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During a busy lunch shift, when chef Sally Abe was asked to replace her male colleague cooking the aged beef fillet, he responded by pouring a pan of scalding oil on her hand.
The man claimed it was an accident, something “we all knew was a lie”, Sally wrote in her memoir, A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen.
The book lifts the figurative saucepan lid on what it is like being a woman in male-dominated professional kitchens. With 16-hour days, rare toilet and food breaks, and a culture of not calling in sick unless you’re on your deathbed, the story she tells is a brutal insight into the hospitality industry.
The book goes some way to explaining why just 17% of professional chefs in the UK are women and only 8% of Michelin-starred restaurants are female-led. Despite the playground insult telling women and girls to “get back in the kitchen”, when they try to do just that as a career, they face almost non-existent maternity leave, chef whites not made for a woman’s body and a culture of hypermasculinity.
Starting at the Savoy Grill, before moving to Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s, Sally was often the only woman working behind the kitchen pass. She was also the only woman (that she knows of) to ever work the meat section at the latter.
It was often a “toxic working environment”.
“I think it’s quite shocking for people who don’t have any idea what hospitality is like,” Sally tells Money. “If you told someone to f*** off in a regular office, you would get sacked. But it’s just day-to-day in the kitchen.”
‘They christened me Tit-rat’
The assault by her colleague was a rare moment when the mental insults tipped over into physical.
“I think that particular person was just a really awful human being – and luckily you don’t encounter too many of those along the way,” Sally says.
But what is all too frequent are the barriers women face when working in professional kitchens.
Sally was christened “Tit rat” by her male counterparts.
“There was no real…
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