Women Are Really Cooking Now

Shari Lynne Robins of the restaurants James Beach and Canal Club was 13 when she started a small catering business making sandwiches for her mother’s beauty shop customers. Granita’s Jennifer Naylor grew up in a venerable Los Angeles restaurant family, granddaughter of Tiny Naylor. Babette Ory is the daughter of jazz legend Edward Kidd Ory, who taught her to cook Creole for his jazz cronies when she was just 2 years old. Josie Le Balch’s father was the chef at L’Escoffier.

Crustacean’s Helene An was a princess of Vietnam’s royal family; Xiomara Ardolina was born and raised in Old Havana; Mako Antonishek is from the Philippines, and Chez Mimi’s Micheline Herbert was a governess from Montreal who cooked for her employer.

But they now have at least one thing in common. They are part of a new phenomenon marking Los Angeles as a vanguard on yet another cultural front: women chefs.

This city is being swept in a wave of women executive chefs--not to mention chef-owners--of some of the most high-profile, influential restaurants defining cuisine locally, and thus nationally. There are dozens of culinary stars in what, in other parts of the country, is still a rarefied male sphere. And when you add managers, pastry chefs, sous chefs, line cooks and such, Southern California is leading the feminist movement in professional kitchens globally.

Numbers are hard to come by, as women chefs are still under-counted. But the three dozen-plus women in Southern California are a strong presence when you consider that a mere 157 of the 3,873 chefs accredited by the American Culinary Federation as executive chefs are women. Executive chef annual salaries can range anywhere from $40,000 to $100,000 and higher, but most fall within the $60,000-to-$70,000 range.

“Los Angeles has done a better job of [having] women rising to the top,” says Jean Wolinsky, spokeswoman for the James Beard Foundation, the preeminent culinary organization in America. Foundation President Len Pickel adds that “the women in Los Angeles have more chance to exhibit what they can do and exhibit their talent. It takes a lot of perseverance and dedication to really jump to the top, especially when you go east of the Mississippi.”

While Northern California may have pioneered the empowered woman breaking through the wall of the male chef mystique via Alice Waters, Molly Katzen and others, Los Angeles now heads the quiet revolution.

These women are shaping palates and tastes, recruiting women kitchen staffs and helping to define American cuisine. The phenomenon, going beyond the upscale Beverly Hills-Westside grid, is playing out all over the Southland--from Christine Brown in Torrance to Ardolina’s Xiomara in Pasadena, Susan Fine Moore’s reformatted coffee shop near Beachwood Canyon to Allyson Thurber at the Lobster in Santa Monica and Tara Thomas’ Traxx in Union Station.

Even the Getty Center has a woman executive chef, Gwen Gulliksen, who oversees three restaurants, a full-service catering division and half a dozen coffee carts. And there are a slew of female chefs--Jennifer Naylor, Jennifer Jasinski, Gina Decew among them--whose careers are being launched by the Wolfgang Puck-Barbara Lazaroff empire.

“Women are just as good, and better, than men,” says an adamant Puck, who is venerated in culinary circles for catapulting many of the women to success. “And they deal with a handicap. It’s like being an immigrant and coming to America, and you have to try harder to do better.”

It was Puck who helped many of them along the way.

“Well, Wolfgang and Barbara get the credit,” Moore says. “They were willing to train anyone who could do the work. They didn’t care, as long as you could do the job,” she says, contrasting that to the glass ceiling she faced when apprenticing at the Century Plaza Hotel in 1970. “They told me there weren’t any openings for women. They looked at it like a rooster in the henhouse.”

By the mid-’80s, says Suzanne Tracht, executive chef at L.A.’s Jozu for the last three years and who is now scouting property for her own restaurant, “if you were a woman in the kitchen, you either worked pastry or pantry.”

Moving to the Front Burner

That began to change when Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger opened City Restaurant in 1985 and Border Grill five years later. Nancy Silverton opened Campanile and LaBrea Bakery in 1989. Other Puck-Lazaroff proteges began moving up to executive chef positions, and as they did, they hired more women kitchen staff. And now, many local women have national profiles.

“Some of the front-runners of the whole California cuisine movement have been women,” says Bloomingdale’s food consultant Michael Weinberg. Milliken and Feniger are at the top of the pyramid, having alchemized Mexican food with a California twist now with Ciudad in Southern California and Las Vegas, and also having parlayed their animated pal banter as the “Too Hot Tamales” on television and radio.

Silverton, along with husband Mark Peel, created high-profile venues and was one of the first to get national press for the burgeoning light California cuisine. Suzanne Goin has made the top 10 lists and covers of Saveur and Food and Wine magazines, and has also been featured in Gourmet, for Lucques’ upscale yet homey California-French mix. And An, the former Vietnamese royal, has catapulted Crustacean’s Euro-Asian cuisine into Esquire’s top 10, as well as mentions in Town & Country and the Wall Street Journal.

And this spring more women plan to stake their flags on Los Angeles property. Josie Le Balch, who made a name for herself at Saddle Peak Lodge and opened the Beach House in Santa Monica, will launch Josie at the former site of 2424 Pico. Scooter Kanfer, formerly of Nik’s, is opening the House, a new American bistro on Melrose, with Dana Caskey. Babette Ory has just begun construction in Santa Monica on Cafe Paradiso, which will be her third restaurant, to open by early summer. L’Ermitage pastry chef Angela Hunter is co-founder (with Benjamin Ford, son of Harrison Ford) of Chadwick’s, which will use bio-dynamic organic produce it is farming itself.

