Transformation in Restaurant Kitchens and Garden
Learn about The Abundance Setting and its advocacy for women in culinary.
Ch-ch-changes
The transformation of caterpillars into Monarch butterflies is one of nature’s most beautiful miracles.
We have had the good fortune over the past couple of weeks to receive regular updates from our friend Gerry Williamson, an avid gardener in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, who for years has located butterfly caterpillars on his milkweed plants and brought them into his screened-in porch, where they can safely morph into butterflies.
In the photo Gerry sent early this (Thursday) morning, a caterpillar is curling into its position to create its chrysalis, the capsule in which it will transform into a Monarch butterfly. Things happen fast in the short lifespan of insects, and Gerry said the chrysalis should be complete by tonight.
With his help, we will continue to share the saga right up to what should be a beautiful conclusion. And Gerry says that if you want butterflies in your garden, plant milkweed.
Turning Up the Heat to Support Women in Culinary
The annual James Beard Foundation Awards were held this past Monday (June 5) at Chicago’s Lyric Opera House. It’s nice that members of the nation’s culinary community get this day each year to dress up and celebrate what they and others achieve in providing great food and hospitality to millions of people.
But as an advocate for a better food system — healthier, sustainably and humanely produced, diverse and fair to workers and farmers alike — it’s not the red carpet at “the Oscars of food” that interests me. It’s the way in which the awards weekend lives up to the James Beard Foundation’s slogan of “Good Food for Good.”
So I was pleased to attend a pair of issues-focused panels that were produced by The James Beard Foundation and held last Saturday (June 3) at Kendall College, the longtime culinary school that is now part of National Louis University and located in the Loop.
Today’s article provides takeaways from the panel titled “The Abundance Setting x JBF Panel: Who’s Watching the Kids?” A subsequent article will cover the other panel, “Food Access & Sustainable Communities.”
The Abundance Setting is a Chicago non-profit that works to ensure fairness for women in the culinary industry. My first interaction with the organization was at a panel also held by the James Beard Foundation prior to the 2022 Awards ceremony.
The Chicago culinary community was very well represented in this year’s panel. The panel was moderated by co-founders of The Abundance Setting: Sarah Stegner of Prairie Grass Cafe in suburban Northbrook — a chef-activist familiar to regular readers of Local Food Forum for her range of advocacy pursuits —and Beverly Kim of Chicago’s Parachute restaurant.
They were joined by three other Chicago chefs: Diana Davila of Mi Tocaya Antojería; Tigist Reda of Demera Ethiopian Restaurant; Becca Grothe of Tribecca’s Sandwich Shop; and Erick Williams, the lone man on the panel, who won the 2022 James Beard Best Chef: Great Lakes Award and saw his Virtue Restaurant score a rare two-year winning streak when chef de cuisine Damarr Brown won the 2023 Emerging Chef Award.
Mary Sue Milliken, a past James Beard Award winner with restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, was the only non-Chicago chef on the panel.
The following are quotes from each that I found to be takeaways from the impactful discussion.
Beverly Kim
“While 54 percent of culinary graduates, like at Kendall, are women, only 7 percent end up being leading chefs or owners. That's a very, very hard statistic to look at. And much of this attrition can be attributed to the motherhood penalty, as women enter in the prime of their careers as well as the prime age for having families. An estimated 43 percent of highly skilled women leave the workforce after becoming a mom. So we would like to imagine a future where women don't have to choose between careers and their families.”
“And that's why the Abundance Setting was formed. Our mission is to support in the advancement of women and mothers in the culinary and hospitality industry to have thriving careers.”
Sarah Stegner
“This is about us as a community making a difference. It isn't about us telling you what to do. It's all of us that are going to make an impact here together.”
“I want to say that until we get the policy change, we need to be human and view people as individuals and look at what they need and try and support them. And as restaurateurs, it's not generic, it has to be individualized in order for the system to function before policy change happens. So yes, we need people, very soon, that are going to step up and advocate, and people that run their business in an inclusive way, and that looks at the opportunities instead of, ‘Well, we don't do it like that.’ What can we do to make it work? And as an audience, people that are able to ask and come up with solutions. Present them. Don't be shy about that.”
Becca Grothe
“I own Tribecca’s Sandwich shop in Avondale. I have two kids, a 4-1/2 year old and a three month old. Currently, my husband is watching the three months old back there. And his mom is watching my four and a half year old.”
