Scaramouche cook Lily Hu says a male coworker once put a bowl of meat scraps on the floor and said, “Lily, that’s your meal right there.”
Rosie Prata, a former server at School, once told chef Brad Moore she wouldn’t bring her table of already-irate customers a burger that he’d left chilling on the kitchen pass for 20 minutes. He responded, she said, by throwing a high chair at her.
Sophia Banks, a trans cook and kitchen manager, was asked by a prospective employer if she “had a dick or a vagina” during a job interview.
At chef Suzanne Barr’s restaurant, Saturday Dinette, customers often run up to her husband and begin praising him for his brilliant cooking.
Within the first hour of last night’s Kitchen Bitches: Smashing The Patriarchy One Plate At A Time, a one-night forum held at Revival Bar, these stories were aired before a packed room of cooks, servers and journalists.
As galling as those stories might be, they’re nothing new for women and minority members who work in the food industry, or for those who have been following the recent outcry over the prevalence of toxic masculinity in restaurant kitchens in Toronto and elsewhere.
Black Hoof proprietor Jen Agg launched the conference in the wake of allegations by Kate Burnham, a former pastry chef at Weslodge, that she was repeatedly sexually and physically harassed by three of her superiors at the King West restaurant. She was forced to resign after restaurant brass did nothing about her complaints.
“There’s this unending, understandable fear that if we speak about our abusers, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” Agg said.
Though the nominal focus on the event was on harassment and hostility against women in restaurants, the first panel, made up of kitchen staff and restaurateurs from around Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., were able to delve a little further into the multifaceted issues plaguing vulnerable food industry workers.
Banks called for a wider, more intersectional approach, including scrutinizing suppliers to see if they rely on exploited or underpaid workers. “We need to treat the welfare of our entire supply chain as important a thing as the welfare of our staff,” she said.
“It’s so hard to find people to work in kitchens these days – if you’re not a good person providing a good environment, you’re fucked,” said author and chef Hugh Acheson, who saw the outcry over hostile kitchen environments as proof that the industry was improving. Agg, in response, was quick to warn against becoming complacent.
On the topic of the high-pressure atmosphere within kitchens, Acheson conceded that many still downplay the effects of verbal abuse, but added, “I think there’s a very professional way of yelling at somebody” – one without getting personal, undercutting people, or power-tripping. Chef Jessica Koslow countered that those in a position of authority need to “communicate how people aren’t doing their jobs, and lift them up”.
Panelists were able to float a few next steps. Koslow explained that at her L.A. restaurant, SQIRL, the kitchen is open to the dining room. “(Open kitchens) require you to communicate, talk to one other, maybe save that aggression for another moment,” she said.
Barr worked with the YWCA to hire marginalized women who were seeking on-the-job training when she opened Saturday Dinette. “These young ladies were amazing, and since then they’ve gone on to other kitchens.” Since the government funding for the venture was cut, she’s now trying to start her own similar program.
Agg said that people fired up by the discussion often ask her which restaurants in Toronto to boycott. “I can’t give you that list – there’d be nowhere left to eat,” she said. Conversely, she added, attention has to be drawn to harassing or violent chefs and business owners.
The night moved from airing the voices on the ground floor of kitchens to ensuring greater representation and visibility of minorities within food media. Before a slightly thinned-out crowd, Eater features editor Helen Rosner acknowledged that great food writing is sociological, rather than just describing delicious meals or relaying recipes. “It’s not just what am I eating, but why am I eating it? Then you have to answer that in a way that’s relevant.”
Writer John Birdsall described the experience of researching a piece on out queer chefs in the food industry and being shut down for interview after interview. “The more important the restaurant or the chef was, the less likely he or she would want to be tagged as ‘the queer chef.’ I found this ongoing stigma … which speaks very much to the way cooks and all staff in restaurants are treated. There’s a fear of expressing yourself too much.”
Denise Balkissoon, the newly-minted features editor at the Globe and Mail, noted a common white-centric perspective in food writing, exemplified in recent pieces that spotlighted a white business owner for marketing trend-ified ghee and dwelled on the “ick factor” of Filipino foods: “It shows an assumption of who your reader is.”
With Lucky Peach‘s Peter Meehan onstage, the discussion turned to the magazine’s controversial recent mea culpa op-ed by celebrated chef Rene Redzepi about his own abusive habits in the kitchen. (“I’ll be the sacrificial lamb of the patriarchy,” Meehan cracked).
For Redzepi to come forward and admit his own wrongdoings, Rosner said, will put the issue of abuse in kitchens in front of those who might not have fully grasped the problem. “That having been said, I hope he reads what he wrote in 10 years and is ashamed of himself, not because it’s bad, but because it wasn’t enough,” she said. “What was lacking from what he published was that there were steps beyond that.”
What did Meehan think of all this? “I came here to listen,” he said, to applause.
nataliam@nowtoronto.com | @nataliamanzocco
