A Woman’s Place in the Pro Kitchen

Crisp white linen. Fresh flowers. Sparkling crystal. Candlelight and soft music. The man at table 7 asks to speak to the chef.

His foie gras is underdone, he informs her. Describing the precise length of time and temperature at which it was cooked, the chef tells him it’s perfectly poached. He insists it is not. She explodes. “It’s like casting pearls before swine.... And why don’t you throw out the wine too?--because with all that smoking, you’ll never taste it!”

Meet Chef Klein, the main character in the new movie “Mostly Martha,” a gifted cook who lives for her work. The dining room diva’s antics provide a revenge fantasy for anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant. But there’s realism, roasted to perfection, in Martha’s steely constitution, say female chefs who know it takes a tough cookie to run a kitchen.

“You need to be undauntable,” says Mary Sue Milliken, the chef-restaurateur who co-owns the Border Grill chain and Ciudad with Susan Feniger. “You have to believe in it so thoroughly because you’ll get discouraged, every step of the way, every turn in the road, unless you are determined.”

“I felt like I needed to be as tough as the guys were,” says Feniger, who began her culinary training when professional kitchens were strictly a man’s world. “I didn’t think about being a woman as being something that got in the way.”

Neither did Nancy Silverton, chef-owner of Campanile and La Brea Bakery. “I’ve always pulled my own weight, and I’ve always been appreciated for what I do,” she says.

In “Mostly Martha,” which opened Friday, the image of a formidable female chef is bang on, says Ann Cooper of Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, a 2,000-member organization that promotes the education and advancement of women in the restaurant industry.

“Internationally, the ratio of women to men chefs is very low,” Cooper says. “But in the U.S., about 45% of all chefs and cooks are women, and that includes places like Denny’s and fast-food restaurants.” At the executive chef level--Martha’s job--about 15% to 20% are women.

The profession mixes culinary and business skills, mental and physical stamina, and requires a high degree of perfectionism. Those characteristics, and her mother’s admiration for female chefs and cookbook authors such as Viana La Place and Patricia Wells, attracted German writer-director Sandra Nettelbeck to the subject.

“If you want to make it as a chef, you really have to love what you do,” she says. “They work six days a week and they never get to go anywhere, because if you want to get your restaurant going, you have to be there all the time.”

That single-mindedness has made Martha a popular character. Nettelbeck’s film, a sleeper hit in Germany, where it was titled “Bella Martha,” has been distributed in 40 countries. Martina Gedeck won the German Film Award for best actress for her performance in the title role.

Nettelbeck wanted to write about a person who was wrapped up in her profession. “She’s an extremist because that’s all she does and she’s oblivious to how it could be different,” Nettelbeck says. “Martha is a grown woman. She’s found her place in life and then she finds love, and she has to make room for it”--because her job at a chic restaurant in Hamburg requires all her attention.

True to life again, say Milliken and Feniger, especially in the kitchen scenes, with line cooks sauteing frantically, waiters buzzing in and out, the clatter of dishes and all the spills and accidents.

“It looked very realistic, just how chaotic, discombobulated and wacky it can be,” says Milliken, who also appreciated “the camaraderie of the staff.”

In the film, Martha is in complete command of the kitchen, but her meticulously organized life up-ends like a tarte Tatin when her sister dies, leaving her to care for an 8-year-old niece. With no clue about parenting, she takes the child to work each night until her boss, the restaurant’s owner, tells her it’s no place for kids.

A lunch-rush visit to the kitchen of Ciudad bears this out.

First, Feniger and Milliken make their way through a space that seems less than 2 feet wide (not an exact measurement, but Paul Prudhomme couldn’t work here).

Line cooks hustle along rubber mats to the grill. The flooring feels like it’s coated with a slippery mixture of moisture created by steam and olive oil. If you feel “slidey,” Milliken says, you’re not in the proper shoes. “You couldn’t come to work in my kitchen,” she tells a reporter in sandals.

She points out the dangers around every corner. Huge pots bubble away. Pounds of onions are being sauteed in hot oil. Drips and spills can cause horrible burns, says Milliken, launching into the tale of a worker in another kitchen who fell down a set of stairs, landing her leg in a pot of boiling chicken stock sitting on the floor at the bottom. The staff immediately helped her immerse the limb in a tub of ice cream, but she still ended up in the hospital.

The soup was probably on the floor because it was too heavy to carry, say the chefs, an observation that launches them into war stories about weightlifting. Milliken demonstrates one method of moving a humongous stockpot: Set it on the floor, stick a kitchen towel through one handle and drag it.

Feniger just dead-lifts things. Standing 5 feet tall, she picks up a 50-pound load of fish like it’s a Nordstrom gift box. Then she describes the shooting back pains she used to experience while doing daily kitchen duty.

She schleps the fish into the chilly walk-in fridge, then heads back to the grill, where it’s hotter than a west Texas July. It’s not bad, they say, unless you’re standing there roasting chiles for five hours.

The two are in their element. Armed with plastic spoons, they dance in and out of tight spaces in a quality-control tasting ballet. They’re dipping into a sage-colored cumin-cilantro sauce, glossy black beans mixed with rice, and a caldron of butternut squash puree, fragrant with herbs.

Between bites, they’re checking the presentation of an appetizer platter of sweet red Spanish peppers stuffed with avocado and goat cheese, and entree plates of grilled salmon filets with a brick-red chile sauce and a Nuevo Latino side of snowy white mashed yuca.

If it were just cooking, the job would be a lot easier, they say. Their company, which includes restaurants in Los Angeles, Pasadena and Las Vegas, employs 350 workers, and they have an open-door policy, which means they take regular meetings with employees, listening to problems big and small. That sets them apart from Martha, who snaps at underlings and then retreats into the walk-in fridge to escape confrontations.

“Most chefs are divas,” says Cooper. “But you need to come to grips with your customers. If you only want to cook for yourself, you need to stay home.” Whether it’s dealing with employees or customers, she says, it helps to be a “people person.”

It also helps to be a savvy businesswoman. Just as Martha went to market each day, carefully ordering produce, chefs watch that bottom line, sometimes staying awake at night because there is little room for error. And if they’re celebrity chefs like Milliken, Feniger and Silverton, they also have to juggle TV appearances, work on Web sites and coordinate intense marketing.

It’s all part of the job--which is sometimes as tricky as spinning sugar.

But these chefs wouldn’t trade their profession. Like Martha, their greatest passions play out at the table and that’s evident in the film, Silverton says.

“Passion and dedication, those two attributes really came through. I love it when I can tell that a chef has coached the actors to look and feel like real chefs.”