Skirt Steak by Charlotte Druckman

Author:Charlotte Druckman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452121307
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

CHAPTER 9

Proving Your Medal

It doesn’t have to be equal opportunity, but it’s a huge problem. And I will go back to this over and over again. Food & Wine’s [Best New Chefs] … You know, there’s maybe one woman on that cover, maybe two every year. And I’m not saying it has to be ten women on that cover, but boy would it be exciting for a young female chef to see … I think it’s really depressing every year. And I’m established. I’m a lucky one. But that cover, it’s always like, really?

—AMANDA COHEN

Food & Wine magazine established its Best New Chefs program in 1988. Each year, ten recipients get the call and are then celebrated on the magazine’s July cover (and within that issue’s pages). That first year, there was one woman included. From then on, there were just one or two with two exceptions—there were three in 1996 and zero in 2003.207 This is what Cohen cites as a source of depression.

I’ve been a freelance journalist for seven years, but I once worked at Food & Wine.208 For the record, I loved life on staff at that magazine and am incredibly proud to have been part of its team. Still, to say I don’t have the same response as Cohen to those annual July covers with their cluster of nine guys and one girl would be a lie. It was one of the initial bees in my bonnet that, ultimately, led to this project.

If there weren’t a lot of female executive chefs, then, although that annual magazine cover might smart a bit, I would also have to acknowledge that the women weren’t out there to be found. But when I began tackling this book, I figured I would interview forty women (all executive chefs or chef-owners, plus maybe a chef de cuisine who was running a kitchen for someone with multiple businesses). As I went on, I kept discovering others—one chef would recommend another, or I’d hear about someone, somehow. Before I knew it, I was up to seventy, and I could have kept going. There are tons more lady exec chefs than I realized (still a whole lot fewer than the male version, true). Maybe the editors of Food & Wine are already aware of this and still aren’t finding enough women who are up to Best New Chef par. Maybe, though, none of us has figured out how many of them exist. I was mainly focused on the country’s major metropolises, so I’m not as familiar with who else is out there. If you want to rail against me for not getting to smaller towns, go ahead, I can take it; that’s a fair beef. If I had more resources—time and funding—I’d love to scour the less-slogged portions of this country to discover additional chefs, male or female.

Although the Best New Chef honor has been known to predict future glory, Denver’s Jennifer Jasinski doesn’t believe it’s the be-all and end-all. “It’s one magazine’s perspective—and as the people who work there have told me, they’re only looking at hot, trendy stuff.

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