Buzz.

“The odds are against us getting the award that drives business into our dining rooms. We are statistically less likely to get the review that makes all the difference. Maybe if women in this industry felt like they had the same opportunities, they would be able to leave abusive kitchens faster. Maybe then they wouldn’t feel like they had to endure the unendurable. Maybe male chefs would view them as equals, not as targets.”

  • Chef Amanda Cohen.

History.

“The longer we have the Best Female Chef in the World Award, the longer we’ll never have a best female chef that is just the best chef in the world. Those two things are mutually exclusive.” —J.

Food media normalizes the industry’s absence of women leaders. 

In 2013, Time magazine published its now infamous “Gods of Food” issue, which featured zero women chefs or restaurateurs on its cover or in its pages. According to Howard Chua-Eoan, the magazine’s editor a the time, Alice Waters almost made the cut but was booted because “she retains a lot of loyalty, the people who work in her kitchens stay” (quoted in Dixler Canavan). B, one of my interviewees, corroborated this characterization. She told me that working at Chez Panisse as a teenager was “incredible” because “there wasn’t any yelling or slamming. It was a very inclusive, supporting, respectful environment.” Chua-Eoan contended that because people liked working there so much, Waters simply wasn’t exporting enough talent to impact the industry. In short, she was punished for creating an alternative, more sustainable leadership model. 

This perspective epitomizes the ways that food media perpetuates the gendered leadership gap. Men—even those with known reputations for being aggressive, sexist or even violent—continue to get more media coverage, publishing deals and awards than their women colleagues.

TIME Magazine’s 2013 “Gods of Food” issue.

Chua-Eoan argued that “the female chef is a relatively recent phenomenon” (Dixler Canavan), which is expressly untrue. Looking at les mères lyonnaise we see that there have been notable women chefs for at least a hundred years. The problem is that they have been excluded from media and awards, which delays their entry into the world of elite food coverage. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Georges Auguste Escoffier rose to prominence, culinary competitions and schools were introduced as ways to further distinguish the masculine world of paid, professional cooking from the feminine domain of unpaid, home cooking (Harris & Giuffre). Women were banned from contests and awards as part of this process of gendered separation. 

This exclusion has been hard to shake. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a moment when an emerging cadre of women chefs, including Walters, Mary Sue Miliken and Wendy Little, seemed poised to become America’s most celebrated chefs (McCarron 2018). But it was short-lived. In the 1990s and early 2000s, with the publication of books like Kitchen Confidential, a “bad boy” rhetoric seized the nation and media began positioning men chefs as iconoclasts, rebels, and “single-minded perfectionists who do not apologize” (McCarron 2018). This shift coincided with an explosion of interest in food media, and a shift from the “prosaic domesticity of home cooking” to the goings-on of chefs. In 1993 the Food Network launched, and as of 2015 it was reaching 100 million viewers (Harris & Giuffre). The amount of food programming on television in the US tripled between 2005 and 2010 (Harris & Giuffre), and several major food magazines, including Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Appetit and Saveur, were either introduced or launched. Finally, The James Beard Foundation Awards were introduced in 1990, and World’s 50 Best launched its awards in 2002. 

Women are still trying to make up for lost time. In Harris & Giuffre’s seminal study of 2,206 restaurant reviews and chef profiles, women were the focus of just 10% of them. When they are featured, men and women are split along typically gendered lines. Figures like Ina Garten, Martha Stewart and other Food Network stars are not considered visionary, which stands in sharp contrast to the positioning of Rene Redzepi and Dave Chang as forward-thinking innovators (McCarron 2017). 

Media also tends to dwell on women’s personal lives in a way that men are spared. In 2021, Pía León is the only woman featured in the top 10 restaurants named in the World’s 50 Best top 10 restaurants. She and her husband are co-owners of Central in Peru. Instead of focusing on their accomplishments as is the case for every other top 10 chef, their profile on the awards’ website calls them “Sweethearts of 50 Best, the husband-and-wife team [who] were married just four days after Central’s first appearance on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2013.” 

Bad Men.

“Men in the industry want to feel like gods.” —R.

Painting men chefs as “bad boys” excuses and juvenilizes violence in restaurants.

It also glorifies workspaces that are unsafe for women. “Men in the industry want to feel like gods,” R told me.

“Media has a lot to do with it, because once you become a celebrity chef, the sky’s the limit…if you hold the keys to the kingdom…you can do whatever you want to do.”

This framing counteracts the work she is trying to do as an HR consultant. When owners are given a free pass to do whatever they want, “that is damaging to culture.” Any effort she makes to fight against harassment becomes “lip service…because you have these owners allowing people to get away with bringing in women they want, hiring the women they want, dating whoever they want.” 

