Seven
MOVING ON
Melinda’s style of cooking at 2223 was low key and delicious, with an approach that was more rustic than mine. I was starting to discover an interest in experimentation, with a strong desire to fuse flavors from different parts of the world; she was more rooted in Californian cuisine. Our personas in the kitchen were different, too. I kept a calm exterior but a lot of the time ran on nervous energy, where Melinda was more relaxed. When we traveled to France, she met my parents and they quietly approved. “She balances you very well,” they said.
After eighteen months at Stars, I was starting to feel restless. I needed to make more money and I needed to broaden my experience. Developing as a chef is entirely dependent on movement, learning what one can from one small kitchen before moving on to the next. One day in 1993, while sitting having a drink at an oyster bar, I ran into the executive chef of the Park Hyatt who, after we got chatting, gave me his card. I called a few days later and he recommended me for a job at a restaurant called Campton Place, near Union Square. I accepted immediately.
On the surface of things, Campton Place did not look like my kind of restaurant at all. It had a white tablecloth dining room with the traditional air of a high-end French restaurant, the type of restaurant I had fled France to avoid. From the outset I sensed it was not a good fit. But—and unusually—I shrugged off my instincts. I told myself I was becoming too comfortable at Stars. I was growing soft and inflexible. Perhaps a spell in a kitchen to which I was less suited was precisely what I needed.
Just as Jeremiah set the tone in the kitchen at Stars, so the executive chef set the tone at Campton Place, and the two kitchens couldn’t have been more different. This man was rough talking and abrasive. He shouted and swore at will, in ways that seemed less to do with getting things done and more with his need to demonstrate power. My schedule was from 3:00 to 11:00 p.m., but he forced me, and everyone else on that shift, to come in to work at 10:00 a.m. If anyone complained he slapped them straight down. “You’re going to come at three? You’re not going to make it.”
When a kitchen is run by someone who mistreats his staff, it is a green light for others to follow suit. The sous-chef took his cue from the boss and at first he was just playful, addressing those below him in a lightly mocking way that was annoying but possible to tolerate. Slowly he became more aggressive. He was verbally abusive and recklessly bullied the staff. One night when we were very busy, I was on the grill and the hot oil splashed all over my arms. It was severely painful and when I looked down at my skin, I saw that the burns were deep.
I needed to be relieved from my station. But when I turned to the sous-chef, he snapped my head off, telling me to stop being pathetic and get back to work.
Beyond this incident, the sous-chef also started to become physical. He tried to touch my breasts and made a lot of very sexual remarks. He was a homophobe, and in reference to my sexuality would say, “Oh, come on, I know you also like guys.” It made me very uncomfortable. I knew it wasn’t right or proper and I should’ve gone to human resources, but instead I went to the executive chef and said, “This is unacceptable.” I told him I didn’t feel safe in his kitchen. I don’t know what I expected—this was a place where the boys backed one another up—but even so, his attitude shocked me. “This is the way it is and if you don’t like it, you can find another job,” he said.
I had never had a problem standing up for myself or others. But this was a new experience for me, having a legitimate complaint met with such derision. I was crazy angry. I knew this behavior was wrong, and the worst thing was that the chef didn’t care. (I ran into him recently, for the first time since those days, and he was extravagantly nice to me. It was clear he had no idea I might harbor bad feelings.)
This is the problem with sexism in the kitchen: like sexism everywhere, it is so normalized that half the time the people doing it don’t even notice. The culture is so ingrained that when it does happen, it is easy for it to go unacknowledged.
To me, the most obvious way to make things better for women in the kitchen is to encourage more women to become chefs in the first place. Growing up, I couldn’t have named a single female chef. Even now, in New York, just 8 percent of Michelin-starred restaurants have female head chefs. (That figure is 20 percent in San Francisco and Chicago, and zero in Washington, DC.) It might seem perverse, in light of this, that I push back about being labeled a “female chef.” You can’t champion minority rights without naming them first. But in 2016, when the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list awarded me the title “World’s Best Female Chef,” it felt like a double-edged sword. There was no mistaking the implication: that “best female chef” was a lesser category than the one unqualified by gender.
I didn’t lose my temper or storm out that day at Campton Place. I simply said okay to the chef, stayed on for a few months while I looked for another job, then left. I had been there for a total of six months, a short time in the scheme of things, but foot-draggingly long when you are having a terrible time. I tried not to let my experiences in an abusive kitchen dent my confidence; I tried to learn from it, to harden my resolve to always trust my own instincts. And I looked with renewed respect at Loretta and Melinda, two women who ran their own restaurants with strength, grace, and dignity. This, I thought, is what should be evoked by the use of the term “female chef,” a promotion, not a circumscription, of female excellence. It should never be assumed that the best among us can’t go toe to toe with a man.
