This afternoon I hosted two incredible culinary friends in my house for a brief visit. All three of us had been cooks, and none of us were currently employed by a restaurant, yet all remain firmly entrenched in the world of food. Mindy is a cookbook author, food journalist, and food stylist, and Gail is Food & Wine Magazine’s Aspen event majordomo and a judge on one of my favorite food tv shows, Top Chef. As we discussed the next round of Top Chef casting, I mentioned to Gail that I had received a mass email from Women Chefs and Restaurateurs (the WCR) asking members to consider applying to be a contestant on the show. I deleted the email immediately – I haven’t cooked professionally in years and value my privacy. The idea of being a competitor in an internationally syndicated show horrifies me.
I had forwarded the email to a few people, but no one took it seriously. Most of my girlfriends who cooked have long since quit the restaurant kitchen, and no one has any interest in going back, star chef craze or not. “I really would like to see more female contestants,” Gail said. “We want women who can really cook, who are actually experienced. I’d love to see a woman be the next Top Chef. But we just don’t have enough women trying out. Sure, we get lots of 21 year olds just out of culinary school, but they aren’t ready.”
And then the conversation stopper: “There just aren’t a lot of women with a ton of experience trying out for the show. Just look at us. All three of us (Mindy, me, gail) have quit the kitchen, probably all for the same reasons.”
What were our reasons? I know why I quit: boredom, lifestyle, income, and a repetitive stress injury, as well as intolerance of the gigantic kitchen egos of my colleagues.
But I had no idea those factors would drive me away from cooking as a profession when I left culinary school to pursue my chef dreams.
Name: Linsey
Job: Innovation in a major food company
Culinary Training: New England Culinary Institute, Vermont
My first internships had been good learning experiences – I worked in the fairly intellectual but frustratingly political kitchen at Salamander Restaurant in Cambridge, MA, and then later in the uppity and cliquey Hamersley’s Bistro in Boston. Over the course of the year, I worked as a pastry extern, as a prep cook, and as a line cook. I had no desire whatsoever to return to the pastry shop after a searingly bad experience working under Arnis, who seemed to have an axe to grind with everyone in the kitchen. He bullied and insulted and used silence to intimidate. I despised every minute in his pastry shop and prayed I would get hit by a bus on my way to work each day. He made me pit cases of cherries, a task that took only a day but caused a year of shooting pain and caused permanent damage to my wrist. He didn’t care. He seemed incapable of empathy.
After 6 months the chefs allowed me to move into a line position, where I was finally freed of Arnis’ tyranny. The move to a new station (hot and cold appetizer), combined with a healthy dose of psychoactive medication made life at Salamander enjoyable. In the mornings I worked at a café on the other side of Cambridge as a prep cook. I’d bike over to work at Salamander and start all over again. The 16 hour days were getting to me, and my boss at the café knew it. She knew the owner of Hamersley’s for a number of years and made a call on my behalf. The next day I was there, interviewing for a structured internship. The pay would be $9.00 an hour, which was significantly more than the $6.50 I was earning at Salamander. There was a weekly rotation, with turns in the pastry kitchen, the open line (a hot station where soup and small appetizers were produced), and the prep station. It sounded like a good deal, and a huge change from the work I was doing at Salamander. So I jumped ship…which only later turned out to be a very bad idea.
As an intern in Hamersley’s, I had to learn everything all over again – new dishes, new people, new rules, new plate ups. Things started out well – everyone, initially seemed pleased with my performance. And then one day, they weren’t. A soup was sent back because a strand of my hair somehow escaped my braided ‘do and made its way into the dish. I knocked over a $50 bain marie full of sherry reduction and glace de veau. I fell down the stairs with a lexan full of ingredients. I made family meal for the staff on Sunday nights, and forever lived in infamy after putting out a pizza made with cream cheese, curry, and anchovies (I was only allowed to use leftovers). I didn’t get along with a number of the cooks, who made no attempt to hide their contempt for me. Someone decided to tell the chefs that I was ‘disparaging the restaurant’. The three sous chefs along with the Chef called me in to a private meeting to confront me. When I asked what they heard I said, no one could give me an answer. I scratched my head trying to figure out what I possibly could have said, but never figured it out. Did offering a scoop of ice cream to a server constitute an affront to their sensibilities? Was I too candid? Or was someone just looking to get me in trouble? It was horrible.
But it wasn’t only bad for me. I remember giving one of the waitstaff a small sampling of something I was preparing in the kitchen. She was caught by the chef who figuratively boxed her ears as he accused her of ‘stealing’ from him. His success came from offering a product people liked eating and managing a very tight inventory and labor schedule. If you wanted to eat family meal, you had to clock out first. There was no eating on the company dime. Inventory was managed with pathological thoroughness – by Sunday night, there was almost nothing left in the downstairs refrigerator where all the ingredients and mise en place were kept.
The one perk we did enjoy was a ‘once a menu’ dinner on the house. Every time the menu changed, the cooks were allowed to come in – with one guest – and eat a comped meal. It was a small pay off for a lot of suffering.
What astonished me the most was the line was run on Sunday nights, when the chef was off, usually at his weekend house. One of the chefs de cuisine ran the restaurant with unusual latitude, allowing us a psychological break from the tyranny of the chef. But in place of the chef was a strange pecking order, one which I still cannot understand, even in retrospect.
