Why Michelin award for ‘female chef’ reeks of a pat on head

A puzzling thing happened on a stage in London on Monday afternoon. A woman from Northern Ireland, at the top of her game, received an award. Clare Smyth was named best "female chef" in Britain and Ireland by the Michelin Guide.

Until Monday, the annual release of the British and Irish Michelin stars was the low-key announcement of the year.

Michelin HQ issued the list with a press of a button. Nervy chefs discovered their stars by phone call, text message or tweet, each one an atomised story of dismay or elation. But this year was different. The French tyre giant brought its newly starred chefs through a side entrance in the Institute of Engineering and Technology at Savoy Place for a live-streamed awards ceremony. When their moment came the chefs were called to the stage, where they had to peel off a layer and don a chef’s white jacket to accept their star.

‘Woman in the kitchen’

As the delighted winners formed a homogenous dazzling white line, the awkward penny dropped. What might not be so clear in a list on paper was suddenly in our faces. Each of the 20 newly starred chefs was a man.

So this new “female” award made a warped sort of sense, the klaxon sound of a “let’s take the bloke-fest look off this” brainwave.

In the end it shone a starker light on one of the world’s most unequal workplaces.

Last year I asked Smyth, the “woman in the kitchen” question. She said she grew up horse riding and showjumping, a world where “there’s no male and female. There is no segregation, so often I would compete against my big brother. And I would win,” she said.

It wasn’t until she became a head chef at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay that “everyone kept pointing it out, saying ‘oh it’s so rare’.”

By any standards Smyth has won at the game of cooking, managing the superhuman feat of maintaining three stars at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay for almost a decade.

‘Good girl yourself’

She plans to open her own restaurant and can stand shoulder to shoulder with any peer. So why does she need a “good girl yourself” pat on the back from Michelin?

Could it have anything to do with the fact that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, with all its testosterone-soaked hoopla and kudos in the industry also has an equally annoying “best female chef” category?

Can we imagine a Booker prize ceremony with a “female writer” award? Smyth’s three stars speak for themselves. A special award for being a chef who is not a man sends the message that Michelin and World’s 50 Best talent comes man-shaped by default.

French journalist and campaigner Maria Canabal who runs the annual Parabere Forum spelled out the realities of kitchen life at the Athru conference in Galway this year.

There’s a 28 per cent pay gap between men and women, and while just over half of all culinary graduates are women only one in five chefs in the UK are women. “Only 1 per cent of Michelin-starred restaurants have women’s changing rooms,” she said. “The message is that they are not a place for women.”

Kitchens are changing to accommodate people who do not want to sacrifice every waking hour to a burner. In a glimmer of light the new Irish winner chef Damien Grey cooks in his tiny Blackrock restaurant Heron and Grey three nights a week so that he can spend time with his two young daughters.

A new generation of chefs, men and women, is changing the rules to bring different life experience and talents to the table.

In that scenario a top bird prize is a depressing throwback to business as usual. It does nothing to jazz up Michelin’s haughty image. It makes the red book look more elitist and out of touch than ever.

Catherine Cleary is a freelance journalist and restaurant critic