Under The Bus
The first time I was given the title of Pastry Chef at a restaurant, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. The second time I was sure I did.
Although COVID has put restaurants under a microscope, anyone working in the industry pre-pandemic would have told you that the labor issue was fucked and getting worse. Talented young people were dropping out in droves-- burned out, sick of the constant abuse, unable to pay their bills as they moved up the ranks from their free stages to their underpaid line cook positions to their underpaid sous chef positions to their underpaid head chef positions. Every kitchen in every restaurant was dealing with a labor shortage. Management’s solution? They totally rehauled the system by paying people a living wage, offering their staff vacations and breaks and health insurance plus they invested in mental health support for everyone too.
AHAHAHAHA I’m kidding. The industry had solutions to the brain drain all right, but for the most part these solutions didn’t involve any of the above examples. One common practice was promoting/hiring people who were under-qualified but eager to positions of power and responsibility. These people could be paid much less than their more qualified peers, and since they were green and uncertain, could be kept on a tight leash by upper management or the owners.
Taking a chance on someone who is eager yet under-qualified is not necessarily a bad thing. With the right leadership, a person can be empowered by a trusted mentor and grow into the role from a position of support and guidance. This could be a way for a person who may traditionally be at a disadvantage (because of their race, socio-economic status, gender, etc.) to gain a toehold in an overwhelmingly white & male position.
But in the case of my second job offer with the title of Pastry Chef, something more insidious was afoot. It was a new restaurant, owned by the chef and his wife. This chef was a bit of a Philadelphia hot-shot: he had helmed many kitchens around town and was famous for his innovative ideas, his craftsmanship (“details matter”) and his focus (“make it nice”). His instagram account was peppered with shots of fluid gels and tweezered micro-herbs and uncanny knife cuts, and each post spawned masturbatory commentary from his loyal followers (“This is making me tingle”). This restaurant was billed as the first time he was truly free to cook his own food the way he wanted it, without the interference of a pesky owner. HE was the owner, HE would call all the shots, and seemingly all of Philadelphia was salivating for a taste of his unchecked brilliance.
When I interviewed with this chef, I still had a bitter taste in my mouth from my last failure as a pastry chef. I was upfront about not wanting to repeat that mistake. This chef assured me that he would teach me everything I needed to know, he would be my mentor, and together we would open the hottest new restaurant in Philadelphia. And for a month or so it seemed like this would actually happen. Before we could get into the restaurant itself, I went over to the chef’s house and we menu-tested together. It was a fun time, and I learned a lot from him.
But then things got hard. Opening a restaurant is incredibly stressful under the best of circumstances, but the chef and his wife were terrible leaders and even more terrible business owners. Communication suddenly stopped. They didn’t pay their kitchen staff for months. Then they stopped paying their vendors. They lost their tempers repeatedly with everyone, often out of the blue. On top of all of that, I was the only woman in the kitchen and the chef fostered an incredibly sexist environment, often encouraging the other cooks in the kitchen to describe graphic sexual acts as we all prepped together.
I tried to roll with the punches, truly I did. I laughed at the gross jokes the cooks slung around because they wouldn’t be talking like that unless they thought I was “one of the guys”, right? I listened to everything the chef and his wife told me and tried my hardest to do it, even when the instructions were contradictory. I came to work even though I hadn’t been paid. But I was the most inexperienced person with a title and a semi-decent salary (when they decided to pay us, that is), so I was doomed from the start. Perhaps by design, I became the scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the kitchen. I was prepping too much food. I wasn’t prepping enough food. Little by little, the chef stopped teaching me and stopped talking to me, unless it was to yell at me for something. I started to feel tremendous anxiety and terror whenever I was around him or his wife.
And then came the day I’d been dreading. The chef fired me for not having a menu item on my station that he had not told me he needed. That doesn’t make sense, right? It didn’t to me either, but to the chef it was the perfect way to tie up my loose end. It was a great plan on his part: hire a woman, get accolades for diversity, hold the woman up to unrealistic expectations and refuse to communicate basic instructions, get angry and fire that woman for being incompentant. This is a classic example of how the industry uses false empowerment to both pat themselves on the back and to solve a labor shortage-- and as a bonus, we are easy props to fire when something goes wrong or money runs out.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that this restaurant failed mightily-- although they struggled along for a year or so after I was fired (and need I mention that they didn’t bother to hire another pastry chef?), the end of the golden boy’s dream seemed like an inevitability to anyone close to the situation. But I hope you’re not too worried about this chef. His reward for abusing his staff and mismanaging his restaurant into the ground was to be hired as the Culinary Director of a large and popular restaurant group in Philadelphia. He’s recently gotten into fermentation, the latest dude-bro chef hobby that bulldozes over the work of centuries of (often indigenous) people.
