Given the long-standing sexism in restaurant kitchens, Women Chefs of New York initially seems a welcome volume. But readers hoping for a discussion of women’s issues in the restaurant world are soon disappointed, for author Nadia Arumugam’s interests lay elsewhere:
If the impetus behind this book isn’t already abundantly clear, let me spell it out: to celebrate great culinary talents, to pay tribute to their achievements, and yes, to help redress the imbalance of shelf space and printed pages allotted to the notable female presence leading professional kitchens.
Arumugam’s remarks, unsubstantiated by facts or figures, are a little shaky. A brief glance at my own cookbook shelves reflect numerous female success stories: April Bloomfield, chef/owner of five restaurants, has authored two cookbooks, including A Girl and Her Pig. Gabrielle Hamilton, chef/owner of Prune, wrote the Prune cookbook and an acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter.The late, great Judy Rodgers worked at Chez Panisse before moving to San Francisco’s Zuni Café and writing The Zuni Café Cookbook.
Before Rose Gray’s 2010 death, she ran London’s River Café with Ruth Rogers. There the women mentored many young chefs, including April Bloomfield, Jamie Oliver, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The pair produced seven cookbooks. While Deborah Madison is best known for her many vegetarian cookbooks, she cooked at Chez Panisse before becoming chef at San Francisco’s Greens Restaurant, owned by chef Anne Somerfield, herself author of Fields of Greens. Let us not forget Edna Lewis, who cooked for grateful displaced Southerners (and happy Northerners) at New York City’s Café Nicholson before beginning a long, distinguished cookbook career with The Taste of Country Cooking. This list is hardly comprehensive.
More troubling here is the book’s selection bias. Of the 28 chefs in Women Chefs of New York, 18 are under age 40. The overwhelming majority are Caucasian, Asian, or bi-racial Asian/Caucasian. Let me spell this out, or rather, count it out: the ethnic diversity in this book comprises Israeli Einat Admony, Palestinian Rawai Bishara, Mexican Fany Gerson, Dominican-American Sasha Miranda, and Tunisian Ghaya Oliveira.
According to The US Census Bureau New York City Quickfacts, in 2010, New York City’s African-American population was 25.5 percent. Latinos comprised 26.6 percent of the population. Meanwhile, 2007 records show 32.3 percent of NYC businesses were women owned. Given these numbers, it’s hard to believe no African-American women were available for inclusion in Women Chefs of New York. If Arumugam was truly unable to find a single female black chef, it’s indicative of an alarming lack of diversity.
Granted, Women Chefs of New York doesn’t set itself up as a book seeking to right racial wrongs in the professional kitchen. Nonetheless, this dearth—not only of African-Americans, but of Puerto-Ricans and Cubans, who comprise a significant number of New Yorkers, is noticeable.
So who does appear in Women Chefs of New York, and what are they talking about? Many of the usual suspects are here: April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, and Christina Tosi show up, along with Dirt Candy’s Amanda Cohen and Balaboosta’s Einat Admony. Elder stateswomen Sara Jenkins, Jody Williams, and Barbara Sibley bring welcome gravitas. Rounding out the numbers are chefs perhaps unfamiliar to those outside New York City: Missy Robbins, Ann Redding, Jennifer Yee.
From Women Chefs of New York
Regardless of their status in the fame game, these chefs all trend toward high-end, hip dining. Alice Gao’s beautifully composed, brightly punchy photographs lead readers from one painfully chic dining spot to another. Page after page of glossily salvaged tables, exactingly mismatched chairs, and deliberate artwork quickly become interchangeable, discernible only by the chef-authored cookbooks resting atop shelves or casually stacked on chairs, as if momentarily forgotten. I’ll just tuck these away after I get those pork bellies in the wood oven.. These afterthoughts are better known as product placement.
Women Chefs of New York is divided by cuisine: American, Mexican and Latino, Asian Fusion, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern, and Pastry. Arumugam devotes a page to each woman, offering a brief curriculum vitae concluding with an “interview”. These five or six questions are too redundant or often too ridiculous to elicit intelligent responses. Sasha Miranda, a Dominican-American, new mother, and with her husband, chef-owner of Miranda Restaurant, is asked what food she hates most and the most unforgettable moment of her “professional career” (as opposed to her unprofessional career?). Fany Gerson, whose exploration of Mexican pastry has already won her a James Beard nomination, is asked what career path she’d pursue if she weren’t a pastry chef. Zahra Tangorra is forced to ponder whether salad or desserts are sexier, then asked what women chefs do better than their male counterparts. Her response to this idiotic question is equally stupid:
“Bearing children. Having fabulous hair and nails. Perhaps cooking without a recipe.”
