Burns Night, historically an all-male affair, is as appropriate a time as any to consider whether women are taking over the world of food.
It's certainly looking that way in London, where two of the top restaurants are headed up by females: the three Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road has Clare Smyth; Angela Hartnett, also a Ramsay protegee, is a force in her own right at Murano. Ramsay's new restaurant London House has Anna Haugh-Kelly as head chef. And at the two Michelin-starred Le Gavroche, Michel Roux Jr's head chef and senior sous chef are female, and I'm told the rest of the kitchen is 50% female. His daughter is currently training as a chef.
In Scotland, the two pioneering women chefs, Claire Macdonald of Kinloch Lodge and Shirley Spear of The Three Chimneys, are no longer in the kitchen, having appointed two extremely able male chefs to replace them.
That leaves Lesley Crosfield at the Albannach hotel in Lochinver and Nicola Braidwood at Braidwoods of Dalry (both of which have a Michelin star) as the sole two females at the very top. But when was the last time you heard or even saw them? Carina Contini and Suzanne O'Connor at the Scottish Cafe in Edinburgh are doing a sterling job, but it's time Scots female chefs got a bit more attention.
Things could be about to change. Darin Campbell, executive chef at Andy Murray's five-star Cromlix hotel in Perthshire, which opens in April, has employed three women chefs out of a total of 10, which is a start.
But get this. The entire kitchen at Jacqueline O'Donnell's independently-owned Sisters restaurant at Kelvingrove, Glasgow, is staffed by women and she is the first Scottish female chef - and the first Glaswegian chef - to appear in the Great British Menu (GBM) in the nine years of the show. O'Donnell says the exposure on television and working with top chefs such as Stevie McLaughlin of Restaurant Andrew Fairlie, also in the Scottish team of the GBM, which will be broadcast from March, has proved a "massive step-up" for her. I wonder if it's too much to hope that there might even be a Scottish-commissioned television food programme to come out of this.
A regular on Radio Scotland's Scots Kitchen, she agrees that it's a pity she has to go to London for high-profile television food programmes, and notes that there's a spike in viewing figures from Scotland when Scots chefs are featured on such programmes as Great British Bake Off, MasterChef and so on.
She expressed a desire to gain a higher profile on the British stage not just for herself and her staff but also for Scottish produce and producers.
O'Donnell, whose sister Pauline runs the kitchen at their second restaurant in Jordanhill in Glasgow, says women are good chefs because they multi-task instinctively and are less likely to get into a flap when the going gets tough. Long shifts are divided up into manageable sections where everybody mucks in to finish a task, so that breaks can be factored in when necessary if the chefs have children.
She even reckons professional kitchens, some of which she describes as "cocky, arrogant and masculine", would become nicer places to work in if the men could only embrace their feminine sides.
Now I wonder what Robert Burns would have made of that.
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