I’m not arguing that this chef isn’t a talented guy-- he certainly is. But his talent was fostered and his mistakes became launchpads in ways that a woman or a BIPOC could never dream of achieving. His abusive behavior was tolerated-- celebrated, even. His constant degrading commentary? Just blowing off steam!
The more I began to think about the phenomenon of hiring slightly under-qualified women or BIPOC for cheap, face-saving, easily disposable labor, the more I thought there must be more layers to the story than just my experience. I am a white woman, after all-- how has my privilege protected me in these situations? I reached out to two women of color in the Philly restaurant industry who I have both worked with and am honored to call my friends, and was pretty blown away by what they had to say.
Gretchen (not her real name) is an incredibly talented cook, pop-up specialist, recipe developer and stylist who has worked not only in restaurants but for food magazines and television shows as well. (She also worked for the chef I wrote about above, as you’ll see.) When I asked her if she had ever been hired for a position that she felt slightly under-qualified for because of either the optics of hiring a woman or POC/the fact that she could be got for cheap/the fact that she could be easily blamed for mistakes or a combination of these things, she responded:
“Yes. I believe there were SO many instances of this. Where I would get “promoted” for the same pay or I would get a .25-.50 raise.
I experienced the same thing at (restaurant) with (chef) where he tried to promote me just as a catalyst for firing another woman. His questions were: on a scale of 1-10 what’s your pastry level? And when can you take over? You’ll just be doing what I will be telling you anyway. That was going to be a pastry and garde manger support at 10/hr.
There have been so many instances of “you have a community here,” or “we are your friends,” or “we are your allies” around my queerness/color that I think the sole purpose of was to get me for cheap.
At Bon Appétit, there was so much interest in me and what I could cook for family meal whenever I’d go to “interview” of the 8 or so times that I did. I was so much doing the work of a freelancer and getting so poorly compensated for it, as a stage/trailer…”
D’Onna began her career in coffee as a barista and then moved on to become the wholesale account rep and educator for places like Counter Culture Coffee before giving bartending a shot at Bloomday Cafe, where I met her. She was such a natural that she soon took over as Head Bartender and is currently diving into wine education through self study and also Wine Empowered, which is a program looking to diversify the wine world by providing formal education to marginalized groups in the hospitality industry. She continues to create stunning beverages and is a voracious advocate for BIPOC voices in coffee and wine. I would give anything to work a Sunday brunch with her again, I miss her so much!
When I posed the same questions to D’Onna that I posed to Gretchen, I must admit that I was expecting a somewhat similar response. Instead I was utterly blown away:
“Professionally, I’ve only ever been underestimated. I’ve only ever been given opportunities for any advancement after first putting my head down and doing “the work”. The work being basic skills associated with whatever job I’ve acquired. And then, it’s only been small microscopic advancements after - that is until my magic shows it’s face.
I think a lot of this has been because of the body I inhabit. Black people, and especially Black queer, trans, non binary, women are often times more underestimated immediately in the workplace than our counterparts. We are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, rarely given even a small chance at advancement, and if we want it we have to fight for it against the systems of oppression we're also trying to survive in the outside world.
Recently I’ve been given opportunities I know I’m capable of and have worked so hard for - but then the side effect of being underestimated my entire professional career starts to rear its ugly head, and I wonder if I’m ready for all this good news because I’m so used to fighting for crumbs.
When you are denied access to information, opportunity, and career elevation you start to wonder sometimes if there’s something wrong with you. You wonder if all those years of bowing your head and heart and just doing the work has actually just made you unable to lift your head up to dream a bit bigger, and to maybe take some risks. You wonder if you’ll be judged harsher for the mistakes you may make with these new career advancements, and you wonder if that will set not just yourself back a few steps, but also people that look like you.
Being underestimated and unprotected in the workplace is a loaded gun to the face that is uniquely positioned to keep your head bent and your heart beat up. But then there’s always the option to say “Fuck it. I’m going to win anyway”.
