To sort out longstanding stereotypes of toxic masculinity in restaurant kitchens and perfect femininity in home cooking, our writer turns to an unlikely source of insight.
images Sybilka Storie

“I would have loved to be at the meeting where they figured out how to take something women have done for millennia and rebrand it as something men do better. ”

I have been writing about food for 30 years, during which there’s been a huge growth in our interest in food. More restaurants, more chefs, more coverage, more food to eat.

Since then, our collective interest in food has been commodified and sold back to us via TV, movies, books, Instagram accounts, etc. The vision we get back of why and how to cook and eat, and who should do what, is highly gendered: Women, home. Men, restaurants.

I don’t mean that there’s a Subcommittee of the Patriarchy on Enforcing Gender Roles in Food that meets bimonthly to work this out, but sometimes it seems as if there might be. I would have loved to be at the meeting where they figured out how to take something women have done for millennia and rebrand it as something men do better.

That’s why I love The Bear, the FX show about a chef who inherits his family’s Italian beef stand in Chicago and turns it into a fine-dining restaurant called The Bear. I first noticed that it was different from the usual male-ego restaurant narrative in episode 2 of season 1. The chef, Carmy Berzatto, is talking on the phone with his sister Natalie as she makes dinner. He asks what she’s cooking, and when she says, “oh, Mom’s chicken,” he jots down, “chicken piccata.” In the next episode we see Carmy demonstrating the very same chicken dish to his staff. They watch respectfully.

Woman, home. Man, restaurant. Same dish, treated differently. Is there perhaps a critique here?

The Bear is a rich, nuanced show about the restaurant biz, suicide, addiction, and tortured family relations. The lesson that stands out for me is that food is such a powerful force in our lives that it shouldn’t be served in neat gender packages. We think of gender roles as being harmful to women, and they are. It’s still hard for women to make it in restaurants, and being in charge of food in the home brings with it a lot of extra chores and emotional work that men don’t do.

But as The Bear unfolds, we can see the toll it takes on men, too: how they are cut out of the true, deeper role food plays in life, and how messed up the male-defined world of restaurants can be.

Of course it’s changed in my three decades of food writing. The Committee has a hard time keeping the lid on. The new world of men and women in food is personified in the character of Sydney Adamu, Carmy’s sous-chef. Carmy and his messed-up family may be the protagonists, but for me, The Bear belongs to Sydney. She represents the culinary future, if we loosen up our boundaries.

The Man-Chefs of Kitchen Confidential
One of the strongest narratives that emerged early in my career was Anthony Bourdain’s conception of the culture of restaurants he wrote about in his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential. It was about the cooks and kitchen workers, all men, who toiled in obscurity. Proud to have survived a world of hard, dangerous work alongside unstable, drug-addicted, testosterone-driven men with poor judgment, he turned the line cook into a heroic character.

With Bourdain’s craggy, handsome face attached to it, that image attracted men to the restaurant industry, and set the tone for how we saw the restaurant world. I never grew to love Bourdain like everyone else did because I couldn’t get past the repellent attitudes toward women in his book. Women were rarely referred to except through words like screwing, banging, penetrating, “poking anything in a skirt,” “should have done that hostess,” and all the language used to describe sex with anonymous women who may or may not have wanted it. When Bourdain did praise women in the kitchen, it was for putting up with sexist behavior and harassment, their only choice at the time.

What woman would be interested in working in that world? It seems designed to keep women out. And it has done a good job, according to my very unscientific research.

I recently scrolled through eight Best New Restaurants lists for various cities on Eater, the restaurant website. Of restaurants (both high- and low-end) whose chefs were named, I found six women and 31 men, plus three couples. Eater’s Cincinnati list includes 17 men and four couples. All 10 of the restaurants in Cincinnati Magazine’s Best Restaurants 2024 are headed by male chefs.

This Kitchen Confidential trope had to be laid to rest after #MeToo. On The Bear, there’s no direct sexual harassment. Carmy chides Richie for calling Sydney “sweetheart” and that’s more or less all we hear about that. But there’s a lot of unbridled masculinity. The constant f-words, the yelling, the stupid behavior of Cousin Richie, the easily triggered fragile egos. It’s interesting to watch Tina, the Latina cook at The Bear, enter this world and navigate it. I think Tina gets the job because she can curse in a brusque manner that makes her a one-of-the-guys woman.

The Fake Perfection of Home Cooking
While restaurants have become thoroughly male-branded, what were women getting? The Food Network, which launched in 1997. The hosts of many early Food Network shows were male New York chefs who made cheffy dishes and liked to say, “Bam!”

But women got plenty of screen time. Rachael Ray started early, and she’s now apparently worth $100 million, so it’s not like the FN was unfriendly to women. But she got a lot of derision for being “too perky” from the male chef crowd who weirdly thought it was OK to dis female home cooks. Women-hosted shows were mostly cooking shows aimed at women who cooked at home. They often had, and have, a specific person they were cooking for, like Ina Garten’s husband Jeffrey, Ree Drummond’s rancher husband, or their families.

Cooking for your family is important stuff. I know a lot of women and girls were inspired to cook by those shows. But nobody really modeled home cooking for men. Alton Brown was one of the few men who did home cooking, but he didn’t suddenly turn men into avid home cooks. Surveys done in 2023 found that women cooked nine meals a week to men’s four and did 78% of the grocery shopping.

