How Women Are Heating Up The Restaurant World
Heidi Brown,
05.29.09, 01:15 PM EDT
Source: Forbes
Chefs like Traci Des Jardins are blazing their own trails in the largely male domain of high-end restaurants--and coping with the weak economy along the way.
In Pictures: Women Chefs At The Top Of Their Game
Move over, Mario. Take a hike, Emeril. Look who's cooking now: A handful to ambitious and talented female chefs who are running their own restaurants and creating compelling brands, that's who. Unlike Lidia Bastianich or Cat Cora, who've traded restaurant kitchens for television sets, these top chefs haven't found celebrity. Instead, they are focusing on crafting menus that delight customers--and turning a profit in tough times.
If executive women face challenges in the corporate world, these female culinary go-getters take even more heat. Restaurant kitchens, where every chef must train, are still male-dominated boot camps that often tolerate (or encourage) harassment and ridicule. Raising capital is tough in a world where financial networking is still very much a man's game. And dilemmas about family-work balance are especially frustrating, since a chef's schedule can be grueling and unpredictable.
So it is with great effort that the numbers are growing. At the Culinary Institute of America, the prestigious New York culinary school, the enrollment of women in the last 20 years has doubled, from 21% in 1980 to 41% in 2007. Forty percent of star national TV chefs are women, and are 30% of the James Beard Foundation's Who's Who, which lists the luminaries of the food business. However, in a recent survey,
Starchefs.com, which covers the world of chefs and food, found that women represent only 22% of the restaurant business, and only 15% of executive chefs are female. Women fare much better in cakes and tarts, representing 39% of pastry chefs.
In fact, women often become pastry chefs because the job has set hours, so a mom has an easier time planning her day and arranging childcare. She's also out of the way of the line cooks. The hours of a typical executive chef run to 14-hour (or longer) days that begin with brainstorming menus and ordering ingredients in the morning and ending only after the final diners have shut the door behind them.
These days, there's also the weak economy to wrestle with. Success in the high-end restaurant business is judged on a meal-to-meal basis: Is the food delicious? Is the service and ambiance top-notch? Most importantly, is it worth the price? Like any businessman or woman, these chef-owners are using ingenuity matched with hard work to keep ahead of the competition, stay afloat and foment customer loyalty.
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If there were a woman who could show her fellow female chefs just how it's done, Traci Des Jardins, one of the few female veterans of the upscale restaurant world, would be the one. Starting with Jardiniere in San Francisco in 1997 ("glamorous, exciting and urbane," said the
San Francisco Chronicle), her mini-empire now includes Mijita, a casual Mexican restaurant; Acme Chophouse (which she manages for the Bon Appetit group); and a restaurant at a new Ritz-Carlton resort in Lake Tahoe slated to open this fall
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