The Next Wave: The Future Belongs to Those on the Line

At the moment Anne Sprecher is more concerned about the botched fish order than about the current state of women chefs. Thirty-nine whole New Zealand snappers were expected at Campanile this morning, but only nine showed up. She puts in an annoyed phone call to the supplier, but when it’s clear that no more whole fish will be available, she reworks the night’s specials with her boss, Mark Peel. (“We can do more lobster instead,” she tells him. “We have more of them than we thought we did.”)

Later, Sprecher outlines her duties. “I think my title is ‘In Charge of Whatever Mark Doesn’t Want to Do,’ ” she says. “I do the scheduling and the organizing and I make sure prep’s coming out right. It works out really well because I don’t like doing meat, which is what Mark loves.” She also hires and fires kitchen employees and decides who works where on the line--the battalion of cooks who actually prepare the food.

Though she’s not the owner, Sprecher holds a powerful position--it’s a job that might not have been entrusted to a woman 10 or 15 years ago. Then, women chefs had a hard time getting promoted from pastry or the pantry station. Those who did were novelties, condescended to in the kitchen and promoted by restaurant publicists as unusual selling points (“We found kiwis add an interesting twist to leg of lamb and we have a woman in the kitchen!”).

It’s still not exactly easy, but these days, women work the line routinely, and are given real responsibilities. Sprecher feels that an assessment of women chefs as women chefs is almost irrelevant now--a good sign.

“It’s so strange thinking back on that stuff,” Sprecher says. “Here at Campanile almost the whole line is women. But then, only five years ago, I went to talk to Mauro (Vincente) at the Rex--and he was really up front--he said, ‘I can’t hire a woman because I’ve got all Italian chefs and they couldn’t handle it.’ ” Now he’s hiring women. It’s changed. I don’t think anybody looks twice if a woman comes in; even a lot of the French chefs have adjusted.”

Sprecher is a reluctant symbol of the struggle women have gone through to earn respect in the kitchen--she’s the woman who got soaked with water by pastry chef Claude Koeberle when Wolfgang Puck hired her to work at Ma Maison in 1979.

When Koeberle saw that his stunt didn’t faze her, they became good friends. “He saw I could take the pressure and decided to teach me a lot,” she says.

Unlike Sprecher, Pauliann Lister never had to learn things the hard way. “I heard a lot of the horror stories you hear about abusive chefs,” she says, “but I won’t work for anyone like that, period.” Lister trained at the La Varenne cooking school in France and came to the recently opened Angeli Mare from the restaurant at Checkers Hotel downtown. “I think at this point there are enough good people out there that I don’t have to subject myself to that kind of stuff. Of course, it hasn’t been a major issue--I’ve never been confronted with it.”

None of her female co-workers have, either. To the women in the kitchen at Angeli Mare (four women and one man, all in their 20s, work the line) the grim tales seem almost as dated as bra burnings and sit-ins that happened when they were kids.

And working for Angeli Mare co-owner and chef Evan Kleiman, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever have firsthand knowledge. Kleiman runs her kitchen more as coach than despot. “Teamwork” is a concept that constantly pops up in these women’s conversations.

“The idea is to get us all in a position where we can work every station and alternate,” says Ilana Sharlin.

“We’re really compatible,” Lister says. “I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but I think that women are better able to share responsibility without drawing lines.”

(Lister is quick to add that the sole male on the team, Jamie Behar, is as much a part of the team as the other women.)

But while these women are committed to their jobs, and especially to Kleiman--whom they all treat as a mentor--they don’t seem as obsessed as their predecessors (as is common with members of the second generation of any movement).

“I don’t ever think I’ll have my own restaurant,” Lister says. “I’m already married.”

“It’s not really one of my dreams,” says lunch chef Margot Malikoff. “Cooking is a skill I do well, it pays the rent . . . and I like it, most of all.”

It turns out that this crew of women has a lot in common with their male contemporaries.

“This is my first professional cooking job,” Laura Guagliano says. “It may turn out that I don’t get where I want to go quickly enough and then I’ll have to try something new. I like being in a position of authority. I like being in charge.”

Trump’s Elizabeth Miller is in charge; she’s Michael Roberts chef du cuisine. But it took Miller more than 10 years to earn her position.

“I had a guy come in here and say, ‘Well, I don’t want to go through the steps--I want to be the best right now,’ ” Miller says. “But no one can be the best right away. You have to stick with it--through years and years of training--and really be a workaholic.

Miller puts in 10 and 12 hour workdays--”and when I have my own restaurant it’ll be 14 and 16 hours, at least,” she says.

She expects to have her own place within three years, probably in Washington where there have been offers of financing. But at the moment Miller is someone who as she puts it, “does Michael Robert’s food.”

“Michael’s job,” she says, “is to be out in the dining room, talking to the patrons and pushing his food, and my job is to make sure that everything comes out of his kitchen perfect. I’m his eyes. I make sure that I have everybody trained to do what he wants. I know his style of food, the way he presents things. Like I was telling this new pantry guy I hired who wanted to make everything look perfect, he hates symmetrical food. He likes it to look nice, but he’s not a plate painter--he wants a mish mash of delicious food.”

There’s a real sense of excitement in Miller’s voice when she talks food. She tells you about the Thai market she went to and the wonderful herbs and sauces she got there (and that they ended up in a few specials at Trumps that night). And she tells you that in her “spare” time she and her daytime sous chef, Nancy Wilkinson, make desserts for the restaurant, Indigo. Traci de Jardin was untrained when she first went to work for Joachim Splichal. “I didn’t even know how to hold a knife,” she says. That was when she was 17. Now she’s about to turn 24 and is Splichal’s chef du cuisine at Patina.

“It’s so incredible for a woman to have that position in a French kitchen,” Campanile’s Sprecher says. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

De Jardin has surprised a lot of people. She quickly worked through the ranks with Splichal at the Seventh Street Bistro and Max au Triangle. Then, because she wanted more of the kind of regime that would make her a serious chef, she went off to France. She got the training she wanted . . . and more grief than she’d bargained for.

“I was working among only men,” she says, “and it was probably the hardest thing that I’ll ever have to do in my life. Not only are the French very biased against women in the kitchen, they’re very biased against Americans. And, big mistake, I didn’t speak French when I went. But I learned . . . fast. Even still I had to put up with everything from practical jokes and sexual comments to absolute cruelty. There was no recognition for my skills or abilities whatsoever. I just washed lettuce and peeled shallots. It’s a story Americans tell over and over.”

But she stayed for eight months, four and a half at Troisgros. From France she went to New York’s Montrachet for a year and a half, where she worked every position in the kitchen until she was promoted to sous chef.

Then she did something that few American chefs in her position would have ever done. She went back to France for more training.

“It was very scary to go back,” she says, “but I’d felt I’d come to a standstill as far as cooking, and I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted to work for. I mean, I’m pretty much into French food and I wanted more of it.”

She went to Paris’ three-star Lucas-Carton in Paris and stayed for six months.

“It was a lot better,” she says. “I knew French the second time around, plus I was older and my confidence was up. I just gave them as much attitude as they gave me and basically said, ‘I’m not going to put up with this. I know what my abilities are and none of you are better than I am.’ ”

The experience taught her about cooking under pressure, a skill she needed when she and Splichal opened Patina this summer.

“It’s been tough. If you step as a chef into a position where the routines are already established it’s a lot easier. We had to make up everything new and develop all our own systems. But it’s all fallen into place, and I’ve even been able to take a day off once in a while. Things are looking good.”