After Campton Place, I was rattled but determined to get right back into the kitchen. I did a few short-term jobs, one of which was working with Melinda at 2223. This seemed like a brilliant idea when we had it. Spending all day with Melinda in a restaurant I loved and admired would be the ultimate antidote to my experience at Campton Place. I would be safe, and supported, and get to spend all day with the woman I loved. What could possibly go wrong?
It turned out, of course, to be a terrible idea, as couples working together frequently discover. Our styles of cooking didn’t easily mesh. And though at home being at different points in our careers had been a virtue, ensuring we weren’t in competition with each other, at work it meant Melinda was my boss. It was weird and unsettling for both of us. The biggest problem, however, was that trying to work and live together gave us too little time off from each other, and when a new opportunity arose, I grabbed at it.
I had been working in a professional kitchen for just over three years and was still young and relatively inexperienced. But I was making good connections with senior chefs in the business, and, in 1996, I was offered my first executive chef job. This was huge—a chance to run my own kitchen.
The restaurant, YoYo Bistro, was based at the Miyako Hotel in San Francisco’s Japantown. I have always been interested in Japan, both the culture and the cuisine. My dad was fascinated by the samurai, and would tell me stories of their martial prowess and noble sacrifice in battle. From what I’d heard, Japan was similar to France in its strict adherence to tradition, and it was a culture to which I felt intuitively close. But while I always paid attention to the flavors and techniques when I ate Japanese food, I had never visited the country and had no training in cooking in that style.
I was an odd choice, then, to run a Japanese-French fusion restaurant. In the kitchen there would be a Chinese chef, a Korean chef, and running the show, me—a French person. I could have said, No, I’m not qualified for this job, but I loved the idea of combining the cuisines and I was curious and eager. I thought I could do it.
The outgoing chef left a solid menu that I didn’t interfere with too much at first. The three of us in the kitchen developed an easy working style. There were so few of us, yelling would have been a ludicrous approach, but in any case it came naturally to me to create an atmosphere of collaboration in which we tried to learn from one another and cook good food.
I don’t remember many of the individual dishes I made at Yoyo Bistro, although I know there was a monkfish that went down very well. What I do remember from that period is how I drew on my memories of French cooking and tried to convert them into lighter versions using Japanese ingredients. These were my first steps toward developing my style as a chef, and forming the foundations on which everything would rest. It felt very natural to me to return to my French roots and build up a flavor base from there. In the five years since I’d left France, my frustration with the country had waned, to be replaced with a tentative yearning to revisit it in my cooking, albeit in heavily reconstituted form.
I liked blending, and refining, and paring things down. I started to make a lot of broth. It’s such a simple thing, but it took on a huge importance in my mind. I loved the purity and intensity of flavor of broth. I loved the fact that it was nourishing and cleansing at the same time. And I loved its transparency. I didn’t want to hide anything.
Yoyo Bistro started to get good reviews. One of them was a three-star review in Access San Francisco, an influential annual catalog. And we started to attract a smart crowd. There were celebrities in the restaurant every night at Stars, but I was usually too far back in the kitchen to see them. At Yoyo Bistro I was the boss, and one night in 1996 we were starting to close when the manager received a call and, walking into the kitchen, told me we had to stay open. A party was coming in: it was Juliette Binoche and others coming direct from the premiere of The English Patient.
Celebrities can be oblivious to everyone but themselves, and most of the people in the party that night were just that—except for Juliette. Whenever a server approached her, she was gracious and said thank you. After the meal, she came back to the kitchen and thanked my two colleagues and me, as we stood there pouring sweat. I’ve cooked for a lot of famous politicians and movie stars since then, but Juliette was by far the most cordial.
It was that year that I turned thirty-one. Thirty itself had passed in a blur while I’d been settling in at YoYo Bistro. When a milestone occurs in my life, the feelings attached to it can take a while to turn up, and such was the case here. It took me a year after turning thirty to realize something startling: I wasn’t an ingenue anymore. I wasn’t the person in my twenties who knew less than everybody else in the kitchen. I knew things, and not only that, I knew people! I was starting to feel like a valued part of the wider chef community. Many of my friends and colleagues in the cooking world were French, people like Roland Passot (La Folie), Hubert Keller (Fleur de Lys), Jean-Pierre Dubray (The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton). In France, I had assumed that, as a young woman from a family with no background in cuisine, I would be shut out of these influential networks; in San Francisco, the doors swung wide open.
Six years after starting at Stars, a friend of a friend in the French chef community told me he was involved in reopening a big five-star hotel in Jakarta, at the heart of which would be an $80 million restaurant focusing on Californian-French food. They were looking for a chef who knew both cuisines, he said. Would I be interested?
I was doing well at YoYo Bistro. I loved San Francisco, where other executive chef jobs were sure to be on the horizon. And I was in a relationship with someone who had no intention of leaving California. And yet I found myself wondering about the offer. There was one more intriguing detail about the job in Jakarta; it was, I had been told, the hotel management’s desire that, either as a gimmick, an experiment, or a political gesture, the kitchen would be staffed entirely by women.