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When Preeti Mistry, the chef-owner of Juhu Beach Club and Navi Kitchen in Oakland, California, first met Thomas Keller, she was starstruck. “I left feeling like I just met Drake or something,” she told Kim Severson of the New York Times, quoted in a recent profile of the French Laundry chef. It’s a touching tribute to a man who has helped define American dining. Then comes this:

“But now?” Severson writes of Mistry. “She views fine dining as disingenuous, built from a system steeped in oppression and hierarchy in which women, gays and other minorities — whether customers or cooks — are not treated the same.” Mistry compares Keller’s style of high-end, high-price-point, tasting menu dining to haute couture, with its appropriation of styles and techniques from minorities, and says to Keller (by way of Severson), “You need to go on your woke journey.”

Severson passed along the message, and later in the piece, Keller replies: “‘I pushed against convention when I was young, Then you realize there is no reason to push against things. There is no value in it.’ Hard work and dedication to craft, he said, will right all wrongs.”

Keller’s answer feels very familiar to me, a woman of color. His position is the equivalent of saying “All lives matter” in response to someone saying “Black lives matter,” and I’m not surprised. Keller is a successful chef, with no firsthand grasp of what it’s like to be a woman or a person of color, and he did what a lot of people do when something they love is criticized: He stripped his critic of her unique experience and viewpoint so he could re-center himself in the discussion. I’ve had this exact conversation in kitchens and dining rooms; I’ve watched as chefs and servers and diners uncomfortably squirm as I speak about something that’s specific to me as a black, female hospitality worker.

Keller was given the chance in print to defend himself against Mistry’s criticisms, but Christopher Kostow, chef of the Restaurant at Meadowood in St. Helena, California, took to social media to add his two cents. In an Instagram post of a picture of a man literally standing on a soap box, he calls out Mistry’s comments:

I’ve lived in the world Kostow is claiming to speak for. I’ve been a line cook, server, manager, and hostess in fine dining restaurants. I was once part of that “diversity” he references. Preeti Mistry is part of that diversity as well, and when I read Kostow’s post discrediting her perspective — a perspective which he cannot claim to have — I felt a wave of anger wash over me. The very issue that Mistry brings up in the Keller profile, of minorities giving so much to a community and not being treated the same, is entirely ignored in his response. Instead, Kostow states that diversity makes restaurants great, and in the same breath chastises a woman of color speaking about her personal experiences. He also accuses food media’s interest in diversity and representation of being “outdated and thinly researched.”

Kostow’s entire argument against Mistry’s personal experience of the food world is, as he says, based on his own personal experience of the food world. In this way, he and Keller are doing the exact same thing: Centering themselves in a food world that is, in their eyes, an equal playing field. If people of color are talking about systemic oppression and you hear it as an attempt to tear a white man down, you’re part of the problem. Silencing opposing voices that are coming from within the very industry that you’re defending (and claiming to represent) does not help; in fact, it’s another form of oppression.

If chefs like Kostow want the restaurant industry to actually be the progressive and inclusive place they seem to think it already is, it’s important for them to listen to voices that are not usually heard, and not to write off entire groups of people because their experiences as people on the margins don’t fit your experiences as a white, male chef.

At the end of his Instagram post, Kostow widens his rebuttal to include the entire world of food media, almost suggesting that there’s a conspiracy to bring Keller, an iconic chef and figure in modern fine dining, down. But the lack of diversity in the restaurant industry is real, and so (as Severson points out in her profile) is the whiteness of Keller’s kitchens. Kostow is correct to notice that issues like these are present in food writing now in a way they haven’t always been, but addressing them is a good thing. The fact that we’re seeing more and more of these stories should be celebrated. This industry is going to have to look directly at its problems, because the problems can’t be addressed without that first step.

“We are critically examining who our idols are, what they represent, and what they exclude.”

Why are these stories that Kostow and Keller are so uncomfortable with being published more and more now? More writers of color are contributing our voices to mainstream food publications, places where we have been historically barred from telling those stories. Readers and diners are more ready to consider difficult questions of race and inclusion. We are critically examining who our idols are, what they represent, and what they exclude.

When Mistry tells Kim Severson that fine dining is “built from a system steeped in oppression and hierarchy in which women, gays and other minorities … are not treated the same,” she is talking about white supremacy, how the idea that white (and straight, and male) is better is an overarching one, which touches many different aspects of our culture — including dining. She’s not saying that groups of white chefs are getting together in secret meetings to discuss how to keep minorities down. She’s merely acknowledging issues that have affected generations of people of color.

Kostow’s Instagram post reminded me of a conversation I had once with a manager of one of the top restaurants in Boston. We were at a hospitality conference in New York, and I mentioned to him that I would love to see more people of color attending. He responded with, “Well, maybe those kinds of people don’t care about hospitality.”

My jaw dropped. My chest tightened with rage at the idea that hospitality in the restaurant industry, an industry that has depended on people of color for decades, wasn’t of interest to people of color. Then I felt embarrassed, as I looked around at my fellow restaurant workers, managers, chefs, all of whom were white, none of whom were challenging his assertion. Minorities are often celebrated as the “backbone” of restaurants and kitchens, but we are rarely given the voice and the opportunities to lead those institutions as chefs, managers, sommeliers, and service captains. And, as Keller and Kostow have made clear, when we make use of our voices, we’re too often told to be silent.

As I looked through the hundreds of likes and comments piling up on Kostow’s post, I saw the names of chefs, managers, line cooks, and servers from some of the top restaurants in the country, the very people who are going to be responsible for making the restaurant industry a more inclusive place. The only way that we’re going to get there is if they — and chefs like Keller and Kostow — open themselves up to hearing experiences different than their own. If we want to move forward as an industry, we have to listen, and be self-critical.

Korsha Wilson is a food writer and a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. She has worked in front-of-the-house and back-of-the-house roles in restaurants, as an intern for the National Restaurant Association, and spent two years working as a cheesemaker for an artisanal mozzarella producer in New England. She is the founder of A Hungry Society, a blog and website dedicated to celebrating food culture’s diversity and helping create a more inclusive food world.

An earlier version of this story appeared in A Hungry Society .