(quoted with permission from Gretchen & D’Onna, edited for length and clarity)
And there it is, the ugly layers of racism and sexism forming a strata of denied opportunities. As the industry struggles to survive this cataclysmic period, I worry that the divide will deepen in the name of business survival. But I am encouraged by the grassroots organization I’m seeing on social media-- it seems that with some (forced) time to think and actually breathe, some restaurant workers are refusing to be satisfied with crumbs from management’s table. I’m seeing a push for living wages, hazard pay, healthcare. I’m seeing brave workers breaking the code of silence and speaking out about toxic work culture, abusive behavior, illegal wage theft. Of course not everyone is in a position to stand up and name names-- so many people are struggling just to survive these days, and employers know this and are definitely taking advantage.
I urge those of us with the privilege to speak up to continue to do so, voraciously advocating for those who cannot. Until the day management restructures the promotion of green talent into a holistic, supported, empowered system I call on those of us who are veterans of the old system to be on our guard. I call on us to step up by protecting and mentoring the next wave of young talent who will soon be slapping the title “pastry chef” onto their resumes.
Vegan Spicy Chocolate Pot de Creme
I’d planned to talk about an instance in my career when I was actually mentored to grow into a position but the above newsletter is already a bit lengthy, so that story will have to wait. But a huge shout-out to Jen, Beth and Mike who took a chance on me as a sous chef at Grateful Plate. This is a Grateful Plate recipe, and as such it was tested, costed and made delicious by people who took the time to do things right while still managing to be respectful of their employees and pay them a living wage. Imagine that! You CAN have it all!
Yield: seven 4-ounce portions
Ingredients:
1 15-ounce/403g can full-fat coconut milk
3 tablespoons/36g coconut oil
2 tablespoons/16g coconut sugar (brown sugar also works great here)
finely grated zest of one whole orange (about 3 tablespoons)
1 tablespoon/15g juice from the orange you’ve just zested
1 teaspoon/3g ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne, or more to taste
1 teaspoon/6g kosher salt, or more to taste
10 ounces/284g 64% chocolate, roughly chopped (really any dark chocolate will work great here, but if you’re concerned with keeping this recipe vegan, be sure to read the ingredients label)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 a very ripe & soft avocado, roughly mashed (I KNOW THIS IS ANNOYING but now you have half an avocado for your lunch don’t @ me okay?!)
Directions:
Set 7 small containers (ramekins or tea cups or pretty little juice glasses work great here) on a half sheet tray.
Combine coconut milk, oil, sugar, orange juice and zest, cinnamon, cayenne and salt in a small saucepan. Place chopped chocolate in a metal bowl. Bring milk mixture to a boil and simmer for one minute, whisking frequently, until sugar is dissolved.
Pour hot liquid over chocolate and allow to sit for 30 seconds. Add vanilla extract. Whisk mixture until completely homogenous.
Place mashed avocado in a blender and pour chocolate mixture over. Carefully blend until completely smooth (you should see no green avocado flecks), stopping the blender to scrape down the sides if necessary.
Immediately pour chocolate mixture into containers. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours (4 hours is ideal) to set.
Reading:
Twilight of the Imperial Chef by Tejal Rao for The New York Times
How Food Media Created Monsters in the Kitchen by Kate Telfeyan for The New Republic
Who Really Writes Chefs’ Recipes? by Mari Uyehara for Food & Wine
The Lives Upended Around a $20 Cheeseburger by Jessica Contrera for The Washington Post
Listening:
My Girls, Animal Kingdom
Hum, Adult Jazz
Time (You and I), Khruangbin
NILE, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar
I’m Cooking/Eating/Drinking:
I’ve been making this pasta salad from Mason Hereford’s Turkey and the Wolf on repeat. It’s tangy and spicy and basically the perfect vehicle to use up our bumper crop of sungold cherry tomatoes. I advocate for using tri-colored rotini for your pasta in this dish because I love me some tri-colored ‘tini and I’ll never be sorry about it.
We celebrated my negative COVID test with some takeout from Silo Fried Chicken and while the chicken was delicious, I couldn’t stop stuffing my face with their dill pickle and ham mac & cheese. Silo, you really get me!
In other chicken news, the smoky, tangy chicken at Bob’s BBQ is the best thing on their menu and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
My co-workers and I agree that the Porter’s Perfection cider has a marshmallow-y mouthfeel— bouncy and thick.
Splatternalia original artwork by the indomitable Hannah Taylor. Check out her stuff here and support her by commissioning work, buying prints and/or attending her gigs when COVID allows!
So happy to see this in my inbox today!
I've always loved your writing so much, and glad to see you tackling huge topics like this one. Thanks for sharing your story and the stories of others. Also that recipe sounds delicious!