I recently watched Season 1 episode 4 of Netflix’s show Chef’s Table, and on it, the owner/head chef Niki Nakayama of N/Naka Restaurant in Los Angeles recounted an experience of hers that left me confused.
[QUOTE=Maria Fontoura]
At a sushi bar where she worked before opening n/naka in 2011, a Japanese man once walked in, saw her behind the counter, did an about-face and left. "He thought, ‘This can’t be a real sushi restaurant—or a good sushi restaurant,’ " says Nakayama
[/QUOTE]
I do not understand how people could ever judge a restaurant or its food as inferior just because a woman is doing the cooking. Do those people think to themselves, “A woman doing a man’s job of cooking as a chef? Unforgivable! She should stay home in her own kitchen and make her own family delicious food! Everyone knows that at home no man knows how to cook nearly as well as his wife; however, in a restaurant the man will always make the superior food, and the women will never match his skill there!”
I…don’t understand that customer’s way of thought. If anyone could enlighten me I would be grateful. I accept that working in a professional kitchen sucks away all of your free time and family life. The working conditions, long awkward hours, and grueling pace leave you unfit to care for a family, thus most women in this industry find jobs as caterers or pastry chefs.
[QUOTE=Rachel Feit]
This could explain why there are more women working as pastry chefs than in any other capacity in the kitchen. The flexible schedule of doing pastries, coupled with the relative autonomy pastry chefs have in the kitchen, allow women to maintain satisfying careers without sacrificing their personal lives. Catering offers the same sorts of advantages.
[/QUOTE]
And I guess that I accept Mario Batali’s explanation of why we don’t see women at the highest rank running a restaurant as a head chef as often as we do men:
[QUOTE=Stacy J. Williams]
the dominant cultural understandings about women do not mesh with what people believe it takes to be a professional chef. […] chef Mario Batali […explained] that women “don’t cook to compete, they cook to feed people.” However, competition lies at the heart of the restaurant business, with chefs competing for customers and media attention. One needs to be competitive to be a successful executive chef. Batali’s comment demonstrates the strength of the idea that women are more suited to cook to feed their families—not for a salary or prestige.
[/QUOTE]
http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2014/05/gender-in-home-kitchens-and-restaurants.html
But how would these things mix and meld into our subconscious minds such that we would think that a woman would make worse food than a man, but only in the context of a restaurant? The man in Chef Nakayama’s example obviously went home and had his wife make him delicious food for dinner. Do people like him, or institutions like in France,
[QUOTE=Rachel Fiet]
One woman I talked to was actually denied entrance into France’s state-run culinary institute because they did not accept female applicants
[/QUOTE]
forget that all of their vaunted culinary history and techniques were made by the women of the homes inventing them through their own home cooking? Do those people say that women should not be teachers as well, just because they should only be teaching their own children at home? Someone please explain this weird idea that having your time divided between the home where you do something (cooking/teaching), and the professional world, where you do the same thing but to a larger audience (chef/professor) somehow makes you worse than if a person (a man) only practiced the craft during business hours.
We accept women being teachers, is it because of the relatively generous school hours that leave the teachers with (in theory) enough time left to take care of the family? Would we have had similar acceptance of women becoming chefs if only the restaurants scheduled more people/shifts such that the hours had been from the beginning, nice and short like a teacher’s time at school? Or only covering one breakfast/lunch/dinner rush?
But, and again, do those people who think “it takes a lifetime to master the craft of proper sushi making,” also turn around out the door when they see a young newbie (male) being trained and serving food? Do they think that a woman is some Gamma (see Brave New World, basically the servant class that is genetically engineered to be inherently limited and unable to rise to Beta or Alpha ways of thinking or ability) that is inherently unable to master creating sushi (even at home?), unlike the male Alpha that can, with enough practice, eventually transcend the tastes of home cooking?