International Women's Day 2018: Eight female chefs you should know about

From keeping plastic at bay in the kitchen to becoming the first woman to earn three Michelin stars, Emma Henderson rounds up eight female chefs heating up the food industry

Friday 02 March 2018 18:42 GMT
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It’s widely reported that there’s a shortage of female chefs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t women in the industry who really are at the top of their game.

And there’s no better time to celebrate them than the one the day of the year dedicated to celebrating women.

Here’s a round up of some of the women we think are really worth shouting about at the moment.

Asma Khan donates a per centage of her restaurant’s proceeds to helping India’s persecuted second daughters (Darjeeling Express)

Asma Khan – owner and chef at Darjeeling Express

Since opening in mid-2017, Asma Khan’s kitchen at Darjeeling Express has been talked about almost non-stop. And that’s because it’s made up of an all-female team who were housewives from South Asia, none of whom have professional cooking training, nor Khan herself. The restaurant serves up high-quality authentic dishes based on north Indian traditional food from her Bengali heritage and designed to be shared.

The menu is heavily based on family recipes passed down through the generations, and in 2012 she started her own food business, which has found it’s permanent home in Carnaby Street’s food court, Kingly Court. The restaurant runs a meat-free Monday menu, which started last month. A percentage of all proceeds from the restaurant supports a charity called “Second Daughters”, which is close to Khan’s heart. It helps support the girls overlooked by their families in favour of their brothers, largely traditional in India, especially the second daughter, and helps provide them with opportunities.

Nargisse Benkabbou is dedicated to giving Moroccan food its own identity in the UK (Octopus books)

Nargisse Benkabbou – author of Casablanca: My Moroccan Food

Growing up in Belgium, Nargisse Benkabbou moved to the UK seven years ago and could not believe the difference in the way the Moroccan food she knew was represented. Her debut cookbook, Casablanca: My Moroccan Food (published in May by Octopus), differentiates from what people often confuse it with: Middle Eastern food. She remembers at university people would tell her they loved hummus and asked for her recipe, not knowing it wasn’t Moroccan.

She quit the corporate job she moved to London for in 2013, did a course at Leiths and began her food blog, My Moroccan Food, two years later. After consulting with her mother and aunts, her book is a personal journey and is all about traditional Moroccan food based on the food she knows from her family, who moved from Fez in the Seventies. With a modern twist, her recipes give a breath of fresh air to Moroccan food.

Thomasina Miers – co-founder of Wahaca and campaigner

Rising to fame after winning MasterChef in 2005, Miers co-founded arguably the high-street’s best chain, Wahaca, three years later, which helped revolutionise Mexican food in this country. But aside from fresh, tasty and affordable food, the company is the first carbon-neutral restaurant group in the UK and dedicated to sustainability. They’ve banned plastic straws, don’t serve food in plastic, are working on reducing plastic in the back of house and offset their carbon footprint by sponsoring a charity in Mexico that makes heaters for people living outside of the big cities.

But Wahaca is not her only calling: Miers is also setting up a charity, Chefs in Schools, to help get food education back into schools as she believes learning the basics early on makes it easier for people to lead a healthy lifestyle.

She’s dedicated to encouraging and helping people to eat healthily, focusing on affordable whole ingredients, rather than processed food.

A career change for Chantelle Nicholson now sees her championing a plant-based tasting menu at Tredwells, Seven Dials

Chantelle Nicholson​ – chef-patron at Tredwells

Another career changer, Kiwi chef Nicholson walked away from the corporate world of law and has been the chef-patron of Tredwells in central London since 2016.

After cooking from a young age, and even mastering the art of making crème fraîche from scratch when she was nine, she was encouraged to follow an academic route. And it was while at university that she first worked in kitchens.

Now, she’s championing a plant-based tasting menu at Tredwells and is bringing out her debut cookbook, Planted, showcasing the best of seasonal produce and how to turn it into delicious vegan dishes, which will be published in April.

Clare Smyth’s debut restaurant, Core, in Notting Hill, emphasises natural and sustainable British produce

Clare Smyth – chef and restaurant owner of Core

Irish chef Clare Smyth was the first female chef in the UK to be awarded three Michelin stars. She became head chef for Restaurant Gordon Ramsey in Chelsea in 2008, aged just 29, and she was also the first female chef to be awarded a perfect 10 by the Good Food Guide.
She opened her own restaurant, Core, last summer in Notting Hill. She is passionate about using natural and sustainable food and champions cooking with seasonal food that comes from UK farmers.

Smyth moved to England aged 16 to enrol in catering college in Portsmouth the day after leaving school, showing real independence and determination from a very early age.

Championing Ghanaian cuisine was the only way Zoe Adjonyoh could connect with her heritage

Zoe Adjonyoh – chef and author of Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen

After releasing her debut cookbook in 2017, and completing a successful residency at Pop Brixton, Adjonyoh now has a permanent site in London Fields, back where it all began when she was dishing up her homecooked food at Hackney WickED festival.

For her, cooking Ghanaian food was the only way to connect to her heritage after leaving her home county and moving to London as a young child. Although she’s been talking about West African food for years, until the release of her cookbook, it was largely one of the last unexplored cuisines in the mainstream food world.

She’d been building a following by doing supper clubs before opening her pop-up in Brixton and managed to dispel the myth portrayed by stereotypes of the Eighties that Africa and it’s food was considered to be an “other”.

Elena Arzak is the fourth generation to work in her family’s restaurant in San Sebastian (Alamy)

Elena Arzak – best female chef in the world

At number 30 in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants 2017 list, Elena Arzak is the highest ranked women in the entire list, with the only other female in the list being Italivi Reboreda at Cosme, New York, at number 40. And that, technically, makes her the best female chef in the world, which she was named back in 2012. But winning the 40th place in the list just proves the imbalance woman face in the professional kitchen.

The restaurant has been in the family for generations and Arzak began working in it from the age of 11, the fourth generation to do so. Arzak’s food is modern Basque and described as elegant Spanish cuisine that’s still traditional and simple.

Anne-Sophie Pic also keeps it in the family, becoming the third to achieve three Michelin stars (AFP)

Anne-Sophie Pic – three Michelin star chef

As the only French female chef to have three Michelin stars in the past 50 years, she’s part of a whole family who have managed to reach the high standard across three generations. But what’s really interesting is she’s had no classical training.

She holds the three stars at her restaurant named after herself in Valence, in south-east France, two at her restaurant Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, and one more at her first UK restaurant, La Dame de Pic, at the Four Seasons Hotel, which opened last year, and awarded at the start in the 2018 Michelin guide.

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