Eight years ago, Auzerais Bellamy landed what she thought was a big break: a stint as a stagiaire, or apprentice, at the French Laundry, Thomas Keller's world-renowned restaurant in the Napa Valley. She wasn't paid for her two days trailing the pastry team, but she saw it as an ideal training ground where, if asked to stay, she could learn from some of the best cooks in the business, sharpening her skills.'If you want to be a great player you have to be coached well, and I felt like I could be coached well there,' she recalled.Bellamy, who grew up in a restaurant family in the Bay Area, had graduated from the Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts, and was working as chef de partie at Keller's more casual Bouchon Bakery in Yountville, California. But when her apprenticeship ended, she wasn't asked to stay on at the French Laundry. 'They said I lacked the technical skill to work there.'Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York TimesShe stayed with Bouchon Bakery, and even moved to New York City to work as a demi-sous-chef at its branch in Rockefeller Center. And when a job as pastry sous-chef opened up at Per Se, Keller's East Coast fine-dining flagship, she applied -- only to be told again that she needed more experience in the company.The job was filled by a young Asian woman from outside the restaurant group, said Bellamy, 30. 'They even had her come to our property to trail me to see how things were done companywide.'Bellamy eventually left the restaurant business altogether, at one point cleaning apartments. In 2016, after an employer raved about a blondie she'd made, she started a Brooklyn bakery, Blondery. Looking back, she says she isn't sure her experience could have been different.'How do you convey to people who aren't rooting for you, how to support you?' she said.Bellamy's story, which she recounted in a 2016 post on Medium, is a familiar one for many Black women in high-end restaurants. In interviews, she and others said that although they
Auzerais Bellamy at Blondery, her bakery in Brooklyn on Sept. 27, 2020.
The job was filled by a young Asian woman from outside the restaurant group, said Bellamy, 30. “They even had her come to our property to trail me to see how things were done companywide.” A report the National Restaurant Association released in 2017 showed that Black workers made up nearly 12% of all restaurant employees, yet only 9.5% of all chefs.
Tanya Holland, who has been working in restaurants since 1985 and is now the executive chef and owner of Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland, California, put it in much starker terms: “As Black women we’re dealing with so much patriarchy and so much systemic racism.” To develop her skills, she moved to other restaurants, learning as much as she could, and left when she felt she couldn’t progress any further. “Through determination and grit, I eventually opened my own restaurant,” she said.
But she felt she had to walk a tightrope with her managers and peers — acting neither too assertive nor too passive, for fear of confirming racist stereotypes. During service, this meant making her voice louder and deeper to stop fellow line cooks from chastising her for being too quiet when calling out, “Oui!” to confirm she’d heard an order. Or using softer tones when speaking one-on-one with her peers.
Wilmot said she wishes that restaurants trained their staffs in cultural sensitivity as well as they do in wine or food. The incident with her co-worker led her to look for other cooking jobs; she eventually left fine dining, and now runs her own catering business, Georgina’s, in her hometown, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and a West African-inspired supper club called Love That I Knead.
At Gramercy Tavern’s parent company, Union Square Hospitality Group, 224 current and former employees in June signed an open letter to the CEO, Danny Meyer, condemning what they saw as the company’s tepid support for the Black Lives Matter movement on social media, and urging him to “adopt systems that support” Black, Indigenous and other workers of color.
Smith, 34, who has been a line cook in Baltimore and now works there as a private chef and chef instructor, said she created the group after being struck by the scarcity of Black female chefs in the kitchens where she worked. “In my last kitchen job it was all white men, and nothing felt like it was truly for us,” she said.