Women Chefs: Checking In on the Revolution : It seems there’s not that much room at top, after all

The stories have become legendary. There’s the one about the male chef who was so infuriated about being asked to share his kitchen with a woman that he went up to the skylight and threw a pail of water on her. Another man welcomed a woman into his kitchen by sticking her cut finger into a bucket of salt. A third initiated his new woman helper by demanding that she instantly clean 25 pounds of squid. And there are the other stories--like the one about the woman who graduated from chef’s school and went looking for a job in a professional restaurant only to be offered a job as a hat-check girl.

Five years ago all the articles about woman chefs began with the horror stories. Women chefs were a novelty, and every one of them had terrible tales to tell of her initiation into the business--dozens of them.

But then things started to change. Three years ago women chefs in Los Angeles finally seemed to be coming into their own. Lydia Shire had arrived to take charge of the kitchens at the new Four Seasons Hotel; she was the first female to become an executive chef in a major Los Angeles hotel. But she was not working in a vacuum--there were so many women running kitchens in Los Angeles that they banded together to start the Woman’s Culinary Alliance--and give other women their support. “We don’t have to prove ourselves anymore,” said Elka Gilmore, the first chairman of the organization, “we just have to support each other.” It looked as if the age of the woman chef had come.

Now things don’t look quite so rosy. Today, there are fewer women running kitchens in Los Angeles than there were three years ago. Lydia Shire left the Four Seasons--and then left town. She was replaced by a man. The Woman’s Culinary Alliance, according to Gilmore, has “disintegrated into a catering coffee klatch.” Gilmore herself has opened--and closed--her own restaurant (Tumbleweed). And of the 30 or so big deal new restaurants slated to open in the next year, only one will be run by a women. What happened?

Says Elka Gilmore, “In my case, I was just sort of naive. I don’t know how I went from being content as a chef to owning a restaurant. At Tumbleweed, I didn’t have time to cook at all. It was really tough; I had a hard time dealing with it. But now I know what it’s like to have to sell your car to make payroll.”

Lisa Stalvey, former chef at Spago, says much the same thing. She left Spago to open her own restaurant, J. Paul’s at the Beach. In the process she lost her money. “I’m not real businessy, I’m just real creative. I admit I’ve been a sucker. I didn’t protect myself legally. I guess I’m not ready to run my own business.”

Even Gigi Patout, who was running the family business, Patout’s in Westwood, has a similar story. “My brother Alex was Mr. P.R. He was so domineering. I was the one who moved, I was the one who set the restaurant up. But I was in the background.” And says Patout, “when the family quarrelled with Alex, I was the one who left the restaurant.”

Says Michael Roberts, chef at Trumps (and a man who has hired so many women that his key kitchen people are all female), “Women chefs are at a disadvantage because they’re working in a male world. They have to be just a little bit tougher than a man does. This is not always to their advantage. The problem is that it’s so difficult for a woman to be given credibility in a kitchen--to prove that she’s strong enough, etc.--that she then gets propelled into thinking that she wants to be the owner. And lots of people would be better off if they just stayed in the number two position. “

A chef who graduates to executive chef changes his job radically. He becomes more of a manager than a cook. This is hard for many women to face. When Lydia Shire took her first executive position many years ago, she admits that she was not prepared. “I failed miserably at management. The cooks were making fun of me behind my back. I wasn’t strong. I’d ask instead of tell, and there are times when you just can’t do that. In a kitchen, everybody needs a leader.”

Shire ultimately became a leader. She worked her way up to executive chef at the Bostonian Hotel--and was then lured away to Los Angeles. For the Four Seasons Hotel, hiring Shire created a lot of press. “I still think I was an experiment,” Shire says now. “They were going into the L.A. market, and you have to be a little weird to be great in L.A. So somebody higher up said, ‘Hire her.’ I’m not sorry I went. I had 43 cooks on my staff and the second lowest turnover rate in the whole hotel chain. People were happy.”

But Shire was not. “We did a quarter of a million dollars worth of banquet business in the first month, and they only gave me one and a half banquet cooks to do it with. They were trying to force me to serve French banquets. We do it this way in all our hotels, they said, and you have to do it our way. I said I’m not going to.” Shire ultimately left the hotel to open her own wildly successful restaurant, Biba, in Boston.

Evan Kleiman has become a leader, too. Like Shire, it took her a while. When she was the chef at Verdi in 1982, she had an assistant, a man, who fought her for control. Exhausted, she finally walked out and left him in charge of the kitchen. That couldn’t happen today. Kleiman knows who is the boss. “It’s hard to work for me,” she admits. “I know what I want. I tend to have huge conflicts with people who want to come in and make up recipes.”

But being successful takes more than the ability to lead. It takes chutzpah. It takes stamina. It takes stubbornness. Asked what the secret of her success has been, Alice Waters, owner of Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse, replied, “I was more obsessed than anybody else.”

