Queens of the kitchen: women hold power until the space becomes a business
My mother is one of four sisters, and some of my most at-home memories take place in the kitchen with them. The sonic landscape of my aunts joking loudly in a pidgin mash-up of Chinese and English; the rounded scent of a fall-off-the-bone rack of ribs, a simmering pot of jook, a soy-sauce chicken. A conversation, a way to show affection, by way of a plate being passed back and forth. A matriarchy reigned in that space, and it was powerful.
But there is a moment when the kitchen reliably fails women, and particularly women of color. When the kitchen becomes a place of business – when it becomes a restaurant in America – white faces are the ones that dominate the front of the line and the front of the house. The women of color fall out.
On the way to opening restaurants and other food businesses, people of color are subject to the personal and systemic racism that plagues the industry. Female chefs confront personal and systemic sexism. Women of color who cook inhabit the crossroads. They have unequal access to investment capital. They are disproportionately freighted with family and childcare responsibilities relative to their white peers. And they face a particular kind of gatekeeping: a huge gap in the imagination between the value of their food and what is widely considered fine dining.
In reviews, female chefs are still often portrayed as custodians of tradition, as Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre point out in the book Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Professional Inequality in the Kitchen. Their analyses of thousands of reviews reveal a profound media bias. Female chefs are described as warm and nurturing. By contrast, male chefs are pictured as mavericks; they break rules, experiment, innovate. If these men were inspired by their mothers or grandmothers – and they almost always were – they are typically praised for moving beyond that “comfort food” to arrive at their current genius.
If the chef in question is a woman of color, from an immigrant background, say, a critic might note that her food has reached an unusual level of “sophistication”. Let me clarify that this is intended as praise.
Having succeeded in opening their own restaurants, women chefs of color are then pursued daily by preconceived notions of what a professional cook looks like. “The quickest example I can think of is when people walk up looking for the chef or owner at Dyafa and walk right past me,” says Reem Assil.
The quickest example I can think of is when people walk up looking for the chef or owner at Dyafa and walk right past me
Reem Assil
Assil is a 2017 graduate of La Cocina, an incubator program launched in 2005 in San Francisco’s Mission district. Of a handful of organizations working to create new opportunities within the industry, La Cocina has had outsized success. Established to support women from immigrant and working-class communities of color who want to start food businesses, it provides admitted applicants with affordable commercial kitchen space, access to investors, technical training and opportunities to showcase their craft – at a San Francisco street food festival attended by thousands, for instance, or a food and wine event with the Golden State Warriors.
During Assil’s time in the program, she opened Reem’s, an Arab street bakery, in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. This year and last, she was nominated for a James Beard award; in 2018, her bakery was named Best New Restaurant by Food & Wine and she opened Dyafa, a full-service restaurant specializing in the flavors of her Palestinian-Syrian heritage. In the space of four years, she went from being a one-woman pop-up to the employer of 25 people and the owner of two brick-and-mortar establishments. Assil opened her restaurant in partnership with chef Daniel Patterson’s Alta Restaurant Group, which works closely with an advocacy group, ROC United, to address issues of race and gender equity and diversify hiring pools. In turn, Assil has developed an expansive hiring policy – 90% of her staff members are people of color and her team is women-led – she has also made it a point to recruit the formerly incarcerated.
Assil’s food is regularly praised for its quality – the hummus is “silky”, the maklouba “beautiful” and “flavorful”. But she is still often written about in stereotypical terms: as someone who presents food “as a vehicle for healing” (Food and Wine), someone who is skilled in “the art of warm” (SF Weekly). And while she is glad that more women of color are being featured in significant publications, she worries about tokenization and wonders if reviewers are simply looking for a “good story”.
Participating in La Cocina is also a way for female chefs to take control of their own narratives. Twice a year, I volunteer to help the organization put on a storytelling show, in which the female entrepreneurs and other performers talk about food and cooking and labor and race and refuge, in front of a live audience.
La Cocina exists in order to ensure that pathways to economic opportunity are not just equal but equitable
Caleb Zigas
Caleb Zigas, La Cocina’s executive director, tells me that the organization was born out of an existing informal economy – “the type of economy that thrives across the world in unregulated alleys, in the homes you find by word-of-mouth, in high-rise apartment buildings in every city”. La Cocina works to formalize that economy. “We focused on women from the beginning, and primarily women of color and immigrants, because that’s where the barrier to entry exists,” he says. “But, as it turns out and as we likely knew all along, it’s not just entry – it’s access to market, it’s access to opportunity, it’s growth and sales, it’s access to capital. La Cocina exists in order to ensure that pathways to economic opportunity are not just equal but equitable.”
It is likely that there are so few female chefs of color – according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics about 20% of the country’s head cooks are women; 4% of these identify as black, 3% as Latina, and 2% as Asian American – because women of color that would be chefs don’t see themselves reflected in the country’s kitchens. Opening a restaurant may not seem like a viable option when the vast majority of restaurateurs are white men. But change appears to be coming. Other bodies working to bridge the gender and race gap in the food industry include SheChef, a professional networking organization that focuses on women of color, and Les Dames d’Escoffier and the James Beard Foundation, which both run women’s leadership programs. To date, La Cocina has graduated 53 program participants who have reached economic or operational self-sufficiency; 34 businesses are in the incubator.
Last fall, Alicia Villanueva, a La Cocina graduate who runs a booming wholesale tamale business, prepared to take the storytelling stage. In rehearsal, she was nervous; she wasn’t used to talking in front of people. But when it came time, she was ready. The kitchen, she began, “is a magic place”.
The kitchen is where her grandmother first gave her an education in food, back in Sinaloa, Mexico. In California, Villanueva started by selling tamales in front of her church; after incubating with La Cocina, her business grew rapidly; first, she appeared at the San Francisco Street Food Festival, then she debuted her own tamale cart. In five years, she’d transitioned to employing more than a dozen people in her own 6,000-square-foot factory. Every week, tens of thousands of her tamales are delivered all over the Bay Area, to tech giants and Whole Foods.
These women, it turns out, are telling a similar story. This kitchen is mine. I own this place.
Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to the New York Times and California Sunday. She is the author of the award-winning American Chinatown. Find her at www.bonnietsui.com and @bonnietsui.