WOMEN WHO CAN TAKE THE HEAT

The first chef Elka Gilmore worked for was so infuriated at having a woman invade his domain that when she cut her finger he stuck it into a bucket of salt. “He was only trying to rattle me,” she says. He didn’t know who he was dealing with.

On her first day as the lone woman in a professional kitchen, Mary Sue Milliken was asked to make 80 quarts of hollandaise--by hand. “I discovered,” she says, “that the trick was to put a smile on your face and pretend that your arm didn’t hurt.”

The first chef Anne Rosenzweig worked for “only took me on to prove to me that I couldn’t do it.” Her inaugural assignment was to clean 25 pounds of squid. “I finished them up, smiled and said, ‘That was fun. You mean you guys get paid to do this?’ ”

“Whenever anybody said, ‘You’re too small,’ ‘You’re not strong enough’ or ‘You don’t have the stamina,’ I became more determined,” says Rosenzweig. Lydia Shire was so intent on being successful “that I came in earlier than anybody else and I left later. I did things nobody asked me to do. I never complained.” Adds Cindy Black: “Women chefs are pretty tough; they work harder than their male equals.”

And suddenly they have a lot to show for it.

“The feeling for women in the kitchen is so different than it was six years ago,” says Rosenzweig. Back then, women had to prove that they could stand up to hard physical labor and long hours. They had to survive rituals that make fraternity hazing look tame. But women refused to get out of the kitchen; they showed that they could take the heat. Now they are entering restaurants in record numbers. Last December, when the Los Angeles-based Woman’s Culinary Alliance had its first meeting, the primary order of business was how to limit the membership to serious chefs.

“Four years ago,” says Alliance chairman Elka Gilmore, “I only had two things to say to the media: I was young and I was a woman. Today I’m not so young--and being a woman is not much of an issue. Women have proved themselves.”

And now they are starting all over again. Having conquered the kitchen, women are moving out from the back of the stove, making the leap from hands-on cook to executive chef, from creative artist to major manager. Next month, when the two most eagerly awaited new restaurants in Los Angeles and New York open their doors, each a multimillion-dollar venture with an enormous staff, women will be running the show.

Did you read that newspaper article? There was that one comment I really loved that said that hiring Rosenzweig to redo 21 was like hiring the designer of a small Madison Avenue boutique to redo a wing at the Met. I’ve gotten that sort of stuff from the beginning, and I’ve come to expect it. I just want to go out and show ‘em, you know, I can do it.

--Anne Rosenzweig, 21, New York

Anne Rosenzweig always liked to cook, but she was never meant to be a chef. A graduate of Juilliard and Columbia, this tiny (she is five feet tall) but intense New Yorker was happily doing field work in ethnomusicology. And then one day it occurred to her that what she really wanted to do was work in a kitchen.

Rosenzweig tends to act on her ideas. She came back from Nepal to search for a teacher. “I considered going to school, but that way you just end up spending thousands of dollars and running a little restaurant that belongs to them. I thought it would make more sense to apprentice myself to someone.”

The man she picked as a teacher was contemptuous of the idea--but reluctant to turn down free labor. “You are a woman,” the chef would shout at her, “and you don’t have the concentration and stamina for a kitchen like this.” But, says Rosenzweig, “he saw that I was determined and very good. Then he got excited and really started teaching.”

Three months later, the prep cook left and Rosenzweig moved into the job. In a year and a half, she had worked her way through the kitchen, hitting every station. Her mentor then helped get her a job as brunch and pastry chef at another restaurant. The first review said that brunch was the best meal at the restaurant--and that the pastries were excellent. The owners did the obvious; they fired the chef and hired Rosenzweig. She had been cooking for less than two years.

“I was not really prepared,” she says now, “but that’s the sort of thing that makes me work that much harder.” Talking to her, you get a sense of enormous intelligence and icy determination. “Being a line cook,” she says, “isn’t like being a chef. You need certain qualities to run all those people, take the pressure, manage it. There are people who aren’t great cooks who make great chefs. But I’m the sort of person who, when I see a hole, I sort of tend to take over.”

When Rosenzweig decided to open her own restaurant, she really swung into action. She and partner Ken Aretsky went around to see banks. (“I knew it was my blood, sweat whatever. I didn’t want to take in a lot of partners and give away the store.”) She dealt with plumbers, bought wine, even trained the staff. “I discovered that to protect your food, you have to have good people in the front; so I started training them myself.” When they finally opened Arcadia on New York’s Upper East Side, she was a fixture at the restaurant. “From 8 in the morning until 1 at night. I was a madman. You know, when you have a restaurant, you’re really married to it.”