Then came the women’s cooking blogs that were written in breathless, girly prose, sort of self-deprecating and fun. And cupcakes with two inches of frosting. Vegan and vegetarian cooking, and later “clean” food was largely a woman’s sphere. Men got “killing it” in the kitchen; women got rainbows of macarons. It was looking like Barbie and G.I. Joe out there.

If men’s restaurant world was exaggeratedly messy, the package offered to women was distortedly perfect. Cookbooks aimed at women were full of gorgeous photographs, the authors were often gorgeous, too, and the shows made the cooking look easy. I’ll bet this practiced perfection turned some people off cooking. Because most home cooks don’t cook in white lace-trimmed dresses and serve dinner in photogenic gardens. That is not the point of home cooking. Those books and blogs and shows made me long for Julia Child, all 6-foot-2 and wild-haired.

The Bear episode “7 Fishes” hilariously and upsettingly shows what striving for perfection at home actually looks like: a kitchen timer covered with Italian gravy stains, splatters on the ceiling, stuffed artichokes on the floor. Donna, the mother of Natalie and Carmy, with long red nails and nicely done hair, is also drunk and emotionally unstable. She’s preparing the traditional Feast of Seven Fishes, and Jamie Lee Curtis plays her with barely controlled lunacy as she destroys the kitchen, sending away anyone who wants to help, crying and cursing. It’s as chaotic as any scene in The Bear’s kitchen. “I make beautiful things for people. No one makes beautiful things for me!” she says, the ultimate cry of a woman who has woven feeding and nurturing others into her self-worth and has exhausted herself trying to turn it into love returned.

The real point of home cooking is shown in scenes like Natalie offhandedly making Mom’s chicken, or Sydney bringing Natalie food after she has a baby. Sydney is Black, not Italian, but she makes what she knows Natalie would like. Sydney making dinner for Marcus, the sweet pastry cook; Tina, in a flashback, packing lunch for her kid every single morning before she goes to look for a job. You never see men cooking a dish and handing it to the person who’s going to eat it. Carmy finally cooks for Claire when he realizes he’s fallen in love with her. He’s not sure whether she’s his girlfriend (that’s how emotionally undeveloped he is) so fortunately he can tell her with some very delicious-looking spaghetti Bolognese.

But the most powerful demonstration of how women feed people is an episode that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on TV. When Natalie goes into labor and she can’t find anyone to go to the hospital with her, she has to resort to her mother, the last person she’d want. Donna is indeed the wrong person, until she fetches Natalie what I think is the single most important “dish” in the whole series: ice chips. They are exactly what Natalie needs, and mother and daughter have a real conversation between contractions. I don’t think it’s just that my mother died a few weeks before I saw the episode that made me sob unreservedly for an hour. I find that act of fondly feeding another person something that soothes or nurtures or totally delights them to be one of the most moving of all human interactions.

“I find that act of fondly feeding another person something that soothes or nurtures or totally delights them to be one of the most moving of all human interactions.”

Men don’t seem to get to do this. There are Chicago restaurant chefs in a later episode who say they find it satisfying to feed people. But I’m not convinced. First, if they do, it’s only the rich people out in the dining room. Because you can’t get the perfect food those chefs are offering without paying a lot for it. As Carmy points out, a picture of a dessert that Marcus admires in a cookbook took 12 people to put together.

As a business model, perfection is ruinous for Carmy, who starts off owing his uncle $200,000. The striving costs Carmy personally, big-time. It’s so all-consuming that he loses Claire, the only person he’s ever cooked especially for. And she seems to have time for him, even though she’s an emergency room doctor, which tells you something about how out of whack the restaurant model is. I kind of wish he’d go back to selling really great beef sandwiches. He’d be making money on those.

But Carmy wants to get a Michelin star, he wants to be a celebrity chef even though he worked for one of those in New York and he’s still literally traumatized by the cruel treatment he got. And then, he gets locked in the walk-in on opening night and his staff, led by Sydney, does fine without him! Celebrity chefs are not lone geniuses. That was a useful myth for a while but it died right there in that scene.

So let’s talk about Sydney. She says she wants to cook good food and make people happy. She has the skills that have been called male and the ones called female. She is self confident and firm. She has chops. She can work hard. She can build a stove out of concrete blocks and wood when the gas goes out. She speaks Spanish. As a Black woman, she has overcome her father’s doubts about a career in foodservice and, one imagines, she has had to fight for respect in kitchens.

She also can defuse a criminal conflict in front of the restaurant. With sandwiches! She clashes with Tina, then wins Tina over by showing her how she can grow, which Tina craves. She hands Carmy a 26-page report on how to improve operations on her first day. And she understands that Carmy’s desire to change the menu every night is shortsighted, wasteful, ego-driven. She can get angry but she also is patient and encouraging. Basically, she out-chefs Carmy.

If the show has a happy ending, it will be in Sydney’s direction. It will be emotional growth, not pathological determination, that makes Carmy succeed. Richie’s going to find his more feminine self. (It’s clearly in there.) Donna’s going to get some therapy for her female martyrdom. Tina is going to blossom with authority and Marcus, who’s had a wonderful chance for his creativity to bloom, will add some muscle.

It can be very helpful in understanding a book or a TV show or movie to look back at its opening. Remember the first episode, when they have a tournament on a pinball machine called Ballbusters? These guys need someone to bust their balls. My prediction is that the series ends with Sydney taking over the restaurant, Carmy getting back with Claire, getting married, having kids, and staying home to make delicious food for the family. I’d be happy for them all. n

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