Female (Up)rising
/How women scaling the restaurant ranks could make the industry a friendlier place to work—and not just for themselves
By Whitney Pipkin | Photography by Jennifer Chase
Last year, the #MeToo movement settled like a cloud over DC’s dining scene. The term “bro culture” and the phrase “It’s probably because you’re a woman” were officially added to the local lexicon, fresh fodder for a conversation that’s been taking place, however quietly, among women in the industry for decades.
A chef whose empire of restaurants employed 800 people at its zenith in early 2018 was accused of sexual harassment in March, settled the lawsuit in May and by year’s end had filed for bankruptcy and shuttered almost all of his eateries. If that sentence makes the ordeal sound tidy, it wasn’t.
As Jessica Sidman wrote in a recent issue of Washingtonian with an egg-covered version of Mike Isabella’s face on the front, the chef’s “resounding fall after his lightning rise reads like a #MeToo reckoning.” Yet, it’s far more complicated than that, she explained. There’s far more the industry needs to do to right the wrongs that still linger in pantries and behind bars, and yet there’s plenty that’s already begun to change.
That’s because reckonings in and of themselves don’t change culture. People do.
Earlier this year, we gathered a group of nearly 30 women in the restaurant industry into one room—women determined to create workplaces that invest in workers, rather than tearing them down, and are uniquely positioned to do so.
They’re part of a new guard of female leaders who have been in the industry long enough to be aware of the industry’s systemic problems, but not long enough to be hardened by them. They are hopeful 20- and 30-somethings who think things can change and are in positions to make those changes now, or in the near future.
“I see us all as these rising stars that, when it comes to DC’s food scene, five years from now even, we’ll be part of the transformation,” Johanna Hellrigl, 29, says to the group of women semi-circled in The Sun Room, a concrete warehouse/meeting space bedecked with potted plants by run by the Salt & Sundry team.
The culture inside restaurants “hasn’t always been friendly to women, and it still isn’t sometimes,” says Hellrigl, executive chef at the 14th Street Thai restaurant Doi Moi and a partner in the Fat Baby Inc. restaurant group. “We’re influencing how the cultural change shifts, especially the culture inside a restaurant.”
Studies and news reports over the last two years show that the Isabella incident isn’t an isolated one. Restaurant workers file more sexual harassment claims than employees in any other industry, according to a 2017 assessment of claims filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A 2014 report by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United found that 90% of women working in restaurants say they have experienced sexual harassment on the job—the majority of it not from their bosses, but from customers.
But even as sexual misconduct has plagued some corners of the restaurant industry, women have continued to rise in the ranks of others, often in spite of obstacles.
Nationally, 45% of restaurant managers are women, according to the National Restaurant Association, and they’re not alone in a field where more than half of workers are female. Women now hold 41% of bartending positions at fine-dining establishments in the country and 19% of chef positions.
The numbers are similar in DC, where women are increasingly owning and running kitchens, dining rooms, bars and food businesses. But does having more women in leadership—or simply in the room—automatically change the way they are treated?
We asked the women we gathered—among them chefs, owners, managers, pastry chefs and beverage professionals—to talk about what it’s like in their kitchens and at their sales meetings, what’s changing and what still needs to.
Self-doubt and taking drink orders
Autumn Cline, executive chef at Rappahannock Oyster Bar, can be wearing the white coat, her title emblazoned across its front, and still she gets the question: “Can I speak with the executive chef?”
Shannon Troncoso, executive chef and part owner at Brookland’s Finest, says she hears the same refrain—from delivery drivers, salespeople, customers.
“If there’s a man next to me, everyone thinks that he’s the owner,” Troncoso says.
Hellrigl, who recently ran another kitchen with two male sous chefs at Proof before it closed early this year, agrees. “People automatically assume the guy next to me is the executive chef and I’m not,” she says.
“Every day,” chimes in Marcelle Afram, executive chef at Bluejacket, a brewery and restaurant at Navy Yard. Another chef says customers try to place drink orders with her when she walks through the dining room, chef’s coat and all.
Marjorie Meek-Bradley, who recently opened St. Anselm at Union Market as executive chef, says she uses the confusion to her advantage. A delivery she doesn’t want to deal with? Oh, the chef is over there.