“:I was a mentee of the Abundance Setting. I think it started right around mid- pandemic. It was a really great time to be surrounded by the support from all the chefs, especially since I wasn't working at the time… The food that we got from the Abundance Setting was incredibly helpful. It also helped introduce my kid to new tastes and flavors. We didn’t have a lot of Korean food at home. So that was exciting to see him kind of learn about those new flavors and things.”
“I think the part that I really liked the most about it, though, was the mentorship from the chefs. We talked probably once a week with them. They asked how things were going and I could talk to them. We were sort of in the process of trying to look for a space to open my own restaurant at the time. So it was nice to have them to bounce ideas off of and talk about, like the process of opening a restaurant while having a kid, and then also in the pandemic.”
Mary Sue Milliken
“I'm the OG up here. I have two kids, 32 and 24… For the first 10 years or so my husband and I were like a puzzle, put together all the pieces to try to pick the kids up and drop them off and make sure they were cared for. And then he came home one day and he's an architect and he said I want a one-year sabbatical and he never went back to work. So he became Mr. Mom at our house after 10 years and when the little one was 2.”
“It's heartbreaking to me that the hospitality industry is so inhospitable to women… We endure terrible hardships, and we work triples [shifts] and we don't get paid. And that's all part of it, which I feel is unnecessary and needs to change desperately. So, no, we haven't come far enough.”
“I knew from the beginning that I wanted children and I knew that I wanted to cook. And so I think I just would say don't be afraid to ask for help. It's very much a situation where family, friends, godparents, all of those people. You just have to be really willing to ask for help when you need it, and also to draw boundaries with your job.”
Erick Williams
“I have a 6 year old son. I was afforded the opportunity when we had our child to immediately go on a paternal leave, which is a little unusual in our industry, especially for an extended period of time, unless you work for a hotel or some large group, and I was working for an independent restaurant that deemed it important for me to be at home to support my wife.”
“People were talking about work-life balance. I don't understand that. It's not because I want to work my fingers to the bone, or I want my team to work their fingers to the bone, or my wife. I don't understand how communities that are working from a deficit are in positions to hang out, or work part-time. So I work in the inner city. with inner-city folk that are trying to pay off student loans, that's if they went to school, they're trying to buy their first car, understand how to pay higher rent, position themselves and better communities that have access to better food. And that's a full-time job. Like there's nothing part-time about it.”
“What helps me is thinking about the commitment that I have in this space. We nurture our teams and as lot of times you hear disgruntled chefs of all walks of life talk about, ‘I didn't show up here today to babysit.’ And in some cases, we feel like we're babysitting the team. In other cases, we feel like we're babysitting our guests. As unfortunate as that is, we are extending a level of nurturing and level of protection, a level of encouragement beyond what we think the job should require.”
“We have to render ourselves vulnerable as parents, and not just be willing to ask for help, but be willing to accept it. And that's the thing that chefs are not that good at.”
Diana Davila
“I always knew I wanted to be a mother. And I feel like I always knew that I wanted to be a chef. And then it wasn't until when I actually became pregnant, you progress in your pregnancy and you start thinking about like, ‘Well, wait a minute, what, how am I going to do this?’... I was also opening up a restaurant. So that kind of worked out good, I would bring the baby with me everywhere… And the other thing that we would do is that across the street from our house, we made really good friends with kind neighbors and she would watch the kids when we had to actually need help. And for the bargain price of $45 a day, we could drop off the kids from 8 a.m. and pick them up at 6 p.m.”
“I think that maybe something about me is that I'm I feel that I'm always very present. So when you're present, you're focusing on what is happening around you at that time, what is needed, what you are doing. And I think that maybe that is what has served me very well.”
“When I first told my family and friends that I was pregnant, everybody assumed that I was going to stop working. That I was just going to be like, ‘Okay, I'll just put this chef stuff behind me.’ I couldn't believe that. These are people who have known me for a long time, that I've always shared with my dreams and aspirations.”
“I always take time to smell the roses and look at the moon and look at the plants and look at my children's faces, and just remembering how beautiful I felt as a child. And seeing that they feel that as well. So I think it's about being present and balanced. I mean, you have to create your own balance of what that means.”
Tigist Reda
“I have a 12 year old boy. Who's watching him today is Dad, former husband, but I feel like we never separated when it comes to our son. We got separated about 10 years ago and we have managed to work together. We don't have schedules, it’s just what do you have this week? What do you have that week?”
“One of our employees right now is about seven to eight months pregnant… [I told her] when you have an appointment or when you're having a bad day, we need to know ahead of time so we can prepare this stuff. Even though we created a good culture around our team, at the end of the day, they're gonna get burned out if we don't manage it or schedule it right because she's not coming here.”