Women are transforming baking’s status in the culinary world and California is at the center of that shift.
The savory side, the hot line, was considered the “real thing,” said restaurateur Nancy Silverton, the only chef to win James Beard awards for both outstanding pastry chef and outstanding chef. Baking meant following rigid recipes, which was women’s work — at least to the men who did the hiring.
“Occasionally an attitude would come out in some way,” Shere said, “but I really didn’t think too much about it.”She ignored a colleague’s overheard comment that a pastry chef isn’t a “real chef” rather than try to correct his mistake. “It was just a microcosm of the time.” Shere preferred the pastry kitchen, with its small, close-knit staff and lack of competitive hierarchy.To this day she has no idea why most men stay away from baking, though she was prepared to float a theory or two. Maybe a “mother thing” put them off, she said — the idea that dessert was a treat, inessential, something a mom might turn out for a family celebration. Or maybe men were uncomfortable in a kitchen where women ran the show.
Like Shere, she enjoyed the autonomy of the pastry kitchen, where each cook made desserts from start to finish. “Everything we did, we did ourselves,” she said. “No line cook complaining about the mayonnaise or the size of the minced chives.” Although other bakeries focused on quality bread took off in California before La Brea — most notably Steve Sullivan’s Acme Bread in Berkeley — it was Silverton’s name that quickly became synonymous with great bread, in part because having a woman at the helm of a bakery was a novelty at the time.La Brea Bakery put the rest of the country on notice: California was a welcoming place for a female baker.
“I’m not naturally an ‘attaboy’ person, which is so not-female of me,” she said, but she figured there had to be a middle ground between cutthroat and warm-and-fuzzy. She rejected chef coats that conveyed status, encouraged a comradely atmosphere as long as the work got done, and strove for a “two-way street” rather than a dictatorship. Outsiders, unable to grasp the new business model, asked Prueitt in the early days if Tartine was a collective.
Nathan, now 37, was a veteran of kitchen harassment before it became a headline, including a stint on the hot line at Lupa in New York City, then part of Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich’s empire, where a male cook more than once followed her into the walk-in refrigerator to kiss her. She moved to San Francisco and a new job, but still felt out of place.
Nathan eventually married Rustic Canyon restaurateur Josh Loeb, and they now co-own eight restaurants and an ice cream business. For over six years, until last summer, she stuck to a daunting workweek: After saying goodnight to the couple’s three small children, she arrived at work at 1:30 in the morning and then dashed home as soon as her husband called to say they were starting to stir.
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