Here’s Looking at You’s Lien Ta talks about the death of chef Jonathan Whitener, chef Jonathan Gil talks about running a restaurant with Stage IV cancer, and the chef trying to get as many Angelenos as possible to try Sri Lankan food. Also, our nominees for the James Beard Media Awards. I’m Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week’s Tasting Notes.
‘Too pretty to be a chef’?
Nearly every female chef I’ve met hates to talk about being a female chef. Just, chef, please.
It’s a stance that Dominique Crenn asserted when she won the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ award for “world’s best female chef” in 2016. “She famously called it ‘stupid,’” Heather Plattwrote last year in this paper of Crenn’s feelings about her award. “‘A chef is a chef.’”
Even with the stories of yelling, groping and much worse behavior emerging since the #MeToo reckoning, the knowledge that the stresses of the industry also take a toll on men has conditioned some of us to believe that while women may not have an easy time in the business, they can still advance in the industry if they are tough enough.
Here in Los Angeles, after all, it’s not hard to name female chefs who lead their own restaurants, including Socalo‘s Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, n/naka‘s Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama, A.O.C.‘s Suzanne Goin, Mozza‘s Nancy Silverton, Playa Provision‘s Brooke Williamson, Jar‘s Suzanne Tract, Kismet‘s Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, Highly Likely‘s Kat Turner and many, many more than the handful of veterans who were making their way to the top during the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.
Indeed, some of the war stories we’ve frequently heard about women in restaurant kitchens have a quaint quality. In 1983, Ruth Reichlwrote a feature story for California magazine that began with the story of Milliken’s first attempt (ultimately successful) to work at Chicago’s Le Perroquet. “Jovan Trboyevic, the owner, said he would never hire a pretty girl like me — it would cause chaos in the kitchen,” Milliken told Reichl. “He offered me a job as a hat check girl instead.”
By the time current “Top Chef” host Kristen Kish was establishing herself in Chicago and Boston restaurants, “hat check girl” was a job associated with black-and-white movies, not actual restaurant work.
So I took notice when Kish, in her new memoir “Accidentally On Purpose,” devoted the better part of a chapter to the disrespect she received in a male-dominated kitchen after she won Season 10 of “Top Chef” in 2013. It was so bad that less than a year after attaining what she’d thought of as her dream job — chef de cuisine at a fine-dining destination restaurant, Boston’s now-closed Menton — she quit.
We’re talking about a chef who proved to be the epitome of calm and unflappability in the midst of reality TV drama during her season as a “Top Chef” contestant and the ultimate team player when she declined to blame a fellow contestant for the dish that led to Kish being eliminated from the competition. (Kish worked her way back into the game she ultimately won thanks to her cooking on “Last Chance Kitchen.”) She’s also rappelled down a waterfall to harvest watercress in Panama for the National Geographic series “Restaurants at the End of the World.”
The irony is that Menton, Boston’s first Relais & Châteaux restaurant, was a woman-owned restaurant. It was one of several businesses overseen by the hospitality company founded by Barbara Lynch, who was forced to close all of her restaurants last year because of a number of factors, including the fallout from a 2023 investigation of workplace abuse by New York Times reporter Julia Moskin.
In her book, Kish does not question any of the accounts of employees who shared their stories with Moskin and others in the press about their boss (the incidents detailed appear to have happened after Kish left the company in 2014). Still, she views Lynch as a supportive mentor who gave her credit for dishes she created and was the one to suggest her as a contestant to “Top Chef’s” producers. Instead, Kish blames her issues in Menton’s kitchen on the ungenerous attitudes of her male colleagues (while emphasizing that she has “worked with many wonderful men over the years”) and on a corporate decision to give her the top job at Menton without the power to make menu changes and subjecting her to a “training period.”
“Barbara, along with the company’s director of operations and its wine director — both of whom were women — were pulling for me to have the job” after “Top Chef,” she wrote in the book. “But there were also two men in the upper echelon of the organization who were not in agreement and didn’t buy that I was ready for it.”
The experience was the opposite of what Kish had experienced at another of Lynch’s restaurants, the 10-seat Stir, where the menu changed nightly with the seasons and the chefs cooked as they talked and joked with customers across the counter — great training for her “Top Chef” run.
Yet at Menton, without the full support of the company, “the team, mostly men,” Kish writes, felt free to be “recalcitrant at best and more often perniciously undermining. … Sometimes I was disregarded or ignored. … Later, on my rare days off or when I was traveling … they were changing dishes without my knowledge. … It was a sort of psychological warfare for which I wasn’t prepared. Not a single cell in my body wanted to engage in this kind of … conflict.”
Among the untrue rumors she heard about herself was that the only reason she had the Menton job was because she was having an affair with Lynch.
“I don’t know if one of the male chefs from the company would have walked back into something like that,” Kish told me onstage when I interviewed her and “Top Chef” head judge Tom Colicchio at last month’s L.A. Times Festival of Books. “They probably would have been praised and celebrated. There were people who wanted my position and my job. And I don’t think [many] at the top echelon of the restaurant actually thought I was going to do well.”
Then there was the time she and Lynch went to a gathering in London for Relais & Châteaux restaurants and encountered a male chef who bluntly told Kish, “You’re too pretty to be a chef.”
Suddenly, the gulf between Kish and Milliken decades earlier wasn’t so vast.
