the glassware, tableware, the wine and liquor, the cheese, the meat, the vegetables. I mention this only because if I’m going to spend $100,000 a year on produce, or linen, or printing, you can’t send a sales rep who calls me “Hon.” You can’t be a potential produce vendor seeking my business by addressing your query letter “Dear Sir.” I will drop that purveyor’s list in the trash can unread—right on top of my bloody tampon—as soon as I see that out-of-date salutation at the top of the page. But I won’t cry.
Equally, someone seeking employment can’t fax in a resume to “Sir” because I won’t hire him if that is his default point of view. I won’t cry; I just won’t hire him. You don’t have to fight or argue or bitch or cry at all; I just quietly spend my money with another company that I perceive has caught up to the times and I hire people I can enjoy working with. This genuine power makes you gentle.
Many of the students were concerned about the constant negotiating one does, internally and externally, to get by in the male kitchen and asked the panel how to navigate that. Melissa said she used to just do her work and quietly shine. But Helene said, “No way! I roared through the kitchen, I ‘bested’ the men at every turn. When I got promoted and they didn’t, I turned around sweetly and said, ‘Bye Guys!’ ”
I had tried smoking filterless cigarettes, swearing like a sailor, pissing in bottles, and banging out twice as much as my male cohorts. And I’d also given lipstick and giggling a try, even claiming to not be able to lift a stockpot so that the guys would help me. Neither strategy is better than the other.
It was not until I opened my own place that I realized how present and ongoing the struggle to be female in a professional kitchen had been. It’s like the hood during service. Everybody talks about the heat in a kitchen, and the heat, without doubt, is formidable. It’s a powerful opponent. But for me the real punisher is the exhaust hood, with the suction so powerful that it sucks up all the metal bound filters from their spots and bangs them against the lip of the hood. The big mechanic kick of the fan belt starting up, the unified clank of the filters rising—like a Rockettes kick, all in unison—then followed by eighteen draining hours of heavy-duty vacuum hum, over which orders are barked, dishes are clanked, pots are slammed around, and the stereo blasts. Then finally at midnight or one, after the disher has turned off the fryer, someone turns off the hood and a profound silence descends. I never realize how much space the noise of the hood takes up in my mind and head—that heavy vacuum sound—until I shut it off, and total bliss and relief set in.
In the same way, when I opened my own restaurant, I enjoyed such an absence of boy-girl jostling that I only then understood that, all through my entire work life, I had been working a double shift. I had been working the same shift as my peers, with all of its heat and heft and long hours on your feet. But I had been doing a second job all along, as well—that of constantly, vigilantly figuring out and calibrating my place in that kitchen with those guys to make a space for myself that was bearable and viable. Should I wear pink clogs or black steel-toe work shoes? Lipstick or Chapstick? Work double hard, double fast, double strong, or keep pace with the average Joe? Swear like a line cook or giggle like a girl?
Meanwhile, the parsley needs to be chopped, and the veal chops seared off. There is, still, the work itself to do.
Someone on the panel to my right said, out loud into the microphone, “Women are more clever than men.”
And then, as if inspired, the woman to my left said, “Women are smarter than men.”
I was feeling hot and insecure about the oatmeal on my sweater to begin with, and was still reeling and deep in thought about the crying question, so I had said only a few words so far into the microphone, and I felt like while I had withdrawn for those few minutes, this group of women, my sister panelists, had set up camp and staked out the territory in a very different place than