A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen by Sally Abe (Fleet £22, 272pp)
The 2011 London riots were in full swing, petrol bombs were thrown, bricks went through windows, The Ledbury was in the middle of a busy dinner service.
Tucked away in Notting Hill, the three Michelin-starred restaurant was about to be well and truly forced from the frying pan into the fire.
A gang outside ram-raided the glass front door smashing it to smithereens. Storming in with baseball bats and knives they demanded watches, phones and rings from the terrified diners.
The front of house had done their best to keep their customers ‘blissfully unaware’ of the coming chaos but once it hit the time had come for the kitchen to step in.
As Sally Abé makes abundantly clear in her book, chefs have never been ones to back down from a fight: ‘right boys, grab something! Let’s get them out of here! Blunt objects, NO KNIVES!’. Working in a kitchen, it seems, is not all dicing onions and searing steak.
Part memoir, part rallying-cry to women in male-dominated industries, Sally Abé’s lively chronicle of life as a chef is a fascinating insight into what goes on behind kitchen doors. And while not every chef she encounters is as …passionate… as Marco Pierre White and plate smashing screaming matches do not abound, working in a kitchen is not all plain sailing.
There are many instances of the so called bantering behaviour you might expect – nicknames and mild sabotage.
There are also a few instances that go a little further – a young American was tied up with clingfilm, put in a large stockpot and covered in ‘a mixture of cold fish stock, meat juices, milk and other dregs’ the bigger boys could find. An example that would put me off a becoming a chef.
Happily, Abé’s experience was rather less traumatic. Having not grown up around cooking, or even considered working in a kitchen as anything more than a waitress, she decides to kill time, while her waste of space boyfriend is at university, by doing a ‘Hospitality Business Management with Culinary Arts BA’.
But, after her mandatory year in industry, during which she works at the Savoy and Claridges under Gordon Ramsay, she decides to drop out. Learning on the job is far more effective than the classroom.
She anecdotally tracks her way through the chefs and restaurants that have flavoured her career. As well, as the cuts, scraps and slicing off of fingers that seem to be an occupational hazard.
Abé has an impressive CV. She rose through the ranks of Claridges, before heading to The Ledbury, then becoming Head Chef of the Harwood Arms, the Michelin-starred gastropub in Fulham.
Her memoir ends as she opens her own restaurant The Pem. You have to respect Abé just for the scale and speed of her achievement – even if sometimes her writing style makes it difficult.
Very good at telling us about her mistakes (in an attempt to be self-deprecating, I am unsure?), she occasionally undermines her own success as you begin to wonder if she actually is any good.
But when you take her own appraisal out of things, her success must be appreciated.By the end you feel like you need to draw breath.
Abé writes with such immediacy, and packs her narrative with so much specialised knowledge, that often you feel like you’re packed in to the unairconditioned kitchen alongside her.
She is fantastic at describing the minutiae of kitchen politics and techniques that even the most culinarily illiterate can follow her. Her outlining of roles and ranks also adds colour to any laypersons understanding of the work that goes into every element of a meal.
After reading Abé’s book I would challenge anyone to go into a restaurant and not respect the 16 hour days, arduous labour and love that chefs put into even the smallest garnish.
Specked throughout the book is Abé’s ethos to manage with respect and kindness rather than an iron fist. As the title suggests, she balks at the fact that 93 percent of Head Chefs are men, and just 17 percent of chefs at any level are women.
Given that in the majority of households women are the once behind the stove these stats aren’t proportional. At The Pem 80 percent of the chefs are women.
The first bit of advice she received from one of the few women at the Savoy, which she leaves us with at the end, sums up her ethos, ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. A rather less cliché be the change you want to see in the world I think.
