. Kerry Heffernan, chef and co-owner of the now-closed Autumn Moon Cafe in Oakland, remembers those days from when she started cooking full time in 1980 but says much has changed.

"It was a very discriminatory environment years ago," she said. "Women never got promoted, and they didn't get paid what male chefs did, and if there was an opening on the hot line, you wouldn't get it."

The line is where your dinner gets cooked - it's the fast-action, adrenaline-charged heart of the restaurant kitchen, and it's a must-do step up the ladder toward becoming sous chef and then chef.

Harassment was normal. In one kitchen, Heffernan remembers a male cook grabbing her by her butt when her hands were full. She slugged him -- and almost lost her job. Now, he's the one who'd be fired, she said.

Where women used to be excluded from top chef jobs, some employers now recruit them. One is Niki Leondakis, a WCR member executive vice president of the Kimpton Group, who's in charge of hiring chefs. Women hold four of the 29 Kimpton chef jobs, including Kuleto's, and Puccini and Pinetti in San Francisco. "That's not a ratio I'm proud of," she said.

But when she's looking for a chef, Leondakis says just one resume out of 10 comes from a woman.

Heffernan and others think that now that women have proved they can work the line, many are choosing not to.

For one thing, it's grueling work, mostly at night and on weekends. The line cook stands at a hot stove for hours, turning out chop after chop with perfect grill marks, juggling hundreds of entrees.

Terri Wu, who graduated from CCA in 2001, thought she would love it and dreamed of becoming a hotshot restaurant chef-owner. She went to work on the cold line at Farallon near Union Square.

"I enjoyed the adrenaline on the line, and I thought that was the place for me," Wu said. "But when I finally got to the hot side of the line, I discovered this was not what I was looking for."

So she did something women often do -- she moved over to pastry. Of becoming a superstar chef, Wu says, "I definitely don't want to do that."

And then there's family. Working nights and weekends can be rough on relationships, let alone on raising young kids.

"Women pretty much still feed the planet and change the diapers,'' said WCR President Ann Cooper, executive chef of Ross School on Long Island.

It's not just the younger generation of cooks that's thinking twice about the big career, Cooper pointed out. A recent New York Times magazine article detailed the many young women with advanced degrees in the law, business and other fields who are opting out of demanding jobs. Letters in response made it clear such choices were about both family and quality of life.

"I think it's not that women can't make it, but that it's still a hard choice if they want to have a family," Cooper said. "This is not just culinary; this is the world."