You see, other than the Chef de Cuisine, there were no other men in the kitchen. It was five women and one man – something I had never experienced before. I expected bonding, sisterhood, and fun. Instead there was cattiness, anger, and jockeying for status. With horror I watched as a friend who worked the station next to me flailed – she was, it seemed, always “in the weeds” – and the cooks stood back and watched. No one jumped on her station or helped her out. They just leaned back, clicking their tongs, and watching. I didn’t have the skills at that point to help out, so helplessly I watched. In all fairness, she didn’t ask anyone for help – in part because she knew the others disliked her, and, more likely, because she didn’t want to look weak or incapable. She was fired three months later. They didn’t offer an excuse – they didn’t like her and they dismissed her without warning.
It was more than I could take. I decided that I couldn’t stay there – I needed to go back to culinary school and finish my degree and the atmosphere was killing me. After a quick – and horribly insulting – exit interview with the chef, during which he said, in the worst sense, that I had a “long long way to go, and that if anyone asked, [I was] an intern at Hamersley's, [I] was not a regular employee,” I was back to school. Don't worry Gordon, I never told anyone that I was one of your cooks. I would have sooner shot myself in the right hand or stuck it down the disposal and flipped on the switch.
Six months later, my coursework complete, I showed up at David Kinch’s restaurant as a six-dollar and hour intern, both hands intact. I was ready to take my place on the line…and then I saw the kitchen. It was tiny, with barely enough room for the four cooks who were there at night to put out the seasonal, French and Spanish-influenced California cuisine Sent Sovi was known for. There was no room for me on the line, no room for me on even the salad station. The only place where I could be fit in was the pastry shop. Just a week before I arrived the pastry chef gave her notice; she was leaving to take a more lucrative job as a pastry chef at a country club. With only internship experience in the pastry shop, and a solemn vow to never bake again, I was suddenly thrust into a position I was not ready for – the sole pastry chef at Restaurant Sent Sovi.
As soon as I completed my internship hours and was given a full-time job, Sous chef Kajsa Dilger took me aside to tell me that I needed to avoid the trap that so many women in cooking fall into – the pastry track. She criticized women who went into pastry. It was typically girlie, and in her mind, a culinary cop-out. She urged me to push to get out of the pastry shop, to find another job as a line cook, to be better than the average culinary grad. I heard her…but I felt helpless. I was actually starting to enjoy my work as a pastry chef. Kinch gave me all the space I wanted to create signature desserts, as long as I kept his favorite tart on the menu. It was a fair trade. But I still couldn’t make it work for me, working as a pastry chef without a mentor.
I ended up taking a job at the Four Seasons under an eccentric Austrian who had been trained under the apprenticeship system. I worked for him for more than a year, but didn’t enjoy my work there. We were short staffed, and I worked nearly 16 hours a day during the holidays. He was an unhappy guy and took out his frustration on the cooks. I started getting bored, and one day, after a fight with him, he switched my schedule and job description and made me the overnight baker. For two weeks I went to work at 11 pm and finished at 7 am. It was hell, and it was a cruel punishment for my insubordination. Was I so awful a person that the only way to deal with me was to exile me to the night kitchen? The executive chef didn’t think so – he brought me with him to the Beard House in New York city to play the role of pastry chef at his big debut dinner. That just made things worse with the Austrian.
Soon thereafter I asked to be transferred to the hot line…and was given the fish station.
I was bored. I was bored to death. I was bored of the routine, of the days that blended together, of the mindless work involved in prepping mise en place, cooking a meal, and breaking down the station. I didn’t like the social life, felt isolated by my work hours, and didn’t really relate to the guys on the line, who poured corn starch down their pants before service so they wouldn’t chafe. I wasn’t challenged, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Sometimes I screwed up; my ability to cook skate was laughable, and I struggled to cook it without it falling apart. Sometimes I banged pans after putting up a dish, just to vent. That earned me the ire of the executive Sous Chef, who told me never to do that again. I was bored, so bored.
And so I got a second full-time job…which led me a career in cheese and away from the kitchen. I have never regretted that decision, but I have wondered if my experience was typical of women everywhere or just me?
Never once did I think that the way I was treated had anything to do with my gender. I was never given special treatment, and had all the same opportunities as my male colleagues. And yet in the long run, despite my love of food and cooking, found the kitchen to be frustrating, repetitive, and unfulfilling. Was that something other women experienced, or was that a special ‘me’ thing? Why, I wonder, do so many women quit the kitchen? What is it about line cooking that drives women away from cooking and toward other career paths? Is it the work or the environment? A combination of the two? Something completely different? And why is it that of all my female friends who cooked, only one, Michelle, is still in the restaurant kitchen?
Almost every serious cheese person I know cooked at some point. Many of my colleagues from Artisanal cooked – when I was a buyer there, everyone who worked in the caves had a culinary degree and started out in the kitchen. Many of the cheese buyers I knew from Whole Foods were disillusioned ex-chefs and cooks. What drove them out? Why did they quit?
In the next few months, I intend to find out. If you are a lapsed cook, I’d love to know what made you leave the kitchen. And are you happy that you did?
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