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When chef Dominique Crenn won the World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ 2016 best female chef award, she famously called it “stupid. A chef is a chef.”
“I agree with Dominique: A chef is a chef,” says Mary Sue Milliken, chef and co-founder of Regarding Her, a nonprofit organization for women in the food and beverage industry. “I agree we don’t need to talk about ‘best’ women anything. But the barriers for women in this field specifically, and many others, need to be eliminated in order for women to wield half the power and to create an industry that’s more hospitable and sustainable.”
It’s a lonely, isolated business, especially for women.
So on a Wednesday night in March, applause breaks out when an apron-clad Stephanie Izard stands at the end of a long table set up inside Guerrilla Tacos’ adjacent Guerrilla Cafecito, which normally serves coffee, pastries and breakfast burritos during the day in downtown L.A.’s Arts District.
“How is everybody?” the chef of the nearby restaurant Girl & the Goat asks the group of cheering guests. Izard has just come out of the kitchen alongside chefs Crystal Espinoza of Guerrilla Tacos and Kat Hong of Yangban. The three of them made buttery Peruvian empanadas, hamachi tostadas and golden Hokkaido scallop toast as part of the Women’s History Month festival put on by Regarding Her.
“I’m really excited,” Izard tells the diners. “I think as much as we can celebrate women in the industry, the more the better.”
In an industry that has never been easy for women and is itself struggling, Regarding Her provides educational and financial programming to help female chefs, leaders and entrepreneurs.
A reckoning in the restaurant industry due to the pandemic has given restaurant workers a chance to step back and see that the system was broken. “We’re focused on women because it’s been so much harder for women for so many different reasons and we want for this organization to be able to help accelerate gender parity [and] eliminate the barriers for women,” says Milliken.
A brutal year for Los Angeles restaurants saw dozens of closings across the city. Inflation, actors’ and writers’ strikes and higher rent, utilities and labor costs all were cited.
The Chefs of the Arts District dinner is just one of dozens of events organized by Regarding Her, born on a Zoom call in 2020 as a pandemic crisis response from nine L.A. women restaurant professionals. The group has since ballooned to over 1,000 members in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to business owners and launched the Academy, a 10-week career accelerator program for female entrepreneurs in the food industry.
“I remember exactly where I was,” says founding member and Guerrilla Tacos owner Brittney Valles of the moment that Regarding Her (or RE:Her) began. “I was in the catering van driving. I was on the phone to pick up a heater from some trailer park because we had to move our restaurant outside,” she says, recalling being in the throes of the pandemic. That’s when she joined forces with the other eight chef and restaurateur founders: Milliken of Socalo, Border Grill and Alice B; Dina Samson of Rossoblu and Superfine Pizza; Lien Ta of All Day Baby and Here’s Looking at You; Bricia Lopez of Guelaguetza; Kim Prince of Hotville Chicken and Dulanville; Love & Salt’s Sylvie Gabriele; Gasolina Cafe’s Sandra Cordero; and Botanica’s Heather Sperling.
“We quickly realized that we really had struck upon something that needed a lot more of our energy,” Milliken adds. That “something” was support of all kinds: practical, emotional and financial for women in the food industry.
Milliken and RE:Her have no problem focusing specifically on women. And though that’s the crux of what Regarding Her sets out to do, Milliken also makes a point to shed light on the unsustainable financial model of restaurants.
“The idea was, at that time, to not only drive business to women-owned restaurants but to try to raise money to help those who were really struggling,” Samson says of their initial COVID grant program. Samson herself raised $150,000 through DoorDash and OpenTable partnerships; the money then was distributed to 15 female applicants.
For many L.A. restaurants, including Botanica in Silver Lake, solvency is more elusive than ever because of the elevated costs of doing business.
Now, despite partnerships and donations from large corporations, individual donors and grants, funding remains Regarding Her’s greatest challenge.
Membership in Regarding Her is free, and the qualifications have expanded to allow not only female business owners but women in other leadership positions like CEOs and general managers to apply. It also offers access to an online network called Circle where women can ask one another questions such as how to negotiate a lease, where to find a good plumber or how to choose a good point-of-sale system. According to Samson, members are quick to share resources and RE:Her has even offered advice and moral support to restaurants during the process of closing.
In 2022, Regarding Her launched its biggest program yet, the Academy, the female entrepreneurs program that also offered each participant a $20,000 grant.
Chef Rashida Holmes credits her participation in the Academy to her ability to transition her acclaimed pop-up Bridgetown Roti into a bricks-and-mortar business set to open this summer.
“I know I can reach out to them for anything,” says Holmes. “Someone like me who has spent 15 years in kitchens, nobody taught me how to do HR. Nobody taught me different strategies of management.”
The consensus among women who participate is that the community and practical support has been the most invaluable and life-changing.
“I think a lot of us sacrifice our own mental health so that other people in our restaurants, in our communities, can be better,” says Valles. “But, ultimately, the fish rots at the top, so if you’re not taking care of you, people are going to sense it.”
Pointing chefs toward resources like therapy sessions and the 3 Chefs 3 Moms program from the Chicago-based nonprofit Abundance Setting is one of the ways Regarding Her has aimed to encourage and support women.
The industry is facing a crisis as new legislation, inflation, higher wages and pandemic fallout have chefs and owners worried for the future of mom-and-pop restaurants.
“I think Regarding Her, if we are successful, will help move that needle to heal the industry in certain ways, to make it easier and more sustainable and more attractive to women who want to have families and more attractive to people who love it but don’t want to work for dirt wages,” says Milliken.
“Nonprofits are not going to save the restaurant industry,” she says when asked if organizations like Regarding Her could become the norm. “The nonprofit business will not be how the industry rights itself and gets on a better course. That’s going to happen through legislature and tax credits.”
The Academy will soon be accepting applications for its summer program and community programming like the dinner at Guerrilla Cafecito where chefs Izard, Hong and Espinoza collaborate.
“It’s just fun to be back in the kitchen talking about our kids and talking about just being a female chef,” says Izard. “I would say we’re talking about balancing life, but that doesn’t exist.”
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