Confessions of a female line cook

By Hailey Pope

A tough guy in chef’s whites, burns all over his arms from his days as a line cook. Power, authority, and a sense of masculinity radiate off of him as he moves confidently throughout the kitchen. That is what many of us think of when we picture the head chef at a fine dining restaurant. Sarah Rich, one of the head chefs at Rich Table, does not look like that person. However, after working as a chef for several decades and opening up her own restaurant with her husband Evan, she has definitely earned that authority.

Sarah Rich. Photo by Matthew Mata

Rich learned to cook around men. In most of the kitchens she worked in while climbing the culinary totem pole, there were very few women around her. She was used to dirty jokes, off comments, and aggression. Because she’d grown up in a family full of boys, she was comfortable around that kind of masculine energy, and she’d grown a thick skin by the time she entered the kitchen at Bouley in Manhattan after graduating from culinary school. She never had a woman superior in the kitchen, and if there were other women around, they were usually working in pastry, which Rich absolutely did not want to do.

“When people met me and they knew I worked in restaurants, they always assumed that I was a pastry cook because girls do pastry. And I hated that. I’m a line cook,” Rich said.

Rich mentions that she was paid less at Bouley as a woman, which she knows because her husband was working the same job at the same time as her during the three and a half years she worked at the downtown mainstay. This is not uncommon in the restaurant industry, which, like many other industries in the United States, is still lagging behind in giving women equal pay for equal work. A 2017 survey from Gecko Hospitality shows that the average starting salary for women is lower than it is for men in almost all positions in the restaurant industry, across all levels, and definitely for all positions in the fine dining world. Rich’s experience is typical for women in the restaurant industry, a business that is often plagued by gender inequity.

From Restaurant Management Salary Survey by Gecko Hospitality. The pay gap between women and men in almost all management positions in the restaurant industry.

Despite women making up almost half of culinary school graduates, according to research from the National Center for Education Statistics, it is much harder to find a woman in a head chef position. Women only make up about 20% of chefs and head cooks, and don’t always make it to the much-desired positions on the hot line in a kitchen.

Rich asserts that she is just as tough as those guys with burns all over their arms, and she has the exact kind of drive needed by someone in such a competitive business.

“I wanted to be the best wherever I was, I wanted to work my hardest, prove myself, be the best line cook. I wanted to push myself,” Rich said.

Data from NCES and U.S. Census Bureau (2016). Despite making up around half of culinary school graduates, women are in the highest-paid, most-respected positions disproportionately less than men.

However, as a woman, Rich remembers being somewhat of an outlier in certain line cook positions, such as the meat and fish stations, which are typically dominated by men. When she started working the meat station--one of the most important stations in a kitchen, underneath the sous chef--she was told by her coworkers that they had never seen a woman in that position before. Though she considers her time at Bouley one of the most formative in her career as a chef, she recognizes its drawbacks.

“I think Bouley was definitely a very tough environment. It had more of what you think of as that classic kitchen environment,” Rich said of Bouley’s skin-thickening atmosphere. Superiors screaming in your face and telling you “what garbage you are” was pretty typical, Rich said.

On top of her work as a chef, Rich also fulfills another equally, if not more, demanding role: motherhood. She and her husband have two children; when she was pregnant with their first, she worked until she was seven months pregnant before taking a year off and then easing herself back into the culinary world. A year after that, Rich Table was born. She says that finding out how to balance these two identities was at first difficult for her.

“When I went to culinary school across the country from my family, I never really got to see them. I never had extended leave. And I knew that was what I signed up for. I was willing to deal with the sacrifice. I always thought I would be that way. But I changed. I really want to be there with my kids. That was something I really struggled with the first couple years. You sort of have to rediscover your identity.”

Rich and her husband are able to balance the time with their kids between them because they own their own business. However, it is often much harder for female chefs who have children to find their own way to raise them while still working as a chef if they’re not able to set their own schedule.

“People do it. I don’t know how they do it. I thought about that, all the years I was coming up as a cook, about what am I gonna do when I have a family. The hours are insane. i think a lot of people take that into consideration.”

Rich says there is also a lack of media representation for women cooks.

“I think people get frustrated with how much press male chefs get versus female chefs. A lot of food press is what’s hot. I think the big tough guy in the uniform sells more than the girl in the uniform,” Rich said.

This is something that has been brought up in the food world before. In 2013, TIME ran a piece called the “Gods of Food,” an article that sparked controversy due to the lack of female chefs featured in the story.

A map of women-led fine dining restaurants in San Francisco. Click on the map to view it in Google.

Rich Table takes a more egalitarian approach with the way they treat their employees, with a fair amount of women working in the back of the house, and there are opportunities for people to advance in the kitchen regardless of their gender.

“You’re here to do a job, and I have an expectation that you’ll do the job and do it well,” Rich said. “And if you prove to me that you want to push yourself and do better, we want to help push you.”

As to what Rich thinks is the answer to overcoming gender inequity in the restaurant business, she says there is no simple answer, but acknowledging the importance of choice and diverse representation of women in kitchens and food media may be part of it.

“The more you see something, the more comfortable you are with it,” Rich said. “There are female chefs out there. If we put out female chefs more, people would see that more. There’s no one answer for what it is to be a female chef.”