Kish writes that Lynch instantly scolded the male chef for his insult: “She told him in no uncertain terms to get … out of there and leave us alone. And while I felt protected, it also made me sad. It was very clear that this was something Barbara had probably been dealing with her whole career. There was almost a rote reaction that many women in many fields would likely recognize — one they needed to cultivate in order to survive and succeed. Always playing defense, working harder, stirring up responses to pull out when some entitled overbearing dude shows up, seeming to think he matters more.”
Of course, Kish’s story has a happy ending. Leaving Menton could have ended her career as a chef since she was getting so many offers to appear on television (“Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,” “Fast Foodies” and “Restaurants at the End of the World”), something she is very good at. But she now oversees the restaurant Arlo Grey by Kristen Kish in Austin, while balancing life with her wife, Bianca Dusic, and hosting duties on Bravo’s “Top Chef.”
I’ll have more to share from my conversation with Kish and Colicchio in next week’s newsletter. Meanwhile, here’s what else has been happening …
‘His food lifted my soul’
During a wide-ranging interview with Food’s Stephanie Breijo, restaurateur Lien Ta, the founder of Here’s Looking at You, shared how mentally exhausting the restaurant business can be after revealing this week that she is closing her Koreatown restaurant on June 13. Of course, the slow pandemic recovery and erratic business after the recent fires factored into her decision, but it was the sudden death last year of her co-founder, the chef Jonathan Whitener, that weighed most on Ta.
“Eating his food,” Ta told Breijo, “lifted my soul. … The truth is that I created this restaurant with Jonathan, and he’s eternally my collaborator. The remaining team are all in agreement that we want this to remain Jonathan’s restaurant. We are missing our leader. Signing on for another five-year lease doesn’t make sense when your leader is gone.”
Ta also talked about the “horrible dread” she felt at times “wondering if anyone was going to book a reservation or come in at all, and who we were going to cut [from service].”
“I was definitely buried in a lot of grief,” she added. “Sometimes I wasn’t really sure what to focus on this last year, to be honest … a lot of restaurant owners are sort of programmed to always find solutions, to get through the day or the week or whatever your metric is. I’ve been doing that for a long time.”
‘I’m Mexican. I don’t know how to give up’
Breijo also had an intense conversation with chefJoshua Gil, who has Stage IV cancer and is in a contract dispute with his his former Mírame and Mírate business partner, but still recently was able to transform a strip-mall Mongolian barbecue restaurant into a Baja-style seafood spot called Three Flames with “tacos, burgers, loaded fries and some of the city’s most creative new tostadas and specials” while keeping the Mongolian barbecue.
“I’m a very stubborn a—,” Gil told Breijo. “I like telling people, ‘I’m Mexican. I don’t know how to give up.’”
One concession to his illness is that he is leaning hard on Anthony Rodriguez, who worked with Gil at Mírame and Mírate.
“These days he sees Rodriguez as the chef,” Breijo wrote, “and himself as a cook who sometimes creates recipes.”
“I’ve been sitting with our identities: who we are, our images of who we are,” Gil said. “I haven’t donned the [chef’s] whites in a long time, and yet I’m still referred to as ‘chef.’ We never lose that. It doesn’t matter how away from the kitchen you are. You’re constantly being called ‘chef’ by those that know you as such, and it’s [hard] holding on to that livelihood, that lifestyle.”
James Beard recognition
Nominations for the James Beard Media Awards,covering books, broadcast media and journalism, were announced on Wednesday. Among the many excellent cookbooks and broadcast, video and audio shows nominated is “The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them” by L.A.’s Karla Tatiana Vasquez. As former Food reporter Cindy Carcamowrote in her profile of Vasquez last year, “SalviSoul” is “the first-ever Salvadoran cookbook to appear on a Big Five imprint.” Food editor Daniel Hernandez talked with Vasquez after news of the nomination came out for our Cooking newsletter, which will publish tomorrow. (Subscribe for free here.)
We also received the happy news that three of our own Food journalists are nominated for Beard awards.
Restaurant critic Bill Addison is nominated in the dining and travel category for his recent guide to dining in San Francisco. Food’s senior editor Danielle Dorsey is nominated in the home cooking category for her story “The warmth of Black traditions around the Thanksgiving table.” And columnist Jenn Harris is up for the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Criticism Award. Her nominated stories are reviews of Sophy’s Cambodian restaurant in Long Beach and Star Leaf in Pasadena, plus a column on why chili crisp and chili crunch are terms that should not be trademarked.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Chicago on June 14.
Also …
- Jamie Feldmarwrites a wonderful portrait of Shaheen Ghazaly, who wants to bring his version of Sri Lankan cuisine to as many Angelenos as possible through his Kurrypinch restaurants. Plus, he shares recipes.
- Harris writes about her favorite food mall in the San Gabriel Valley.
- Contributor Martine Thompson guides us to 7 terrific spots for vegan fried chicken in L.A.
- From our 101 Best Tacos guide, we’ve pulled 8 of our favorite birria and barbacoa tacos to try.
- Dee-Ann Durbin writes about the looming tax on Mexican tomatoes.
- And Cinco de Mayo may be over for the year, but if you missed Carolynn Carreño‘s cooking newsletter from Sunday, there are some great Mexican recipes to try anytime.
Eat your way across L.A.
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