Chef Edward Lee’s Plan to Empower Women Chefs

As accusations of sexual harassment surfaced against chefs throughout the restaurant industry over the past couple of years, many chefs and restaurateurs were left questioning what they could do to prevent this from happening again. Some restaurants revamped their HR department and policies and restructured leadership. Others decided to tackle the issue by going in a completely different direction.

Chef Edward Lee and general manager and wine director of 610 Magnolia, Lindsay Ofcacek, decided they would go with the latter and the Women Chefs of Kentucky Initiative was born. The mentorship program is a part of Lee’s non-profit, the LEE Initiative, and works with female chefs in Kentucky to give them the tools they need to become leaders in the industry. “We were talking about how it’s a bummer that this is happening,” Ofcacek says. “But we also believe that for every bad chef, there’s an army of good ones.”

“It’s not about sexual harassment,” Lee says. “It’s about equality. It’s about diversity. It’s about creating different avenues for people who traditionally would have had a hard time succeeding in the restaurant business.” The conversation about the issues women were facing in the industry is ongoing, and the wave of accusations again brought to light the inequality female chefs face every day. Now this mentorship program is changing the industry one chef at a time.

With the existing structure of the non-profit in place, the team was able to develop the program fairly quickly. By February 2018, it was a certified 501c3 organization. But Ofcacek and Lee didn’t want to produce a short-term fix to a long-term issue “It was something that we really wanted to invest in,” he says.

Each year, five female chefs from Kentucky take part in the program. They work with accomplished chefs around the country and learn everything from setting up a website and writing HR policies to learning how to do an interview with the media. The program is designed to empower female chefs, who both Ofacaek and Lee hope will become leaders in the industry down the road.

Ofcacek and Lee agree that the chefs aren’t chosen just for their culinary skills. The chefs have to have the drive and personality to take advantage of the program and turn it into a career that will inspire future generations, and Kentucky in particular has a rich history of female chefs. They found through researching cookbooks, cooking shows, and restaurants, women were the predominate voice for passing down food from generation to generation, Lee says. “For all the talk about male dominance in the food world, especially as it pertains to Kentucky,” Lee says, “it’s really only a recent thing. Historically, it has been dominated by women.”

During the program, the chefs spend time in Kentucky, but when they go to cook with their mentors they leave the Bluegrass State behind. This year’s mentors include Brooke Williamson and she’s in Playa del Rey, California; Mindy Segal in Chicago; Ashley Christensen and Katie Button in North Carolina; and Nina Compton in New Orleans. “We’re really into getting them to go into the culinary scene outside of where they live,” Ofcacek says. “None of our mentors are in Kentucky. We really wanted to help expose young women in the industry to the good chefs, to the good restaurants, to the people that were doing things the right way.”  To make sure the chefs aren’t financially strapped while they are participating in the yearlong program, the group pays the wages of their regular job when they have to be out.

The program was intentionally structured to be small. “The personal connection is lost when you try to create a mentorship program with 100 people,” Lee says. Over time, the intimate structure will have an effect. Both Ofcacek and Lee said, in five years, they’ll have trained 25 chefs who each have a hand in changing the industry.

“I can’t change the industry as a whole,” he says. “But I can change the lives of five people here. And to me, in many ways, I would rather do that then see the ripple effect go from there.”


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