And Ann Gentry’s Real Food Daily, with restaurants in both Santa Monica and West Hollywood, has pushed the envelope as the only operation in Southern California serving a 100% vegetarian-vegan menu using foods grown exclusively with organic farming methods.

So why is it all coming together here?

“I think that L.A. is a really progressive town,” Milliken says. “This is a forward-thinking kind of environment.”

She recalls her first job at a high-end French restaurant in Chicago: “I had to practically beg my way into it because I was a woman. I love L.A. There is this open atmosphere to be creative in your food, whatever, career, lifestyle.”

Opportunities in the Golden State

When Suzanne Bourg bought Pasadena’s Raymond restaurant 21 years ago, “I didn’t know of a single other woman chef,” she says. She transformed the historical Craftsman cottage from an unassuming sandwich place to its current award-winning, if traditional, mix of French and California cuisine.

“Los Angeles has a lot of opportunity for women. It’s unbelievable how independent women are,” Ardolina adds. She has been on the cutting edge not only because she introduced authentic Cuban cuisine ahead of the current Latin wave but also because she is one of the many women chef-entrepreneurs operating their own restaurants. “When women find out I’m a woman chef, a single mother and a restaurant owner, they think I’m a hero.”

“We’re more casual out here,” explains Crustacean co-owner Elizabeth An, Helene’s daughter, pinpointing the West Coast receptivity to gender equality in the kitchen, among other arenas. And Traxx chef-owner Tara Thomas says her Union Station eatery benefits from “a wonderful amalgam of different cultures here, of different walks of life.” Thomas had worked at a number of venues, including the Ritz-Carlton kitchen in San Francisco, before opening a restaurant in Little Tokyo with her husband. When the couple split up, she took the plunge on her own and signed a contract for the historic train station.

Silverton, another icon among women chefs in Los Angeles for both breaking the gender barrier and hiring women kitchen staff, says that there is a natural, almost organic, synergy between California energy and women.

“I always say, ‘There are two types of food, there’s girl food and there’s boy food.’ And I’m saying this in fun, as a gross generalization. But girls cook to please and to nurture and boys cook to impress. The food that is very typical of California is girl food. Food that comes from the heart, food that comes from our local food sources, the huge bountiful vegetables. We in California don’t cook as much to camouflage as we do to encourage these flavors. That’s what you find at many of the restaurants in California. And a lot of women are doing this food.”

Thomas cites a common motive among women restaurateurs: a maternal instinct.

“I think we women chefs, myself included, tend to run the restaurant like family,” she says. “The reason I got in the business was that I thought it would be great to entertain all the time. I had a fantasy of a salon where my friends would come in and I’d see them, cook for them, give them a little sustenance, things I want to share with them, and then develop a relationship with my guests.”

That same biological proclivity to family has also been a career obstacle for some women.

“I have this theory,” says Mako Antonishek, chef at Le Colonial, one of the city’s most high-profile restaurants on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. “Women are as driven as men until you reach a point where you are forced to decide how you want to balance the pressure of executive chef and a family. Being a chef is all-consuming. And you ask yourself, ‘What do I want? Can I have both?’ But it’s tough.”

But within the field there is much more support than rivalry, they say.

“It’s a very nurturing community,” Milliken says.

Veteran restaurant publicist Joan Luther describes a get-together dinner she hosted in the fall, attended by 16 of the top women chefs.

“Seeing all these women in one room, so interested in each other and what they were doing and so supportive, was thrilling,” she says.

Gender Differences in the Kitchen

There are clear differences between men and women in the kitchen, notwithstanding the general caveats about stereotyping.

“Women tend to be a bit more organized and methodical than men, as a gender thing,” says Pickel, the Beard Foundation president. Temperament is a ticklish issue, say chefs.

“Oh, boy, it’s a loaded subject,” faculty instructor Toni Sagaguchi says, with a laugh. Sagaguchi works at the Culinary Institute of America. “Women are a little more nurturing, a little less screaming, than men.”

Adds Antonishek: “Women are more prone to try other methods of reprimanding cooks, whereas men go that very French way of just yelling. Immediately. It’s, like, automatic for them to bark.”

The number of women in professional kitchens is rising dramatically, here and around the country.

“When women run kitchens, more women go work in them, so it becomes something that increases exponentially,” says Deann Bayless, the Chicago-based head of the national Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.

“And the doors are open for line cooks, sous chefs, line chefs,” adds the Getty’s Gulliksen. According to Dina Altieri, instructor at the local California School of Culinary Arts, “classes have gone from 30% female in the early ‘90s to 50-50 male-female now.”

The city already has a plethora of female pastry chefs, a field that has traditionally accepted women. In addition to L’Ermitage’s Hunter, there is a slew of women working at the top-tier restaurants, like Spago Beverly Hills’ Sherry Yard, Wonyee Tom at the Water Grill and Jan Purdy at Linq’s.

And Jasinksi, who has been with Puck-Lazaroff for a decade, broke the corporate gender divide with her appointment by Puck as overall chef for the corporate division of Wolfgang Puck Cafes, concepts and frozen food--a first for a woman.

“I haven’t met any other chefs who are running multi-unit corporate operations who are women,” Jasinski says. “I love it when I go out to the dining room and talk to the people. They get a kick out of women chefs. They go, ‘Great, go for it.’ Because it’s a tough business. But I couldn’t see myself doing something different.”