PARIS, Feb 21 ― The World’s Best Restaurants ranking has honoured Japanese chef Natsuko Shoji with the title of “Asia’s Best Female Chef 2022”. A distinction that not only draws attention to the need to highlight women chefs, but also to women chefs of Asian origin in this professional.
San Antonio’s food and beverage industry is still largely dominated by men, but the city is also home to female culinary powerhouses who aren’t waiting.
Andrea E. McHugh
Newport Life
Executive Chef Jennifer Backman resembles an orchestra conductor as she oversees her culinary colleagues at the Mooring Seafood Kitchen & Bar in Newport. Most weekend days, her team harmoniously executes each component of the more than 1,000 dishes that leave her kitchen. Backman’s unrelenting drive and self-confessed type A perfectionism has pushed her to the top spot in the kitchen a position that is statistically dominated by men both nationwide and here in Newport County. But is the pendulum swinging in a different direction?
Chef Valeria Molinelli, the Culinary Department Chair at Johnson & Wales’ College of Food Innovation & Technology in Providence, says yes. When she first came to the university as a student in 1999, she remembers being one of very few women in the culinary program. “I don’t remember, for that matter, seeing a lot of Latin American students, either,” adds the chef, who was born and raised in Lima, Peru. “Now I
Hassler, who grew up in the Valley, had a similar shift in thinking about food and how to eat it after studying abroad in the 90s.
“In America, life was all about go go go, but in France and Italy, your life is about dinner,” she believes. “What you will eat, who you will eat with, where you will eat, the conversation you have once you get there. That experience changed me.”
“I say it’s country French and American comfort food.”
Lauren Cusimano
A mostly self-taught chef, Hassler worked for a caterer in Italy, settling there and marrying. When she and her husband returned to Phoenix, she brought back memories of dining and cooking abroad.