Ellen Fox chats with Chicago's culinary crème de les femmes
"I consider myself a woman who happens to be a chef," says Suzy Crofton, sitting in the office above her 2-year-old restaurant, Crofton on Wells. "The way I look at it, you don't say 'a woman doctor' or 'a woman lawyer.' It's a profession that you choose."
But in the twenty years since Crofton started whipping up Polish pastries at a Minneapolis dinner theater, it's worth noting that more women have chosen the culinary profession -- a field that has long been, and still is, largely dominated by men. When the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC) first opened sixteen years ago, only about 10 percent of its 100 students were women. Now, women make up more than half of the school's 2,000 students. At Kendall College's School of Culinary Arts in Evanston, the current man-to-woman ratio is roughly 70-30.
"Women were coming into the business arena, and they wanted to get out of cooking for a living," says CHIC founder and president Linda Calafiore, recalling the school's early days. But with the emergence of the "celebrity chef" craze, she says, people have finally begun to see cooking as a viable, respected way to make a living. Though women are still a minority in the profession (of the top forty favorite Chicago restaurants in this year's Zagat Survey, only three are helmed by female chefs), Calafiore thinks the male-to-female ratio will even out in perhaps ten years. The growing visibility of women chefs can be seen as on par with the advances of women in all fields -- from sports to business -- but it seems particularly overdue in the food industry: Women traditionally prepare most of the world's home-cooked meals. Consider, however, the maxim "Too many cooks spoil the broth" -- and the mind likely conjures up images of men. Zinfandel chef Susan Goss reasons that's because the culinary industry in America, young by European standards, got its start with imported chefs. "All the good restaurants came over from Europe," she explains. While many of America's early Basque and Pennsylvania Dutch inns were run by women, Goss adds, "they weren't the formal, fancy, haute cuisine restaurants. Those were all [run] by male chefs that were imported from Italy and France and Germany. And that's why it's become known as a male-dominated industry, because if there were women in European kitchens, they certainly didn't go to the United States."
Goss' mention of Basque and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking isn't incidental. Such influences are evident in the "ethnic American" specialties she prepares at her 6-year-old River North restaurant -- dishes like pot roast in a reduction of red wine vinegar, brown sugar and raisins, or wood-grilled pork chops with a pear cider sauce.
A sixteen-year veteran of the trade, Goss, who owns Zinfandel with her husband Drew, didn't realize she wanted to cook until after she graduated from college, when a prospective career in archaeology began to look bleak: "I didn't know if I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a museum washing rocks."
She and Drew attended the new wave New York Restaurant School for six months in 1981, after a gig at -- of all places -- T. G. I. Friday's inspired her to go into the business.
"It was really a model of mediocre, production/franchised food, but they do it really well," she says. "It told me, 'This place is really successful -- and I can do something a heck of a lot better.'"
Since then, aside from a short-lived job at a poorly run café, Goss has only ever worked at her own ventures. Still, it seems her brief foray into Friday's was enough to disenfranchise her: "The kitchen was fifty-fifty, women to men, but it was run by men. The women were the salad girls, and the prep girls, and they were always referred to as 'girls.' The men were on the [cooking] line."
But for all of the advances made by women in the industry, Goss says she's had very few women applicants over the years.
"I have one woman in my kitchen right now, and that's out of eleven people." Of the sixty-odd members of the Chicago chapter of the International Association of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, Goss estimates she's one of perhaps five active chefs; other members work in PR or as food writers. "I'm just so surprised. Supposedly this is such a growing group. But in Chicago, I don't see a lot of women coming out of restaurant schools, and if they are, I don't know where they're going."
Goss isn't imagining things. Tara Phillips, CHIC's director of career services, says many female graduates are shunning smaller, independent restaurants, which may not provide insurance, in favor of positions at hotel restaurants or as personal chefs.
"I've noticed that the women tend to look for positions that have benefits; they're moving more toward things where they have flexibility in hours," Phillips says. "The men tend to be more open to any position that's available. If they have to work until two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning, it just doesn't matter."
Phillips says male cooks seem to get promoted faster, and she believes that some kitchens even hint at which gender they prefer. If a male applicant is desired, "they'll say things like, 'This position requires a lot of flexibility, and sometimes some muscle.' At the same time, if their preference is a woman, they tend to say something like, 'We'd like to have some one who is mature and stable.' And 'mature and stable' often refers to women."
But how can one know that for sure?
"Because if I send them five students, and four of them are men and one's a woman, the woman will get the job," Phillips posits. "They never say 'Send me a woman; send me a man.' But it's just the tone that they give."
But others, like The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton chef Sarah Stegner, think that the industry's long hours (often ten to fourteen a day), late hours and heavy weekend and holiday work schedules -- not to mention the certainty of burns and cuts -- do not deter on the basis of gender.
"I don't think you could say a woman or a man would prefer or not prefer [to be a chef]. It's how much you love your job and what you've chosen to do," she says.
If some consider Charlie Trotter Chicago's king of fine dining, there are just as many that see 35-year-old Stegner as Chicago's reigning queen. Winner of the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year in America award in 1994, and last year's Best Midwest Chef, Stegner's cooking style combines classic French techniques with fresh American products.
Fine cooking isn't about outrageous flavor combinations, she says, "a veal chop should taste like a veal chop." A signature dish at the Ritz is rack of lamb with organic red potatoes whipped with goat cheese, topped with a roasted tomato sauce.