The rest of the writing isn’t much better. Arumugam’s breezy generalizations raise more questions than they answer. When she writes that Carolyn Bane, Sarah Sanneh, and Erika Williams, of Pies ‘N’ Thighs, have appeared “in every food magazine that counts”, we’re left to wonder which magazines count. Before Ann Redding began cooking professionally, her life was “meandering nowhere in particular”. Amanda Cohen’s Dirt Candy, we’re told, is “the most innovative modern American vegetarian restaurant within a radius as wide as you could imagine”.
The chefs have generously shared recipes, but then again, most have little to fear. With their complex, multi-step operations and specialty ingredients, the majority of dishes in Women Chefs of New York lie vastly outside the home cook’s purview. That isn’t to say the food is unappetizing or the preparation instructions vague, but when ingredient lists call for dried hibiscus flowers, 140-bloom gelatin sheets, pouring fondant, fresh Iberian octopus, huitlacoche (an expensive corn fungus treasured by Mexicans and Mexican-food aficionados), and fresh pork blood, even the most intrepid home cook will be reminded why she eats out—and what she’s paying for when she does. This doesn’t even touch on equipment—silicon dome molds, spiral slicers, baking sheets in every possible size, marble slabs, pasta cutters, and piping bags. A roomy restaurant kitchen with a paid staff doesn’t hurt here, either.
The bright spots come from the women themselves. April Bloomfield’s doable recipes include a Warm Bacon-and-Egg Salad and a Roasted Pork Shoulder With Chianti. Included in the pork recipe is glass of Chianti for the cook. Amanda Cohen’s responses to Arumugam’s questions are wickedly funny. Her favorite last meal? All you can eat buffet. “I could keep that meal rolling on for weeks.” Her favorite chef’s morsel? “Gin.”
Rawia Bishara, the eldest chef in the book, was born in Nazareth, Israel. She moved to the United States in 1974, opening Tanoreen Restaurant, a “tribute to her mother” in 1998. It’s easy to see why critics rave and crowds flock, for Bishara is a charismatic, beautiful woman whose deep love of hospitable cooking has nothing to do with chic decor or pretentious ingredients. Jody Williams, the book’s sole openly Lesbian chef, tells aspiring cooks they must never “adulterate the truth or culture of a cuisine”. To that end, she offers perfectly expressed Tuscan recipes, including a Winter Walnut Pesto With Toasted Country Bread and Oxtails Braised In Red Wine and Bitter Chocolate. Each is within reach of the most modest cook.
Unfortunately, those bright spots fail to overcome the weaker aspects of Women Chefs of New York. Ultimately, it’s a 200-page plus advertisement doing nothing to further the cause of women chefs. Or, for that matter, every hardworking, underpaid professional cook. For the restaurant-going public to become educated about the real hazards of professional cookery, another order of seriousness is required. This includes a willingness to ask difficult questions—for example, where are all the African-American women chefs? What about affirmative action and work/life balance? And, to admit that for every Gabrielle Hamilton—a woman described by fellow chef Tamar Adler as “a beautiful bulldog”—a talented female cook left the business because she found the hours or the harassment intolerable, or realized the impossibility of a professional cooking career and having a family. Maybe that woman took an incredible, iconic dish with her, never to be prepared. We’ll never know.
The day Women Chefs of New York arrived, I went to local diner, ordered a tuna melt, and began flipping through the book. The diner, located in Oakland, California, has been open for decades. The street has gentrified around it, lined with upscale shops and expensive eateries. The diner is a throwback, utterly plain, even dingy. The food is nothing special, but it’s hot and good, and unlike a lot of diner food, you don’t regret having eaten it later on. While I paged through Women Chefs of New York, two Chinese women cooked and waitressed around me. The place was packed. Elderly men nursed coffees. Young couples wrangled toddlers. Business people rushed in to buy doughnuts. We were every race and creed and income level. We were all treated equally, with a hurried warmth and respect. When one of the babies fell and began howling, one of the waitresses rushed over, smiling, to help soothe her.
I ate slowly. My blood sugar, which had plummeted, began stabilizing. My hands stopped shaking. I paid the $8 bill, tipped generously, gave money to the homeless woman outside, and wondered what those women, with their Chinese shrine above the cooktop where they prepared classic American diner food, would have to say about women’s roles in professional kitchens.