They all were--all the successful ones. Lydia Shire says “I was always trying and pushing. It simply never would have occurred to me to ask for a Saturday night off. If you want to get ahead, you have to do what it takes.”

Mary Sue Milliken, co-owner of City Restaurant, the chef who graduated from chef’s school only to be offered a job as a hatcheck girl, refused to take no for an answer. She called every week until she wore the owner down. He finally bowed to the inevitable and gave her a job peeling vegetables.

But today, most chefs complain, nobody wants to take a job peeling vegetables. Says Milliken’s partner at one of L.A.’s most successful restaurants, Susan Feniger, “We’ll put an ad in the paper and not one person will apply for a job.” Michael Roberts says, “People don’t want to start at the bottom and work to the top. Today they go to cooking school for two years, graduate and say to me, ‘My mother’s going to stop the payments on my BMW. I need to earn $12 an hour--and I won’t work weekends.” Says Shire, “It irks me when these young cooks come in and say they need Saturday off because that’s the night their husband isn’t working.”

Nancy Silverton, who now owns Campanile with her husband, Mark Peel, and runs the La Brea Bakery, worked for free at her first job. This is not unusual; most of the women of the first generation did. But today, says Silverton, there don’t seem to be people who are willing to do that. “If there had been a bakery around when I started out,” says Silverton, “I would have worked on my day off, worked for free. I would have done anything. But I haven’t had a single person who has come in and said, ‘I want to learn to bake bread like you do.’ Wouldn’t you think there’d be one person in Los Angeles who would want to?”

“I wish there had been a bakery when I started out,” says Victoria Granof, executive chef at Atlas, due to open next month in the Wiltern Building.

Granof started with no training at all. When she wanted to get some, a friend suggested she call Michael Roberts at Trumps. “That was 1983, when Trumps was a sort of culinary temple. Michael told me to come in and see him. When I got there he said, ‘I don’t have time to talk to you, but can you bake bread?’ I’d never done it, but I said, ‘Sure’. He told me I could start the next day. So I went home and baked all night, trying every recipe in the Joy of Cooking until I got one acceptable loaf.”

Granof proceeded to work so hard that after two months Roberts asked her to take over the pastries as well. She left Trumps to work at the fledgling City restaurant (“a friend called and told me that those girls really had their stuff together, so I went.”) Ultimately she went off to take classes at the Cordon Bleu in England-- and then to work in a restaurant in Italy.

“While I was there Evan (Kleiman) called and asked me to come work for her. You know, I think I’ve been very lucky. I worked for people like Michael Roberts and Evan. It’s made it easier. If I had been in a situation where I had to spend five years doing stages in a traditional French kitchen, I would have had some more of those horror stories to tell you. But it was easier for me.”

It will continue to get easier. Women may be failing as executive chefs--but they are pouring into kitchens in record numbers. “There are a lot more woman cooks,” says Kleiman. “Not just chefs. They are everywhere, at all levels. There has definitely been a change in the last three years. It’s no longer extraordinary.”

There are still chefs who refuse to let women in the kitchen. Chefs like the one with a restaurant on Melrose who recently told Elka Gilmore, “I know women are going to be more prominent in kitchens, but I personally won’t be able to deal with it.” But those kitchens are becoming rarer. The new California casual style of eating has produced a new California casual style of restaurant. Few local kitchens are organized along traditional French lines. Most chefs don’t even bestow titles like “sous chef” and “saucier” anymore. In place of the old-line French chefs there are innovative younger men--Michael Roberts, Wolfgang Puck, Joachim Splichal--all of whom employ women as head chefs.

And then, of course, there are the women who have made it. They are helping the ones who haven’t. “The Woman’s Culinary Alliance may now involve mostly caterers,” says Kleiman, “but there is an informal support network among women chefs. Eighty percent of the applications I got to work here at Angeli Mare were from women.”

And she hired a lot of them. There are four women on the line at Angeli Mare. And if you walk into the kitchen at Trattoria Angeli, you may be surprised to hear a decidedly Cajun accent coming from behind the stove. “When I needed a job,” says Gigi Patout, “I called Evan. She said, ‘You want to work for me?’ ” The Cajun chef laughs, a deep rolling laugh and says, “I told her I didn’t know anything about Italian food, but I was willing.” She laughs again and adds, “It’s been such a good challenge for me. The worst thing for me was being able to pronounce the words. You know, the closest thing to this we’ve got in Louisiana was Pizza Hut.”

Susan Feniger says lots of women come into City to apply for jobs, too. “I think it’s because we’re women who own it. I’m amazed how many women want to work with other women.”

“Maybe,” says Kleiman, “women haven’t gone to the top as fast as they might have. But it’s going to come in the next generation. The woman working for me now are between 25 and 29, and a lot of them are real interested in having their own place, running the show. It’s just a matter of time.”