Chef Desiree Nudd, 28, runs the open format kitchen at Estrellón. She has been told she's "very intimidating."

"I run a very tight ship," Nudd said. "I like things perfect. Clean."

She knows she's tough. As an alumna of high-intensity, fine-dining Chicago restaurants like The Lobby and Boka, Nudd learned to push herself.

"I've been brought up in this world of men," Nudd said. "I learned the mentality of, 'You're not going to make it in the kitchen.'

"You either have to kill it and get over everything else, or you're not going to succeed. I knew I wanted to be better than them."

Slowly, in fits and starts, more of Madison's top culinary positions are being taken by women, who serve as executive chefs, sous chefs and chef-owners. As they do, women are getting more say in how restaurant kitchens — those male-dominated, notoriously sexist places to work — function.

Many shy away from press coverage. Some don't even want to call themselves chefs. But several said they learned from their predecessors that they would run their own kitchens differently.

"There are so many strong, successful women in the culinary industry that just aren't in the spotlight," said Anna Dickson, formerly the head chef at Merchant.

"Women need to know they can be leaders in the industry," she said. "It's not easy and women face unique challenges, but it is worth it."

Slow burn

But kitchen staffs are still largely male, and at the highest levels, the culinary field remains dominated by men. Graduating classes in culinary schools are approaching parity, yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent data in 2014, women hold less than 20 percent of chef and head cook positions.

Those women who make it to the top earn less than their male counterparts. A study from the American Culinary Federation in 2011 reported an $18,000 earnings gap between male and female executive chefs.

Since The Capital Times looked at this issue locally in 2012, the tide has begun, slowly, to turn. Women lead kitchens at restaurants like Estrellón, Sujeo, Brocach on the Capitol Square, Madison Sourdough, The Fountain and, until recently, Field Table.

Before moving west, Dickson won accolades for her work at Merchant. Entrepreneur Laila Borokhim is expanding from her restaurant, Layla's Persian Cuisine, to a new food cart called Noosh.

"More than ever, women are filling the second- or third-tier jobs (chef de cuisine, executive sous chef) that will produce the next generation of leaders in the nation's best restaurants," Julia Moskin wrote in 2014 in the New York Times. "More women are entering the pipeline at elite culinary schools."

Nudd, who's held her executive position at Estrellón since April, once worked on a line with nearly all women. It was at a contemporary tavern called Jackson 20 in Alexandria, Virginia, where Nudd had her first "serious" restaurant job.

"It was awesome," Nudd said. "You felt this sense of pride. It felt good. You don't see it a lot."

Admission to the boys' club

When chef Molly Maciejewski, now 33, was starting her cooking career near Sheboygan, she worked with several older men from Bosnia.

"I worked with this gentleman who, every single day, would ask me 'When are you gonna get married?'" Maciejewski recalled. "He would say, every day, 'Why would you want to be a cook? You can cook at home for your husband.' Every day.

"It became a joke, but it really baffled him. He could not understand why I would want to do this hard, laborious job."

Maciejewski opened Madison Sourdough's Williamson Street café in 2009 with her brother-in-law, Andrew Hutchison, and Sourdough co-owner David Lohrentz. Her training, in culinary school and Destination Kohler's restaurant group, brought her into kitchens where she was often the only woman in the room, at least on the savory side.

"There's an expectation that women want to do pastry," Maciejewski said. Some cooks believe "that it's easier, that it's less stressful. Which isn't necessarily true, but it's a different kind of stress than working the line," where food is made to order.

A higher percentage of pastry chefs are women, which means pastry is sometimes maligned and diminished as a "pink prison."

Maciejewski worked in pastry at the American Club and the Immigrant Room, both in Kohler.

"When I decided to come back to savory cooking, some people were surprised and some people were proud of me, like 'good, you didn't get stuck there,'" Maciejewski said. "Which is a terrible thing to feel about pastry chefs. They do amazing work.

"There was this feeling in that environment that, as a female, getting put in pastry was not what you want for your career."

Maciejewski found she liked the pace of the line and excelled at the work. But it was definitely "a boys' club."

"I'm always very hesitant to say that things happen because you're a girl," Maciejewski said. "At one of my first serious cooking jobs, I had a chef who just refused to put me on hot line, and refused to teach me to butcher.

"Other cooks who were newer, who had less experience, were getting those opportunities."

The executive chef told her, "You're just so good at what you're doing right now," which Maciejewski knew was a dismissal. Finally, a sous chef trained her on the executive chef's day off.

"It's tough without that kind of advocate for you," she said. "You always want to assume it's not because of (being a woman), but sometimes that's all that's left."

The daily grind

Like their male counterparts, Madison's top female chefs come from a variety of backgrounds and have different management styles.

But they seemed to share a few things: determination, resilience and a work ethic that can be punishing.

Women in kitchens, they said, have to prove themselves. While female cooks strive to equal or best their coworkers in efficiency and technical skill, they may shoot back when other cooks tease or make sexual jokes. They are sometimes disinclined to ask for help — no cook wants to look weak.