It has, in fact, taken a toll on Rosenzweig’s marriage (her husband is a journalist). But if her husband was not happy about the first restaurant, he was even less pleased when she took on a second. Rosenzweig herself was reluctant to tackle the resurrection of the sixth-highest-grossing restaurant in the country, New York’s 21. But in the end, she was unable to resist the money--or the challenge. “It was a real male bastion; there had never been a woman involved. That intrigued me.”

21 is not a restaurant--it is an institution. It has been the place to be since 1930--if, that is, they’ll let you in at all. (A doorman once reportedly looked at some upstarts anxious for entry and said, “They are people I don’t know, so why should I be friendly to them?”) This is a restaurant for the rich and the powerful rather than the merely famous; those who have regular tables control a substantial percentage of the country’s Gross National Product. But last year, multimillionaire Marshall Cogan bought 21--and he was anxious for change. “It was going downhill,” says Rosenzweig. “He was watching his investment fall to pieces.”

The food world was reeling from the announcement that a woman was going to take over at 21; then they got another shock. Rosenzweig and her partners announced that they had hired Alain Sailhac of the four-star Le Cirque. “I needed someone strong in the kitchen,” says Rosenzweig, who intends to oversee the action from her post at Arcadia. “Sure,” people said, “but what does he need her for?”

Rosenzweig hardly blinks. The prospect of directing one of the world’s most respected French chefs, a man considerably older than herself, hardly fazes her. “His background is very French,” she says. “At 21, we want to be seen as a great American restaurant. We need each other. So far, we haven’t had any disagreements. Unfortunately, I’m basically his boss. . . . If he gets mad, I’m the one who will have to be the mediator.”

As the opening gets closer (they are aiming for the end of April), the talk gets louder. But people who are waiting for Rosenzweig to trip should remember two things: That this is a woman who admits, “I have no problem telling people what to do.” And that one of the great joys in her life is having people tell her what she can’t do--so she can prove them wrong.

My job has always come first; my children have always understood that. It would simply never have occurred to me to ask for Saturday night off. If you want to get ahead, you have to do what it takes.

--Lydia Shire,

Four Seasons Hotel,

Los Angeles

Shire may be the most powerful woman in American kitchens, but it is still shocking to hear her saying these things. Not because she is a woman, but because she does not seem like a tough one. Shire dresses in bright colors. Her most frequent expression falls somewhere between a belly laugh and a delighted giggle. And she has wonderful manners; she is the sort of person who never shows up empty-handed, always writes “thank you” notes and doesn’t fumble over introductions. She is also passionate about football, loves to eat and drink and makes her life seem like a lot of fun.

But more than this, in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of professional food, a world notable for its jealousy, its back-biting, its squabbling over stolen recipes, Shire is a genuinely generous soul. Ask about her success and Shire says, “Everybody has been so nice to me.” When a photographer shows up, she pulls her assistants into the picture. How, you wonder, did anyone this likable manage to become the country’s premiere woman executive chef at the age of 38?

There is steel beneath the smile. Fifteen years ago Shire was a divorced mother of three with no money and no means of support. She sat down and considered what she liked to do best, pulled out a cookbook and baked a seven-layer cake. Hailing a cab, she went to Maison Robert, the best restaurant in Boston, and presented the chef with her creation. Unfortunately, it was the middle of summer, and the icing had melted by the time she got there. The chef took one look at her cake and offered her a job cleaning vegetables.

A week convinced Shire that this was not what she’d had in mind. She wanted to cook. So she pawned her engagement ring, left her children with her former husband and took herself to the Cordon Bleu in London. “There were no cooking schools in America,” she says simply, “and I didn’t speak French.”

Eight months later, she was knocking on the door of Maison Robert again. “Now I’ve been to cooking school, so you have to hire me,” she said. Faced with the force of her personality, they did. “I just kept trying and pushing,” she says; three years later, she was head chef at the restaurant.

“Julia Child liked the fact that I was the only non-owner woman chef working in Boston,” says Shire, and when the Harvest restaurant (a Cambridge trend-setter that is still going strong) needed a chef, she suggested Shire. But if Shire was hot on the range, she was a miserable manager. “I found that the cooks were making fun of me behind my back. In a kitchen, everybody needs a leader, and I kept asking people to do things instead of telling them. I made so many mistakes.” After nine months, Shire cried uncle and quit.

She moved to the fine-dining room of the Copley Plaza Hotel, which had so small a kitchen that she was working almost alone. Before long, it had been voted the best hotel dining room in Boston and business had doubled. A succession of other jobs followed--and then the inevitable happened. She was offered another management position.

