My Open Letter Back To Tom Colicchio And Every Other Guy In The Restaurant Business

Celebrity chef Tom Colicchio has a heart-felt essay on Medium about women in kitchens. I have some heart-felt thoughts, too.

Colicchio calls his essay, “An Open Letter To (Male) Chefs.” In it, he says “enough” to the bro culture (he uses a word starting with “d”) that permeates the restaurant business.

He also, to my surprise, decries the structure of restaurant work that wreaks havoc on family life. This is one of the best lines:

“It’s time we re-imagine the family averse work week that tells young cooks being a ‘real’ chef is incompatible with being a parent. That trade off is a Faustian bargain, and its own form of harassment.”

Damn. Finally, a guy gets it.

I am not a chef, but I have some culinary training, at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, with Patricia Wells in Paris, and in numerous classes of all types that I’ve taken for years.

The past decade, writing food stories, I’ve haunted kitchens, asking chefs to tell me about their business strategies, always keeping my eyes and ears open to the banter on the line and how men and women interact.

Restaurants are a tough business. That’s one reason why restaurants always have “Help Wanted” signs in their…