The future is female: How women chefs are breaking up the boys' club

From being crowned Ireland’s Best Chef in 2018 at the Irish Restaurant Awards to achieving the Michelin Bib Gourmand, Jess is no stranger to accolades but her love of food was born in simple beginnings.

Her favourite food memory?

“We’d boil a bath and I’d get mum’s old razor out of the shower and shave a pig. We’d light a fire underneath the cast iron bath after we gutted it.”

Being involved in the farm to fork process really gave Jess a sense of where her food came from.

“Mum would make brawn with the head and the trotters. We would use every bit of the pig.”

Jess learned to hunt at a young age.

“I’ve wanted to be a chef since I was 10. So I’ve been killing pigs and sheep and chickens since I was a kid. I always knew where food came from; that you had to kill an animal to eat meat.”

Coming from New Zealand, Jess was inspired by its pioneering background in foraging and that ethos is reflected in the menu at Kai, which includes locally picked blackberries, three-cornered leeks and nettles when in season.

Kai is an institution in Galway and after 12 years trading, it still keeps the menu fresh, a true testament to Jess’ passion and commitment as head chef.

“Food means everything to me. I’ve been obsessed with it since I left school at 15 to wash dishes. I always wanted to have a neighborhood restaurant and I wanted everybody that came into Kai to feel like they were important.”

Kai was recently awarded with the highly coveted Michelin Green Star for its efforts in sustainability.

“I can make anything with anything. People talk about sustainability and there’s these pictures of them picking weeds out of a ditch, and that’s great. But sustainability is also about making sure your staff are paid correctly so they can live their lives to the fullest.”

Food is so much more than sustenance to Jess and she uses her knowledge in the kitchen as a way to help people preserve their cultures.

“I worked with people who couldn’t cook for themselves in Direct Provision. I went to Beirut and Jordan, with the UNHCR [The UN Refugee Agency]. We lost our [Irish]food culture in the famine. I didn’t want that for them.”

She knew that food was a universal connector, a way to forget, if only momentarily, the situation they had left behind in their home countries.

“You can see their eyes light up when you start talking about the smell of tomato leaves, or the taste of fresh parsley out of the garden.”

Aishling Moore, head chef at Goldie, Cork

Cork’s Aishling Byrne has a fin to tail approach in Goldie restaurant on Oliver Plunkett Street, Cork.

“We buy direct from small day boats in Ballycotton. We only serve wild Irish fish.”

Buying the fish whole minimises food waste: “We try to use as much of the fish as possible. It gives us scope for creativity and to do interesting things with the menu while being as conscious as possible.”

Aishling dries out her fish in-house before serving: “We’ll buy 100-120kgs. We leave it on the bone and let it dry out in our fridge to develop the flavor and the texture. We get a better yield on the fish because there’s less flesh sticking to the bone.”

Aishling’s high standards mean no farmed fish so she only uses the local fishermen’s catch.

“We have a very limited menu. Just yesterday, the only fish I could get was pollock and carp. Sometimes we literally don’t have enough fish so we’ve considered closing the doors.”

Aishling and her team take sustainability very seriously: “We don’t use cling film in the restaurant. Restaurants go through rolls of that every year and it’s so bad for the environment.”

Aishling was heavily influenced by Jamie Oliver: “He’s effected so much change across the world and he made cooking accessible.”

This democratisation of food stuck with Aishling and she always wanted her restaurants to be atypical but accessible.

“We do foods that you will have some form of memory attached to but you wouldn’t [associate] with fish.”

Her three essential tools for cooking fish are the fish slice, tweezers, and a well seasoned carbon steel pan.

Her attitude towards fish has taken a dramatic turn since the days of being repulsed by the sight of it.

“When I was a kid, I was dragged through the English Market kicking and screaming and I hated the smell, really hated it. But now I spend so much time there.”

Roann Byrne, BIM Taste the Atlantic Young Chef Ambassador and co-founder of Danu

Although Roann Byrne is still in her 20s, her impact on the culinary scene has been significant. She is currently working on a masters in gastronomy, looking at the gender imbalance in kitchens across Ireland.

“Any time I started talking about my thesis, the men around me would ask; ‘why are you doing it on women in kitchens? Sure, sexism isn’t a thing.’”

Roann’s research sought to establish why fewer women than men hold head chef roles in Irish restaurants.

“They’re not [rising] nearly as high in rank as fast as men. By the time women are 25-30, if there’s any talk of them being in a long-term relationship or wanting to have kids, it discourages them from the chef’s lifestyle.”

As part of her role as Taste the Atlantic young chef ambassador role, Roann spent an entire summer working with high quality producers and chefs, including the Michelin-starred JP McMahon of Aniar restaurant.

“We developed a smoked oyster mushroom bruschetta with Guinness foam on top. JP brought us out foraging and learning about wild Irish herbs.”

It’s hard to put into words what food means to Roann but she loves how it connects people.

“Each culture has its own dishes but food is the one thing that connects us all. Food comes into everything: war, power, land and food production.”

As a woman chef, it’s really important for Roann to speak about diet culture and how damaging that is to women.

“I’ve been looking at food as sustenance, as nourishment, and as pleasure. A lot of Irish food doesn’t seek pleasure because of the way the Catholic religion looks at pleasure. When I was younger, I had a lot of disordered eating and was picky and uncomfortable with different foods.”

Education and traceability is the key to changing attitudes towards food, says Roann.

“The way I got more comfortable with exploring new foods is knowing where they came from.”

Grainne O’Keefe, head chef and patron of Mae Restaurant and Culinary Director Bujo Burger Joint

Grainne O’Keefe has always had a theory about gender imbalance in kitchens.

“The same man that would turn around and say; ‘oh, get back to the kitchen and make me a sandwich’ will say, ‘women don’t make good chefs’.” Cooking was considered a traditionally feminine activity, says Grainne.

“Back in the day, it would have been super feminine, a mother’s role, putting flower petals on top of the dish.”

When did the tide turn?

“[In the 19th century, chef Georges-Auguste Escoffier created the] brigade system and [it became] ‘this is what men do. Pots are heavy, fires are hot. Women can’t handle this. You do it at home for your kids but not for people paying’.”

As head chef of her own restaurant Mae, lovingly called after her grandmother, Grainne has made it a deliberate policy to seek out female talent.

“There’s only two males working in the restaurant and the rest are female.” Growing up in Blanchardstown in a family of seven, Grainne loved to cook for her family.

“I’d watch cooking shows and there was a mobile library in school and I’d get cookbooks out. I realised that there was this whole world that revolved around food.”

So, what’s her most-loved dish?

At the moment, she says, it has to be the crumpet, served crab, dill, horseradish and lemon.

“When the Michelin Guide came in, they put up a tweet about it. People just went nuts about it.”