“I didn’t want to give up cooking,” she says wistfully. “When you’re on the line, you’re only responsible for yourself. You’re just cooking nice dinners for people, and when they come up and say how much they liked the food, it makes you feel good. I didn’t want to manage people. I held out for a while.”

Boston is a fairly small restaurant town, which may be why Shire was never labeled as a woman chef; from the start, she was seen as simply one of Boston’s best chefs. Shire eventually bowed to the inevitable, became the chef at Seasons in the Bostonian Hotel, and was then promoted to executive chef for the entire hotel. Somewhere along the line, Shire had picked up the courage and the clout to be a manager. Says Susan Regis, who worked under her in Boston: “Lydia is a person who builds confidence. She lets you think on your own; it was a great place to learn.” The job also built Shire’s confidence, and when the challenge of something even bigger came along, she felt she was ready.

And the Four Seasons (which is expected to open on April 17) is big. The hotel has three restaurants, 280 rooms and banquets booked through much of 1988; the kitchen alone cost a million dollars. On a good day, it will be serving more than 2,000 meals. This is not to mention the separate employee cafeteria for which Shire is also responsible. To help her feed the hordes, Shire will have a staff of more than 70 people.

Is she nervous? She shakes her head. “It’s just kind of like there are a few more bodies,” she says as casually as if she were talking about whipping up a couple of extra peanut-butter sandwiches for her kids.

Shire shrugs. “I’ve come to think of myself as a thinker and provider,” she says. “I like to see lots of happy cooks. Whenever I yearn to stop managing and start cooking, I ask myself who would be doing this if I weren’t? Probably some schmuck.”

I was hired as the lunch chef at the best French restaurant in Madison, Wis., but after six months the head chef walked out and I took over. It was no problem; after all, I’d had years of experience.

Elka Gilmore at Camelions,

Santa Monica

She was all of 16.

If Lydia Shire and Anne Rosenzweig are typical of how far women have come in the restaurant industry, Elka Gilmore is an indication of where they are going. She is a rumpled young woman who looks less like an executive chef than like some kid who just hitched a ride across country. She doesn’t sound like a chef either, with her eager, outgoing air. But then she starts to talk.

“My first job was washing dishes in a cafe when I was 12. I had to stand on a milk crate to put the dishes away, and I sort of dragged it around behind me. After I’d been there three months, I started working the line, making quiches and crepes.” This was not some weekend job in the family restaurant; Gilmore was actually earning her own living by the time she was 13. “They didn’t know how old I was,” she says. “I went in before school and made Danish and croissants, then after school I made the cookies. On Sundays, I cooked brunch. I probably poached more eggs than any 13-year-old in history. I was very energetic and really into it.”

So energetic that the Austin native left home at 14. She was accepted early for college (University of Wisconsin), studied chemistry, quit when she became head chef at a restaurant. “After a year,” she says, “I felt that I was being unfair to my career by staying in Madison. So I went to New York and then to Boston.”

Since then, Gilmore has worked her way through a lot of kitchens in this country and in France. She met Marsha Sands, owner of Camelions, when she was 19, and opened a restaurant with her in Nantucket; three years ago, they opened the highly acclaimed restaurant in Santa Monica. “The part of being a chef that is so awful,” says Gilmore, “is standing there and peeling carrots for days on end. I got to do that when I was a child and it was fun.”

Although few children are forced to support themselves, cooks are getting into the kitchen at an increasingly early age. The last decade saw the rise of the over-educated chef--architects and political scientists who got out of college and suddenly decided that what they really wanted to do was cook. But, these days, kids are skipping college to become chefs. Some go to cooking school--but almost everybody agrees that there is no substitute for experience. Says Anne Rosenzweig of her own apprenticeship: “I learned twice as much in a year and a half than I could have learned in cooking school.”

Without even knowing what she was doing, Elka Gilmore gave herself a classic European apprenticeship. At 25, she has been cooking for more than half of her life. It gives her extraordinary confidence. “I don’t even think about the technical things anymore,” she says. “Cooking has just become innate to me. When you’ve filleted three salmon a day for 10 years, it is not an issue.”

Now Gilmore wants to give others the benefit of her training. One of the primary goals of the Women’s Culinary Alliance, which she helped found, is to set up an apprenticeship program. “We want to support women in the food industry,” says Gilmore. “It’s important.” The Alliance will hold a black-tie dinner on June 14 at the Four Seasons as a double benefit for itself and for the Women’s Building downtown. Tickets are $125--and the dinner will be entirely cooked by women. (The women on the cover will be among the many participants; for information call (213) 553-7405.)

“We don’t have to prove ourselves anymore,” says Gilmore. “We’ve already won the cup. All we have to do now is pass it on.”