Going one step further, a study published in April 2021 found that food media normalizes psychological and sexual violence, sometimes to the point of romanticization (Meiser & Pantumsinchai). Gordon Ramsay, for example, has profited off inflicting trauma: Hell’s Kitchen—in which he screams at and bullies chef contestants—has nearly 300 episodes, a weekly viewership of up to 11 million people, and has earned him 3 Primetime Emmy Nominations (Meiser & Pantumsinchai). The study found that food media particularly perpetuates “almost-harassment”: the fine line between playful banter and sexual harassment that is used to establish group membership (Meiser & Pantumsinchai). Celebrity chefs like Ramsay, Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali have normalized this kind of abuse. Batali in particular was awarded a public image as an “indulgent, over-the-top gourmand” that obscured his private behavior (Rosner).  

Cool Girls.

“Am I an idiot for pushing, not giving up?” - M.

Lately, there has been a concerted effort to include restaurant women in food media.

However, as Mari Uyehara argues in her excellent article “How Fashion Hijacked the Food World,” these women tend to be young, white, thin and removed from the everyday labor of restaurant work. Out of the first 11 covers of Cherry Bombe (a magazine dedicated to women in food), only two women featured were chefs running their own restaurants (Uyehara). The rest were models, former models, or airbrushed culinary figures like Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson who “don’t betray a wrinkle” (Uyehara 210). Indeed, older women chefs are curiously absent from food media, which is something M, at 49, feels acutely:

“There aren’t really that many older women in the industry. I feel like I’m not young enough, and so I’m not interesting anymore.”

Her age has had a direct influence on her own struggle to access media coverage. “I do feel like I’m not the young cool kid. I felt that especially with Bon Appétit magazine. I can’t even tell you the hoops that I went to, to try get an article.” Working for decades without feeling that she has been recognized is demoralizing and prompts her to contemplate leaving cooking: “Am I an idiot for pushing, not giving up?”

Model Karlie Kloss on the cover of the first issue of Cherry Bombe.

An Insider Boys’ Club.

“It’s basically an insider boys’ club.” —J.

M feels like her age and gender have precluded her from earning any awards: “I’m so tired and over it. It feels particularly gendered to me.”

J similarly described restaurant awards as “an insider boys’ club.” They are both right. Historically, women have been excluded from the industry’s most influential awards. In 2017, 28.4% of James Beard semifinalists were women, and 17.6% of Bon Appetit’s “Hot 10” restaurant list were women—but all were part of man-woman partnerships (Kludt 2017). From January 2018 to January 2020, just 24.6% of The New York Times’ “Critic’s Picks” were women-led (Meiser & Pantumsinchai). The number of women chefs on the World’s 50 Best list without a man partner? Zero. 

While it is easy to dismiss these awards and lists as outdated, they have the power to make or break restaurant careers. Even though M told me repeatedly that she was “over it,” after pausing to reflect she revealed that being overlooked for awards is painful. “It still hurts actually. I don’t know why I couldn’t even make the [James Beard Award] long list the last time. I thought I was doing pretty phenomenal work.” This exclusion is confusing to navigate. Because these awards’ decision-making processes are typically opaque, there are no real steps a woman can take to increase her odds of winning. As J told me: 

“Women have all the skills that they need, but they don’t have a lot of the other things. They don’t have the network, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the connections, right? But because none of these requirements are stated up front, women [don’t] win [awards]. It’s not that her food isn’t good…It’s because we haven’t addressed all the other ways that women are not welcome.”

These systems are starting to change, spurred by the catastrophic impact the pandemic had on restaurants. Many employees felt empowered, as C explained, “to call out their employers for certain reasons. Not necessarily for mistreatment, but just like, things that don’t seem fair.” Writers, editors and other gatekeepers are now considering more deeply about who gets their accolades. The James Beard Foundation recently conducted an audit with the goal of increasing the transparency of the nomination process. Bon Appétit opted to scrap its “Hot 10” list this year, choosing instead to dedicate the issue to people in restaurants who are doing meaningful work to make the industry a more equitable place.

So, the tide is moving in the right direction, but progress is slow. The World’s 50 Best remains a patriarchal institution. In October 2021, Noma was awarded the No. 1 spot for the fifth time. All top 10 winners were men aside from Central, which is run by a husband and wife team. The No. 12 pick, Steireck, is also run by a heterosexual couple—but only the man is featured in the profile picture on the awards website. The reasons for this become a little clearer when we look at who is controlling the pursestrings. 16 out of 18 of the awards’ sponsors are man-led; only Aspire Lifestyles and Food Made Good have women CEOs (as of November 2021). Women here are the exception, as reflected in their insistence on keeping a “World’s Best Female Chef” award. These separate categories—and gendered monikers like “female” and “badass” more broadly—only deepen women’s status as other. 

As J put it: “The longer we have the best Female Chef in the World Award, the longer we’ll never have a best female chef that is just the best chef in the world. Those two things are mutually exclusive.”

References.

Images.