Awkward introductions can be a cloying reminder of peoples’ assumptions about chef work: it’s not for women.
In their book “Taking the Heat: Women Chefs and Gender Inequality in the Professional Kitchen,” authors Deborah Harris and Patti Giuffre said the cooking that had historically fallen to females was belittled when the Escoffier’s brigade kitchen system came into vogue in the late 1800s. Fine dining emerged with men at the helm, and a culture that ranges from unfriendly to hostile toward women took hold.
At a former restaurant, Mollie Bird, chef at Little Pearl, said she had to confront co-workers who gave her the silent treatment when she was the only woman cooking on the line.
“I had to say, ‘Look, I’m here to stay. If you want to cook with me, great. If not, there is the door,’” she recalls.
For Joy Crump, executive chef and co-owner of FoodE in Fredericksburg, the reservations about being the one in charge were often her own.
“I went from being a line cook to being an owner, so I didn’t have that executive chef experience before taking on ownership. I used to be really uncomfortable if people called me ‘Chef.’ I’d be, like, ‘Just call me Joy,’” Crump says. “But now I understand they need to see me in that role as much as I need to be seen in that role.”
Hellrigl and Meek-Bradley say they’ve seen their share of chauvinism in restaurant kitchens, but they’ve worked hard to develop a different culture in their own. Less yelling, more teaching. Less star-chef posturing, more teambuilding.
“I just promoted someone who cooked with me for four years to sous chef. To me, that’s what builds the team and makes it better,” says Meek-Bradley. “That’s why I left places that I didn’t feel comfortable in and tried to create that structure.”
‘The pink dungeon’ of the kitchen
There are some corners of the kitchen where women are more welcome than others—or relegated to, depending on your perspective. If there is a female chef in a restaurant’s kitchen, they say, she’s probably the pastry chef.
“‘You’ve got such little hands. Your fingers are so small. You would be good at pastry,’” Paola Velez, pastry chef at Iron Gate, says she was told after culinary school. “That’s how I got introduced to what I do now.”
Velez has come to appreciate the artistry and autonomy that comes with her position, high-fiving herself when a couple comes in “just for dessert.” But, she says, “I feel like I’m always proving my value.”
Zoe Ezrailson, pastry chef at Doi Moi, received her own paragraphs of praise in a Tom Sietsema review of the last restaurant where she worked. But she left to work with Hellrigl, in part, because she still had to get almost every dish approved by a male chef who admitted he “didn’t know anything about pastry.”
The pastry chefs we talked to said the double whammy of being a female in an underappreciated position left them feeling like property, especially when other chefs ask at an event, “Is this your girl?” If a restaurant is struggling financially, the pastry chef is often the first kitchen position to go. They need to prove their value every day.
Pastry chefs are often physically separated from the rest of the kitchen, kneading dough or working with butter in cooler back rooms. Caitlyn Dysart, pastry chef at Centrolina, says she’s turned down restaurants that don’t consider pastry an integral part of the kitchen, because it can already feel so isolating and invisible.
When self-taught female pastry chef Dolester Miles, from the restaurant group that includes Birmingham’s Highlands Bar & Grill, won Outstanding Pastry Chef from the James Beard Foundation last year, it gave this group hope. After decades on the job, she was finally getting her due.
“I wept,” says Velez, “because I saw myself in her story.”
Beverage: ‘You see the worst’
Kapri Robinson feels like she’s part bartender, part bad-behavior bouncer when she works a late shift at the Reliable Tavern in Petworth.
Pouring drinks for a living, “you see the worst of people’s alcohol-induced issues,” says Robinson, who regularly asks people to leave for making staff or customers uncomfortable.
The other women who serve, sell or recommend alcohol for a living groan in agreement.
“I am so shocked at what people still do in 2019,” says Christine Kim, bartender at Service Bar. “Just because I’m providing you a service doesn’t mean you can touch me.”
It’s not yet noon, but a bottle of champagne seems to have opened itself and the stories have been flowing. Seventy-eight percent of the harassment restaurant workers experience is from customers, according to the 2014 ROC report, and bartenders (not to mention servers) are on the front lines.
“Of course, at the bar, I’m around drunk men a lot and it isn’t their behavior or drunkenness that disturbs me,” says Kim. “It’s that their friends, who often aren’t drunk, defend them.”
