Middle-aged men the worst for harassing female staff, says top NI chef
A WORLD-RENOWNED chef from Co Antrim has said women in the restaurant industry are more likely to be sexually harassed by customers than in the kitchen.
Clare Smyth, who was recently named the best female chef in the world, has two Michelin stars at her Core restaurant in Notting Hill and catered for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex at their wedding reception.
Despite the popular image of a macho culture in restaurant kitchens, she said it was often male customers that acted inappropriately.
“We see a lot of things,” she said at the Harper’s Bazaar Summit in London.
“When you work front of house and you’ve got middle-aged men who have had a few drinks... the stuff that gets said is absolutely disgusting”.
On one occasion the Bushmills woman was even forced to ban a regular customer for harassment.
“The young lady didn’t want to say anything because she felt it was her job, and that made me really angry,” she said.
“I refuse to accept anything like that at all in my workplace.”
She also took issue with the patronising attitude from some maitre d’s towards young women working front of house.
“A lot of sexism is there and not actually from people in the kitchen.”
Despite accepting her award for best female chef in Spain last year, Clare (40) said it should no longer be necessary to have different categories for men and women.
Before scaling the heights of the culinary world, she said it was her upbringing on a Northern Ireland farm that prepared her for the hard graft involved.
“It gave me a good work ethic, being a farmer,” she said earlier this month. “You work all the time, you don’t stop. When you were lambing sheep, you worked all night, and you worked 365 days of the year. That work ethic, I grew up with. Hospitality is difficult for some people, but for me, it wasn’t — I was already used to it.”
The next challenge for Clare is as a judge on the upcoming Netflix series The Final Table, which is available from tomorrow.
A global competition, the programme sees 12 pairs of chefs attempt to master a range of international cuisine. Each episode sees contestants battle to avoid being eliminated by each country’s appointed “greatest” chef.
Far from feeling nerves, Clare said her open-plan restaurant set-up meant she was used to being “on show” for her customers.
“I always felt I had a lot to prove,” she said ahead of her Netflix debut. “I always knew what I wanted to achieve and so I was harder on myself. Maybe I was sometimes unnecessarily hard on myself.”
On the subject of success, she added: “I’ve worked very hard, it’s not just happened overnight.
“I don’t pinch myself and think, ‘I’m lucky’. I think, ‘I left home at 16 to become a chef and I worked for it’ and we’ve got a long way to go.”