"If I start getting soft and crying and having all these feelings, what's going to happen?" Nudd said. "People are going to stop calling me a bitch and say she's a p----."

Female chefs learn not to bend over (literally), to overlook the teasing. But it can cross a line: One woman said she threw a coworker against a wall and told him to "never (expletive) touch her again."

"If you're starting out somewhere, the guys may try to make it harder on you, try to get you to tap out," said Candace Flowers, the new head chef at The Fountain and Sweet Tea, both on State Street. "But then they get really mad when you do it better and faster than them, or more efficiently.

“They want to see if you can handle it.”

Flowers, 36, grew up in Atlanta and trained at a culinary school in Las Vegas. She's been in the industry since she was a teenager working at a Waffle House.

Men and women alike, Flowers said, have to develop "thick skin."

"I've worked for men that were way underqualified for the positions that they had, and then they were offended because they saw me moving forward," Flowers said. "When you're young and female ... the older people are getting closer to their last stop (and you're not). It's psychological."

Flowers described her management style as "honest" and unapologetically tough.

"This is my life," she said. "I don't get to come in and cook and clean my station and leave. It's high pressure, low pay and you gotta love what you're doing."

Growing a restaurant

For Laila Borokhim, opening Layla's Persian Cuisine three years ago was something she simply needed to do — to serve vegetable-centric, Persian-influenced food, and work for herself doing something she loves.

Borokhim, 34, learned to cook from her grandmother. She didn't come out of professional kitchens and doesn't call herself a chef.

Her basement restaurant on Butler Street, as well as a new food cart called Noosh serving "Jewified world cuisine," are her life's work, like Sweet Tea is for Flowers.

"I'm not trying to win any sort of award," Borokhim said. "I'm trying to support myself and my child by doing something that I like doing."

Borokhim's young son, Avner, sometimes comes into the restaurant with her. For more than two years Layla's didn't have a dishwashing machine, so Borokhim and her tiny staff did lunch and dinner dishes by hand.

"No one was going to give me a loan," said Borokhim, gesturing to walls partly covered with bright yellow wallpaper and a sampler stitched by a friend that says "Breastfeeding Welcome Here."

"To get the collateral is very difficult, and I think it's way more difficult if you're a woman."

Women may have different management styles than men, too. Borokhim runs her 15-seat restaurant with few employees, to whom she sometimes gives more leeway than she should. She empathizes, she said, with having "off days."

"I have feelings," Borokhim said. "I know there are guys out there and they just fire people ... not in a malicious way, but if you're causing (customers) to leave, you're fired. Getting rid of employees ... it's really hard."

Working with employees to make a positive environment was a priority for former Field Table executive chef Shannon Berry, who helped open the restaurant on the Square with owner Patricia Davis.

Berry, 29, said she cultivated a collaborative kitchen and was careful about her communication style.

"Everybody who comes into the restaurant is like, 'Who's the chef, can I speak to him?'" Berry said. "Every person assumes it's a man, and then I walk out."

Berry left her post at Field Table at the end of August and plans to return to school in sustainability or a related field.

Berry said her replacement gave her useful feedback on her way out.

"You schedule for the people and not for the business," he told her. If someone asked for a day off or to work part-time, Berry was likely to grant the request, even if it wasn't in the restaurant's best interest.

"I tend to be empathetic and help out people," she said. "Sometimes that gets in my way a little bit. You have to be OK with other people making mistakes, and you making mistakes. It's good when you are surrounded by forgiving people, and you can forgive yourself."

Women leaders may be inclined to empathy, but some find it hard to extend that to themselves. The job itself breeds workaholics.

"I don't know if I know how to balance work and life very well," Berry said. "I've always been working and working and working so much. I don't know how to sit down and relax yet, and maybe that's not okay.

"It's not just women. The guys are stressed out," Berry added. "When you see a grown man throw a tantrum on a consistent basis, that person is stressed."

A woman's place

Jamie Hoang leads the kitchen at Sujeo, the pan-Asian restaurant L'Etoile chef Tory Miller and his team opened in 2014. Hoang, 26, comes from a culinary family. Her aunt, Jean Tran, owns Ha Long Bay and her mother is a chef.

"Me and my cousins all grew up in the restaurant," Hoang said. "The kitchen at Ha Long Bay is all women and one guy, my uncle. The women in my family are strong and opinionated."

In the jobs she held since graduating from Madison College's culinary program, Hoang quickly learned how to work with, then manage, men who were older than her, some of whom had been cooking longer.

Yet as she moved up in the restaurant world, Hoang found that maintaining a relationship outside of work was difficult. Hoang married in summer 2014, but the couple has since split.

"It's not like he didn't support me," Hoang said. "But I think he wanted that normal family thing, where we would be home at the same time. The wife is there to make dinner.

"I'm probably not going to have kids in two years."

Brocach on the Square, set to reopen in a few weeks, has a new executive chef. Chef Kate Magee, 34, met her husband, Cameron Magee, at Perennial in Chicago, where they were station partners.

