Unspoken rules of kitchens laid bare
Ex-Manresa cook’s James Beard award-winning podcast reveals the real heat in restaurants
She was expecting a handshake. Instead, she got an “Oooh la la.”
As a young cook at Manresa, Katy Osuna had traveled to France with the rest of the three Michelin-starred Los Gatos staff to cook in some of the country’s finest kitchens. At a three-Michelin restaurant in Paris, the “super famous” executive chef made his way down the line, greeting each visiting cook with a firm handshake and a “nice to meet you.” When he got to Osuna, the only woman, he looked the blonde up and down and said, “Oooh la la,” before moving on to the next man.
“I was pissed. I was really insulted,” recalls Osuna, 28, who shares the story on Copper & Heat, the podcast she hosts and co-produces with her husband, Ricardo, 29, in their Oakland apartment, where the sizzle and clatter of pots and pans set the tone for the sound-rich podcast. This spring, Copper & Heat won a James Beard Broadcast Media Award for its first season, dubbed Be a Girl, which reveals the working conditions and micro-aggressions Osuna and female cooks deal with every day in the Bay Area.
Among them, the time a male cook questioned Osuna’s ability to work the grill, because she’s a girl, or the time she was told it was “hot” that she was a line cook, or the hundredth time she had to endure a dirty joke or hear that a male cook was acting like “a pussy,” all while trying to keep her cool in the high-stress frenzy of a fine dining kitchen.
“I have zero problem with dirty jokes, actually,” says Osuna, who speaks openly about her struggle with anxiety, exacerbated by high-stress situations. She lost 20 pounds while working the amuse bouche station at Manresa. “What I have a problem with is being objectified and demeaned because of my gender. I have a problem with not being taken seriously and having to fight twice as hard to earn respect.”
In a post #MeToo era, Osuna and other Bay Area cooks on the podcast, both male and female, also tackle issues like work-life balance and wage disparity, and difficult questions like these:
How does the pressure to be tough affect cooks? Why do women represent only 19% of chefs and 7% of executive chefs? Why are kitchens still organized as a brigade, or military hierarchy, instead of fostering teamwork and mutual respect?
Copper & Heat isn’t the only podcast exploring these issues, but it is one of the few focusing on the voices of cooks, like Edalyn Garcia, now an executive sous chef at The Village Pub, a Michelinstarred Woodside restaurant. Garcia, a petite Filipina, opens up about trying to make herself more masculine to fit into kitchen culture. She becomes emotional, too, when revealing how her passion and purpose in the kitchen helped her overcome severe depression early in her career.
“It feels like therapy,” Garcia, 30, says of the podcast. “They’ve given us a voice.”
And because head chefs typically get all the attention, it can be eye-opening for Osuna’s industry and foodie listeners to hear from the cooks who make those chefs look good.
“Cooks are used to keeping their heads down and getting the job done,” says Osuna, who now works as a cook and special projects consultant for Oakland’s Belcampo Meat Company. “But they’re also sick of not being heard. We are finally hearing from voices that have been ignored for too long.”
Listeners can also hear from Dan D’Amico, who worked with Osuna at Manresa and is on the fish station there. On the podcast, he starts out by saying dirty jokes are always going to happen in kitchens — that’s just the culture — and when a woman can’t handle it, he’s “subconsciously thinking the woman is a feminist (expletive).”
Then, with the mic still on, he has a moment of clarity. “It’s not right,” he says. “Everyone should be accepted for who they are. Damn, am I the reason this is all happening? I wanna say no, but I’m not going to sit here and say I’m perfect because I’m not.”
It’s one of several illuminating Copper & Heat moments.
“Change is happening, but if we want it to continue, we really need to have open and honest conversations about these issues,” Ricardo Osuna says.
The couple is working on season two, which will address the financial aspects of working in fine dining kitchens, where line cooks with culinary school debt are often paid less than those working in fast food.
“It’s time to explore how restaurants treat their people,” he says.