Kelly: I do a ton of charity events all over the country, and [the participants are] mostly men. And it’s like everyone’s marking their territory at the beginning, nobody talks to you, they don’t even want to know your name. Then you put out your dish, and they’re like, whoa, what’s your name? Where are you from?

Bouchard: Locally, I’ve had male chefs at charity events go around shaking everybody’s hand except mine.

Kelly: But when it’s all women, we’re like, “Oh, do you need any help? You need some extra cilantro? I have it.” Everyone’s sharing. It’s more of a community. I don’t know why, but it is.

French: We cook from a different place. I feel like, being in the middle of nowhere and not having a feeling of competition — a lot of us in Maine are not in these centers where we have to look around and wonder what everyone else is doing. We can just focus on what we’re doing.

Desjarlais: That’s why I came back, from Vegas and other places. To calm down and just cook, to enjoy cooking again. Running kitchens in large cities, [you have to care about] the trends and all that stuff. It seemed counter-trend to come to Maine, when I came back, to get a spot and just cook and not have to be like, what is everyone else around me doing? I don’t know if that relates to being female or not, but it definitely wasn’t centered on, “I’m going to be a rising star!” It was just, I’m going to make nice things. And I feel like here, I’m comfortable, and I can do that.

French: But I feel like women, we can’t even help it, it’s just innate that we cook from a different place, where we’re not cooking to be cool or the best or make fancy things and say, “I won this award!” We’re cooking because we want to give someone on the other side of the table joy. It’s this little bit of warm fire, it’s a grandmother, it’s a mother. Whereas men are like, it’s awards or it’s this other.

Charles: Television doesn’t help. Food television has spiraled downwards. It’s all gladiator stuff. It used to be friendly, always giving due. Now it’s just a free-for-all, hideously competitive, all about throwing people off the island and being the last man standing.

French: I got a call from a woman at the Washington Post a couple years ago, and she said, I want to do this story on Maine and all the places you should go. And she reached out to all these men and then me, and she said, “You’re the only one who would say nice things about other people.” All the men, they just couldn’t say something positive because they had to be, “Mine is the best.”

Stadler: In Maine? That makes me really sad.

Finigan: It was all men when I was cooking in Vermont. I grew up in a restaurant — my dad’s a chef — and I worked there all through high school, and that was all men. For some of my male chefs that have worked for me, they’ve never had a boss who was a woman. And for some of them, it was tough, and they didn’t work out.

French: I think it’s hard for a man to look up to a woman as a role model.

Bouchard: I’ve suspended and fired male employees who have treated me markedly differently than my male counterparts. It’s like, I know you wouldn’t have spoken to so-and-so or so-and-so like this, and they’ve said, “Yeah.” I don’t think it’s the business we’re in — I think it’s just that some men are innately disrespectful to women.

Charles: Working in a big city, I think you don’t find that as much, because there are more powerful women doing powerful things. In places like Maine, some are brought up in families where they’re taught by their grandfathers and fathers that women don’t occupy those kinds of jobs. So maybe there’s more of it here than you might find in the city. I actually ask men in interviews now, I say, you need to be able to have a woman tell you what to do, and before you take this job, it’s something you should think about. Go home and sleep on it.

French: We have an all-woman staff. Except poor TJ, the dishwasher. But we didn’t design it to be all women, it just came about as an accident, I think, because my old life was a mess and no one else was going to trust that I was going to pull it together, except for a few girlfriends who were like, okay, I’ll get your back, and we’ll see where this goes. So, you know, there’s no boss, no managers. We’re all just managing ourselves, and it’s everyone’s baby — there’s Victoria, and she grew the tomatoes; there’s Ashley, and she grew the flowers — and we all feel like we have a part of it. We have customers who have commented, like, “Why does it feel so good in here?” And they look around and go, “Oh my god, it’s all women.” Women just, like, floating around you. It’s just the way we move. It’s just the presence of a woman and what we bring to a room and to an environment, sort of that softer side that makes people feel lulled at the table.

van Emmerik: I teach an employment skills class, and I [tell my female students], “You are no less than anyone. Shake my hand like you would shake a man’s hand. And run your damn kitchen.”