Some time ago, a book club that I belong to asked me to present ‘Kitchen Confidential – Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly’. By sheer coincidence, my son had picked up a copy of the book a few weeks earlier. It was the ‘Insider’s edition with handwritten footnotes and afterthoughts’ which Bourdian had added in 2006, years after he ceased being a cook.
I knew Anthony Bourdain more as a charismatic presenter of genre-defying TV shows; part-food, part-political, warm and quixotic shows and while reading the book I was both fascinated by the raw, self-mocking style and horrified by his earlier avatar. Sex, drugs and booze in the kitchens didn’t shock me. He liked tough women in the kitchen and narrates an incident when a co-worker put up obscene photos on the workstation of a woman who retorted with a suitable verbal insult. “Women who can survive and prosper in such a high-testosterone universe are all too rare”, he wrote
Really, do we need to play this school-bully game? Why should the workplace kitchen be a battleground for a woman? Why do men who generally loathe cooking at home become successful professional cooks while women who handle the kitchen with ease are unable to rise to the top in the profession? Finding out the reality of Indian kitchens would make it more contextual for my book club members I felt.
I was horrified by what I discovered about conditions in Indian kitchens. Almost 91 % of kitchens are run by men and the majority of employees are male. Machismo is always simmering. A rising woman chef told me “If you start working in the kitchen young, you are subjected to emotional and physical abuse. There’s a lot of groping, touching, cornering, pulling, and pushing. The display of physical strength is primal. You feel real fear when you realise you are alone with a sexual predator in a walk-in freezer. It’s considered a rite of passage to harass women, as well as men, including cis men.”
While corporate restaurants follow POSH guidelines of zero-tolerance for harassment, men have other and equally gruesome ways of harassing women in the kitchen. An independent chef who works on speciality food festivals in top corporate hotels across India told me that while she is not ill-treated due to her seniority and social position, male chefs do look down upon women in the kitchen. Their super-ego comes to the fore with displays of aggression in the kitchen. The psychological pressure of working in the hot kitchen, long working hours, the anger when food is sent back sometimes – all of it is vented on the ‘reportees’ and the ‘commis’ level takes the brunt of it.
The facilities in the restaurant kitchens are not gender-friendly either. Staff toilets are located two floors below the kitchen and it makes it all the more difficult for women when they have their periods. Many women don’t rise up to the top levels, quitting when they get married or moving to the bakery from the hot kitchen. Very few reach the level of executive chef. It is a small wonder that the high job stress has led to a high attrition rate. It’s easy to miss this subtext in the first cursory reading of the book but Bourdain romanticised the type of man who routinely made kitchen unsafe spaces with raunchy jokes, sexually explicit language, and unchecked aggression says Elisabeth Sherman, in her article on the 20th anniversary of ‘Kitchen Confidential’. It’s something that Bourdain regretted later, confessing that the book has been rightly dismissed by women in this industry as the ‘bro bible’. “If there’s a harasser in the kitchen who’s a jerk at work, chances are he’s got my book at his station, and I am going to have to live with that.” Bourdain perhaps found redemption in doing this. He had already become far more evolved and caring human than he was all those years ago when he worked in the kitchens. In a 2018 interview with Helen Rosner, he told her, “Remember when you asked me if I was a feminist, and I was afraid to say yes? Write this down: I’m a fuckin’ feminist.”
The good news is that there are quite a few male hoteliers who are feminists and champion the women in the kitchens of the great Indian hotels. Virender Razdan, General Manager of The Leela Bhartiya City Bengaluru, recently hosted an interesting event ‘Shefs at the Leela’ featuring four globally renowned women chefs – Romy Gill, Sanjana Patel, Meha Kumar, and Vanshika Bhatia who each created a unique dish. Accentuating the culinary profession’s artistic sensibilities, it also featured a contemporary visualisation of Kathak presented by Madhu Nataraj’s STEM dance company. The initiative for SHEFs came from Madhav Sehgal, the General Manager of the Leela Palace Bangalore. The need for driving more inclusion and diversity in the kitchens was more obvious to him as an industry insider. While hotel brands have been driving diversity agendas for quite a few years, these have almost always been in the front-of-the-house and guest-facing areas. Hotels and restaurants do very little to support women who want a career in kitchens. Though legal obligations are complied with, there’s no real endeavour to improve the culture of the kitchens. An example was right in his own home – in her 11-year career in a hotel, his wife started in the kitchen but quickly moved to sales. This trajectory is quite common amongst women in the industry as the vibe in a kitchen is not sustainable for women. Just three or four out of a hundred female hotel management graduates opt for the kitchen.
In his fourth stint as the general manager of a hotel, Sehgal has used the opportunity to drive change and help women chefs realise their aspirations. It starts with instilling confidence in fresh graduates that there would be a supportive system and a welcoming culture. Next, they need role models to inspire them. It was initially difficult to find them but when he started looking for them, he found many celebrated Indian women chefs in India with their own successful restaurants, cafes and pastry shops. Enough to have run four editions of SHEFS and establish it as a platform that recognises women chefs and facilitates their interaction with talented young chefs. Sehgal hopes that the platform’s intent will nudge industry leaders to mandate diversity in the kitchens. It’s not just women who would benefit, so would the industry as it would lead to better business, better food and a better culture. Women chefs concur that the professional kitchen will improve when the focus is not on gender but on productivity and efficiency in the kitchen.
Razdan also feels that having more women in the kitchen would improve the quality of food. A soft-spoken and charming industry veteran, Razdan has helmed hotels for the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Oberoi, the ITC and the Leela hotels. He says almost poetically, “Our plate does not smile any more as male chefs over a period of time have become very unemotional. They aren’t emotionally connected with the food; it has become a factory product, a commodity. Women chefs on the other hand bring a lot of emotion into the culinary landscape.” PS: While I was enamoured by the raspy-voiced, lanky and handsome Bourdain, I didn’t attempt to meet on his visits to India because he denounced vegetarians, “and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans” as an affront to all that he stood for. Oh, the irony when Les Halles, the restaurant where he last worked, offered a vegetarian option of the menu at a pop-up to celebrate the release of the documentary on his life, ‘Roadrunner’.
Sandhya Mendonca is an author and host of the ‘Spotlight with Sandhya’ podcast.