That they are in the same industry — much like Desiree Nudd and her fiancée, L'Etoile pastry chef Phillip Rodriguez — helps them make it work. Sort of.

"It is really hard," Kate Magee said. "I consider him a workaholic. But we do the same stuff ... there's time when he'll be at work for 16 hours and I'll go over and say, 'It's time to go, you don't have to be here.'

"For me, I have been able to find that balance. He's working on it."

In her own kitchen, Magee takes on the role of boss, teacher and even "Mom," a nickname a young female mentee once gave her.

Magee doesn't want to have children. She does want this. That passion has driven her in kitchens where she was both the youngest cook and "the only girl."

"When you become a manager, you're going to have to deal with a lot of s--- from the guys. You're their boss," Magee said. "We get emotional, we cry; can't help it. I think it's a matter of what you're willing to put up with until you no longer put up with it."

Now, if someone came into her kitchen and talked to Magee the way some coworkers have, they'd be gone.

"That's the beauty of us being in our own kitchens," Magee said. "We control the mentality, the vibe, the atmosphere, what's acceptable, what's not. It takes years to get in that position, if you can stick it out long enough."

In good taste

As more women step into top jobs, could the cuisine change? It's possible. Flowers, at Sweet Tea and The Fountain, grew tired of serving fried food at bars and the VFW post on John Nolen Drive.

"Restaurant culture in Madison was built on bar culture," Flowers said. "You have to have food to soak up the liquor. (At the VFW) most of my clientele was well over 50, and the only things we served (were) fried with a side of ranch.

"I felt like I was their cardiologist's best friend."

At Sweet Tea, Flowers cooks southern comfort food — roasted pork, corn muffins, red velvet cake — with plenty of vegetables, like kale and cabbage.

"I want you to feel like you're at your grandma's house," Flowers said. "The menu always changes, nothing comes out of a box."

Maciejewski's menu at Sourdough is a bit homey, too.

"I tend to be a nurturing person, and the foods I like to cook the most are nurturing and comforting," Maciejewski said.

At Sujeo, Hoang draws inspiration from her Laotian/ Chinese family for late night noodle bar specials like khao soi and bún. Magee dreams of opening a bed and breakfast, and Borokhim is now making pierogi (dumplings) and challah sandwiches for the Noosh food cart.

Borokhim didn't think she could do the food she wants to do, chicken cooked in pomegranate walnut sauce and slow-simmered lamb with green beans, in another person's kitchen.

"I like providing what I provide," Borokhim said. "I wanted to have control. I do want to be known for certain quality."

"Hell yeah, it matters"

It's been two years since Anna Dickson, formerly the head chef at Merchant, appeared on the cover of Madison Magazine holding a bunch of beets with "Chef of the Year" printed in looping text across her image.

Now Dickson is in Big Sky, Montana, working as a manager at a ski resort. Though she doesn't run a kitchen anymore, she believes it's getting easier for women who do.

"When I think about my lifetime experience in kitchens, in California there were just as many women as men," Dickson said. "I would like to think the culinary industry is going in the right direction. More female chefs are authors and restaurant owners. We're going away from those rock star-obsessed, wild kitchens ... people are being more professional.

"Part of the problem is that we talk about the absence of women," Dickson added. "The more women who see women in those roles, the more women will believe they can also be in that role."

Women interviewed for this story were used to being in the minority. Flowers said when she worked at Benvenuto's Italian Grill and was promoted by a female general manager, her male coworkers cried favoritism.

Flowers would tell young women going into the industry to be "mentally prepared."

"I used to say, 'Let your haters be your motivators,'" Flowers said. Female cooks may be "discouraged by their counterparts, or mistreated.

"It took a long time to get here, 20 years," she said. "Even at 16 at Waffle House, I cooked and waited tables and ran the cash register for the whole second shift by myself. I've always wanted this."

At Sujeo, Hoang said she doesn't see female applicants. Nudd, at Estrellón, came in before Hoang as a "lone wolf" in the four-restaurant group that includes L'Etoile and Graze. When she came to Estrellón, Nudd was the only woman on the savory side in a management position.

Early in her career, Nudd worried any mistake would make it harder for every other woman who came after her. She rejects the idea that gender doesn't matter in a professional kitchen.

"Hell yeah, it matters," Nudd said. "There's one girl and five guys in there, it matters. I would walk into a kitchen for a stage and I would be so scared. Because I'd be like, 'Oh, they probably think I suck because I'm a girl.' You always have to prove your work.

"When I have female cooks come in, I tell them, you have to be determined. You have to stand up for yourself."

Former Field Table chef Berry cooked for nine years. Her next move, in addition to school, could be in a cheese shop. She hasn't decided.

"You do feel like you're fighting every day and that no one's hearing you," Berry said. "People want that change to come tomorrow, but I think it just takes time. You've got to build each other up.

"As somebody who focuses on their craft, you'd rather be known for that," she said. "Just a good chef all around."

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