Stegner got her start cleaning fish at the Ritz fifteen years ago, and aside from a four-month stint in Europe, she's been there ever since. She attended Glenview's now-closed Cooking School Dumas Pere, but mainly attributes success in the culinary field to the good fortune one has in finding a mentor -- in her case, former Ritz-Carlton executive chef Fernand Gutierrez.
"Most chefs get to where they are because of their training. That's the key to it, that you need to have somebody willing to teach you." Traditionally, Stegner explains, "it's been men in the industry taking on other men." Stegner admits that being a top chef leaves little personal time ("It'd be nice to go out on a Friday night with another couple") and believes that starting wages (sometimes $7 an hour) make it hard for anyone to be a cook and make a living. But, she says firmly, "I don't mind putting in the extra hours, and I don't see it as chipping away at my personal time because of the extra stuff. It's something that I enjoy doing."
While Stegner sees no difference between the way men cook and the way women cook, there are others who do.
"I really believe that a good female chef is hands [down] better than a male chef," says Watusi's chef de cuisine, Katherine August. "I think women are innately better at multi-tasking and being able to do a lot of things at once, which is a big part of being a chef." There's a sensuality about food, she adds, that "only women can provide, because, as base as it sounds, we are food providers."
August's 5-year-old Wicker Park restaurant Twilight closed in August, after the building was sold and she lost her lease. The bistro specialized in fusion cuisine -- vegan potstickers, Greek nachos, sweet potato soup -- at affordable prices. Now, at Watusi, she oversees the nightly preparation of Suzy Crofton's New World menu -- a mixture of Latin, Caribbean and West Indies flavors, with specialties like suckling pig with rum, brown sugar and chipotle, and roast sea bass with warm curry.
Having worked, over the course of fifteen years, in roughly ten kitchens -- from Everest to a restaurant near Heidelberg, Germany -- August says nothing breaks down barriers faster than a tenacious desire to learn. At the time, Everest was an all-male kitchen, and its chef -- reputable, "old school" Jean Joho -- was perhaps a little skeptical. "But I was pretty aggressive in what I wanted to do, and pretty gregarious in my approach. And I think people appreciated that."
Some say the environment in many kitchens is a lot less cutthroat than it once was.
"Back when I was being an apprentice, I got yelled at a lot, I got screamed at a lot, and we had to tolerate that," explains Jackie Shen, executive chef at Lawry's The Prime Rib. Now, even Chicago's once-icy restaurant-to-restaurant relations have thawed, she says, recalling a recent Sunday when she lent out prime rib to an understocked Four Seasons.
Shen says she tolerated much in her early years because she knew she had a lot to learn. With no formal training, and only a self-run snack shop under her belt, Shen paid her dues apprenticing to Le Francais' chef Jean Banchet. She finally scored her very own French outfit on Lincoln Park -- Jackie's -- which she ran from 1982 to 1995.
"When you are willing to learn," she offers, "gender doesn't make a difference." But where it has made a difference is in the eyes of Shen's father, who she describes as "a conservative man from China."
"According to my father, high school is just about what women should need. More suitable is for women to just become a housewife and raise kids." As a teenager in Hong Kong, Shen had to persuade her father, an insurance exec, to let her attend the University of Houston's hotel/restaurant management school. He agreed, provided she pay her own tuition.
Now that she's made a name for herself, overseeing Lawry's signature presentations of beef, plus adding fish items and her own beloved "chocolate bag" to the menu -- Shen says her father has finally gotten used to seeing his daughter at the helm of a famous kitchen. "He sort of thinks, 'Oh yeah, she's not doing so bad.'"
Like Shen, Suzy Crofton came to the professional kitchen with no formal culinary education. But Crofton was a little craftier.
"I got a little cocky and told them I knew how to make béarnaise and I didn't," she grins, recalling the time she applied to work at Gordon Sinclair's Lake Forest restaurant, Sinclair's. "They called me on it."
She didn't get the job at first, but a few days later she was called in to replace a less-than-satisfactory pastry chef. It was a position Crofton easily warmed to, having spent her youth baking with her mother, a picture of whom now hangs near the front of Crofton of Wells' dining room. The words "My inspiration" are inscribed beneath it.
Over twenty years, Crofton worked her way up the classical food chain, moving from an apprenticeship at Cricket's to Le Fran'ais and Naperville's Montparnasse. Her Wells Street restaurant specializes in cooking she describes as "seasonal American" backed by classical technique: a potato and braised cabbage gallette, for example, is topped by a wild blue huckleberry sauce. Owning her own restaurant allows Crofton to provide an "oasis of sanity" for diners, as well as cooks and servers, she says. "I worked in a lot of places where the back of the house didn't get a long with the front of the house. I wanted to have a place where people respected each other and built something good and something strong."
As for the "woman chef" thing, Crofton recalls the time she appeared in a book called "Women of Taste."
"It was individual interviews about how you became a chef, and the angle that [the writer] kept pushing was that there was more suffering, and that we were in the 'old boy network' and stuff like that," her face gets a quizzical look. "I thought it seemed a little antiquated for this day and age.
"I think you can only fall prey to that if you let yourself. Any chef that's really good is really strict, focused -- a perfectionist," she says with conviction. "And if you wanna be on their team you're going to have to cut, run and try to keep up with them."
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.