Sally Abé knows what it’s like to be the odd one out. The 37-year-old has worked in fine dining for 15 years and has written a book about the experience: A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, which came out last month.
‘Historically, kitchens have been challenging places to work, with lots of shouting and screaming,’ says Abé, now consultant chef at The Pem, a contemporary British restaurant in London that’s named after a suffragette, ‘and I think the idea of this has put some women off.’
If popular culture paints an unflattering, machismo portrait of the elite kitchen – think of the BBC’s Boiling Point – the reality can be worse.
Fezile Ozalgan will never forget the day a co-worker waved a carving knife in her face. Or the incident involving a colleague who sprayed a toxic cleaning chemical at her ‘as a joke’. Or the time someone deliberately put salt in her coffee instead of sugar. Or the countless occasions she was called useless, a bitch, even once, a slut – all while simply trying to do her job.
Ozalgan, 30, is currently executive chef at London foodie hotspot Penelope’s, the signature restaurant of Covent Garden’s Hotel Amano. These experiences, she emphasises, aren’t recent – they happened ten years ago, and couldn’t be more different to the inclusive environment she works in today.
Sallle Abé
But as she climbed the ladder to the professional kitchen, working her way up from a job in a McDonald’s drive-through to waiting tables at the House of Lords and becoming commis chef in Michelin-starred restaurants, she faced opposition, often verging on abuse, at almost every stage ‘Being not just the only female but also the youngest, I instantly had a target on my back for the men around me,’ Ozalgan says.
‘Emotionally, I found it very difficult: it made me feel worthless. My fear was that, by not biting back, I would appear weak, which would then spur on more abuse.’
Ozalgan’s experience is far from unique. Ask any female chef working today and they’ll reel off incidents that could have come straight from an episode of Hell’s Kitchen. It turns out that Gordon Ramsay is not the only shouty male chef out there.
Clare Smyth, voted the world’s best female chef in 2018 (and, incidentally, the first woman to work in Ramsay’s team), has described professional kitchens as ‘testosterone-driven places’, while Angela Hartnett, chef-patron of Michelin-starred Murano, refers to ‘inequality everywhere’.
Roberta Hall-McCarron, 41, executive chef and owner of The Little Chartroom and Eleanore, two of Edinburgh’s most lauded restaurants, recalls brushing off derogatory comments – and worse – as ‘the norm’ when she was younger. ‘I had one instance where I was bending down to pick up something that I dropped on the floor, and my chef de partie pinched my bum with a pair of tongs,’ she recalls.
Asma Khan
‘My reaction was instant. I asked him what the hell he was doing. He denied it and it never happened again – but nothing was done about it.’
Men dominate the kitchen. Equality statistics have barely ticked upwards in two decades: just 20 per cent of UK kitchens have female head chefs, even though 60 per cent of people in the food industry are women. At the elite Michelin end of the spectrum, female chefs number a disheartening six per cent.
Certainly, outmoded attitudes about gender that have faded elsewhere – or been driven out – seem to be hard-wired into the professional kitchen. Some sectors, in particular, struggle to shift this stereotype: French kitchens are widely lambasted for being anti-women, and fewer than ten per cent of Japanese sushi chefs are female.
As Miho Sato, the UK’s only female sushi master and head chef at The Aubrey at London’s Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park hotel, puts it: ‘A lot more sacrifices must be made by female chefs. It’s a choice and one I was happy to make, but it’s not for everyone.’
Chief among these ‘choices’ is the family issue, highlighted by almost every female chef I spoke to. ‘Working in a kitchen and having a family is very tough to juggle,’ says Abé. ‘There’s no getting around working evenings and weekends. Chefs put in between 50 and 80 hours a week – more than double the UK average – and that isn’t conducive to raising a family.’
Roberta Hall-McCarron
Hall-McCarron, who has a two-year-old daughter, recalls returning to work following four months of maternity leave, after which her husband stayed at home with the baby. ‘I’ve definitely heard male chefs say, “Don’t ever employ a female chef, they’ll just get pregnant and take a year off,”’ she reveals.
Sarah Turner, chef and head of development at Social Pantry, the UK’s leading independent sustainable caterer, says attitudes like this make the career more attractive to men, perpetuating the gender imbalance. ‘You wonder how it’ll be if you’re eight months pregnant and working in the kitchen: there’s a lot of heavy lifting, long hours on your feet,’ she says.
However, not everyone feels so jaded by their experiences on the way up. Millie Simpson, 35, kitchen manager at Sauce by The Langham, London, has spent most of her career under the tutelage of the Roux family, and says she’s been ‘fortunate’ in having ‘very good managers who have never shied away from wanting to develop diversity’.
Fezile Ozalgan; Miho Sato
‘When I was much younger, the three senior positions at Le Gavroche restaurant were all held by women, so getting to see examples like that made me feel as though there wasn’t such a divide.’ Little by little, other professional kitchens around the country are changing. There are now more well-known female chefs than ever: think Skye Gyngell, Lisa Goodwin-Allen, Monica Galetti and Hélène Darroze. As their stars rise, the nature of the industry changes.
Vibrant, award-winning restaurants founded and run by female chefs are appearing. Think establishments such as Asma Khan’s Darjeeling Express, the only all-female Indian kitchen in the world, and Chantelle Nicholson’s Michelin-starred Apricity, where 87 per cent of the staff are women.
‘Things are definitely progressing,’ says Hall, who is on a female chefs’ WhatsApp group, where newcomers and old-timers swap war stories. She says her chief demand is for financial support from the government for chefs returning to work after maternity leave, as well as emotional support from employers to ease the transition back into the kitchen.
As for the jibes, slurs and inappropriate behaviour that, sadly, persist, the professionals’ advice is to withstand the heat and, whatever you do, stay in that kitchen. Ozalgan agrees: ‘If you are passionate about cooking, if it’s what you really want, don’t give up. It will pay off.’