Many of these women get together after late shifts to grouse about the inappropriate behavior they see every night. But on this occasion, they want to talk solutions. Several say they’ve gotten bolder about calling out customers, co-workers—even their friends who “get that way” when they drink.
Earlecia Richelle, a brand ambassador for Grey Goose vodka, says a conversation she had recently with Jessica Weinstein, former beverage director at Hank’s Oyster Bar, made her rethink the sort of behaviors she’s allowed to slide in the past.
“We are constantly turning our eye on things that are 100% inappropriate,” she says. “It’s uncomfortable, but we have to start calling it out.”
Felicia Colbert, sommelier at A Rake’s Progress in The Line Hotel, pointed out that the bad behavior isn’t reserved for bar drinking; it’s rampant in the fine-dining world, too.
“When guests are paying $1,000 to $1,500 a person to eat at your establishment, their expectation of how they’re allowed to treat you is completely different,” says Colbert.
She has taken to asking unwanted touchers, “Do the laws not exist in this establishment, sir?”
From ‘honey’ to ‘jefe’
For women in ownership or managerial roles, harassment is something they are constantly sniffing out. Not only do they want themselves and others to feel safe at work, they’ve seen how easily a few bad actors can take down the whole operation.
“It is terrifying for every restaurant, because all you need is for someone to do something really stupid in your restaurant,” says Heidi Minora, marketing director at EatWell DC restaurant group. “These things that are happening right now end businesses.”
Carlie Steiner, co-owner and beverage director at Himitsu, says she’s kept it at bay so far by empowering staff at the 24-seat eatery to speak up if someone—even a customer—makes them uncomfortable.
“If you are uncomfortable, you make the call. I don’t have to be called before they’re kicked out,” says Steiner. “I have a small staff and I trust them to make that decision.”
Minora says standing up for women is a great start, but the industry is still missing some major pieces of the support system—like maternity leave policies. Often, on-your-feet restaurant jobs are not ideal for pregnant, nursing or new mothers, who aren’t encouraged to take time off.
Violetta Edelman, co-owner of Dolcezza Gelato, and Patrice Cleary, owner of Purple Patch, a Filipino restaurant in Mount Pleasant, got into ownership in part to create food businesses that would mesh with motherhood. Cleary says she turned half of her office into a nursery and isn’t afraid to nurse her infant son during a meeting. And Edelman brings her children, ages 9, 6 and 2, to the farmers market stand.
“I’m creating that environment to make it socially acceptable to be able to do this,” says Cleary, “I have to. I want to embrace having a child.”
Simone Jacobsen, who owns Toli Moli, a Burmese bodega at Union Market with her mother, says she’s been encouraged by an uptick of gatherings about women helping women. But she also wants to see workplaces and leadership become friendlier to all sorts of people on the fringes.
“We have all these women in leadership positions. It’s extremely exciting, and at the same time I want to work with men and gender nonbinary and older and differently abled people who are reflective of our society at large,” she says. “I would like for us to be in a place that we don’t have to have closed-door discussions about the challenges we face in the workplace.”
Many of the women feel like things are beginning to change for the better. When Minora started working in the industry a dozen years ago, she says no one ever called her by her name.
“It was always, ‘Honey, Baby, Sweetie, Mommy,’ all the time,” says Minora.
But, over the last couple of years, she’s noticed a shift. The things that were OK a decade ago no longer are, and the language, slowly, is changing to reflect it.
“The other day, I had a Latino dishwasher who’s worked with me for years, all of the sudden, he started calling me Jefe [Spanish for boss] out of nowhere,” says Minora. “It was, like, ‘OK, I’ve finally made it.’”
Whitney Pipkin is a staff writer for the Chesapeake Bay Journal and a freelance journalist focused on food, farms and the environment. Her freelance work appears nationally in The Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine and in regional publications Virginia Living, Northern Virginia and Arlington magazines and the Delmarva Farmer. A frequent contributor to Edible DC, Pipkin has served as guest editor for Edible DC’s Fall 2018 and Summer 2016 issues. A wife and mother based in Northern Virginia, she occasionally blogs about food, family, fitness and faith at ThinkAboutEat.com
