Halfway through a conversation about the ways restaurant culture has shifted, Belinda Chang got quiet: Perhaps #MeToo wasn’t as much of a tsunami as it seemed two years ago, when women began sharing their stories of harassment and assault at the hands of chefs.

“I don’t think the attitude has changed among the people who were the original offenders,” she said. “And there are probably a lot of people who still are either totally baffled by what all the fuss was about or totally make fun of it.”

Ms. Chang, 46, has been in the restaurant game for a long time. She started in the 1990s, when she was studying chemistry at Rice University. By 1997, she had moved home to Chicago to work at Charlie Trotter’s. By 2011, she had won the James Beard award for outstanding wine service for her work at The Modern in New York.

I met her back in early 2000s, when she was the dynamic new face of women in wine at the Fifth Floor in San Francisco and I was reporting about food for The San Francisco Chronicle. She’s back in Chicago now, running a hospitality marketing business.

We both agree there have been significant changes since towering culinary figures like John Besh, Mario Batali and Ken Friedman fell after women told their stories about sexual harassment, abuse and assault.