TracyFood

In case you missed it: New York magazine on female chefs and more (including Janeane Garofalo, aw yeah). 19 November 2007 2:06 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory, feminism, interviews, news, restaurants, vegetarianism, work , trackback

Woo! Two posts in one day! I’m out of control! (Although actually, this is just a cunning ploy to make up for having missed last Wednesday’s post, and as soon as you’re not looking I’ll sneakily change the date on this entry to make it look like I’m not a flaky slackerbeast, but I digress. Anyway.)

For some reason, none of the food blogs on my long-neglected Google Reader mentioned New York magazine’s October 21 piece on the city’s few female top chefs, “A Woman’s Place?”; I read about it on Salon’s Broadsheet. But whatever; I’m just glad I found it. Food (especially cooking) and gender? I accept! Long story short, it’s a little bitty interview — I’m guessing much-abridged from the full conversation — with seven women who happen to be high-power restaurant chefs (or should I say high-power restaurant chefs who happen to be women?) There’s the usual questions: why haven’t more women risen to prominence in this traditionally male-dominated field, blah blah blah, do women cook differently from men? That last got a wonderful answer from Sara Jenkins, formerly of 50 Carmine:

I think women cook different food, and I think women cook better food…. I look at this whole molecular-gastronomy thing, and I’m like, “Boys with toys.” They’re just fascinated with technology and chemistry sets. I think we make better-tasting food. I’m sorry, I know that’s politically incorrect.

Yes!

Far better than the interview, though, was the amazing photo slideshow that accompanied it, and here’s where I’m going to get a little politically incorrect but fuck it. I found the pictures far more telling than the words: these women are all stupendously badass beautiful. In particular I was just stunned by how, every one, they all look intensely, unapologetically strong. Like I have no doubt in my mind that any of them could quite literally wipe their floor with me. It is exhilarating to see.

A few more random thoughts about women and professional food work: Morning Glory is hands-down the most woman-dominated kitchen I have ever worked in, and I really like it. When my parents visited in August, I brought my mom in to shadow me in the kitchen one morning, and she quite literally met every guy working there at the time: one cook, one server, and one dishwasher (okay, we may have had one or two guys baking, but — as the New York interviewees point out — usually that’s the one kitchen department that attracts “girls”, and in any case it’s an even more invisible one than the rest of the back of the house. I’ve learned from experience that I can do macho line cook, I can talk just as much shit and work with just as many taped-up cuts and semi-healed burns as any dumbass guy, but I’ve also learned that it’s really nice if I don’t have to do that stuff.

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of male-dominated kitchens, and in case you haven’t already done so half a dozen times already, go watch Janeane Garofalo being the best part of Ratatouille (it’s at the very end of this little clip from the Conan O’Brien show, but c’mon, you don’t mind an excuse to watch more Janeane, especially Janeane being very funny about vegetarianism, meat, and potatoes, mmmm potatoes):

Aw, yeah. There ya go. Honestly, as far as I’m concerned you are all now excused from watching the rest of that movie, as long as you watch that bit and love the hell out of it (and fret about the fact that Janeane’s character doesn’t cover her freaking hair!)