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Plus, last call for our webinar on the benefits of community gardens and urban farms
Women with children face enormous issues in building careers in the culinary industry. Especially for mothers who are primary child caregivers, juggling the long hours (often with night and weekend shifts) and sometimes exhausting workloads with the needs of their children can present insuperable challenges.
With exceptions, restaurants and other culinary establishments have historically provided little flexibility for women chefs and other employees who are in these situations. This is why chefs Beverly Kim, Sarah Stegner and others worked to create the Chicago non-profit The Abundance Setting, which advocates for better working conditions and career opportunities for women raising children.
“So many people in this industry are willing to look the other way and not care. It's been like this, so why should it change? It has to change in order to make it so women have an opportunity that they deserve to have, that they have the right to have,” said Sarah as she opened a panel discussion, titled “It Takes a Village,” that was presented by The James Beard Foundation on June 9, a day in advance of its annual culinary awards ceremony in Chicago.
Beverly (at right in the above group photo), spelled out the urgency of her non-profit’s efforts:
"The Abundance Setting was formed out of the need to have a community to support the advancement of working mothers and women because the numbers say there's more than 50 percent women in this industry, but only one of five chefs — thanks to the NRA [National Restaurant Association] for sharing this information — are actually women. So why the dropoff? A lot of that has to do with parenthood and how unwelcoming this industry is for parents, and especially for moms who take on a lot of that childcare. So our goal is to have a better understanding of the challenges of parenting and ways we can come together as a village to connect the dots for solutions."
The panel did, however, expand beyond the particular challenges of women in culinary to how both male and female chefs work to achieve work-life balance to ensure that the needs of both their children and significant others are addressed.
The panelists, from the right above, were Darnell Reed of Chicago’s Luella’s Southern Kitchen; Hamissi Mamba and Nadia Nijimbere of Detroit’s Baobab Fare, which features the East African cooking of their native Burundi (together they were finalists for this year’s James Beard Outstanding Chef Award); and Anne Ahmed, who features the cuisine of her native Laos at Kamma Hospitality’s three restaurants in Minneapolis.
The following are takeaways from each of the panelists:
Darnell Reed
I will say that my village in big part is my family, because one of the biggest things in the industry that you will need when you have kids is someone to watch them when you go to work. If you have a baby, have a babysitter, and so on... My grandmother, she'll help watch my kids. My mom, my fiancée, her sisters, we have a lot of family support that will help us with the kids when we need it because we're busy in our restaurants.
Hamissi Mamba
My village is Detroit, my hometown. I'm so proud to be a Detroiter. We didn't have a family, it was just me and Nadia, we came over as refugees. And we didn't have anybody around. We made friends who became family and those friends who became family watch and take care of our kids when we don't we don't have time. Our kids did a lot to make it easy and to behave.
Nadia Nijimbere
I lived in Freedom House, that shelter, for three years. It was hard when I discovered that I was pregnant. He's in Africa, back home in Burundi. And I came here struggling to start a new life here in the U.S., in Detroit, where I had nobody. My first village was the Freedom House people that I was living with. My village is Detroit first. My kids... they are calling everybody “Auntie,” “Uncle,” “Grandma,” and then people get so confused. Is that your grandma? Yes. That's your uncle? How are all these three people related ? We grow up knowing that we cannot call adults by their names. It's either uncle, auntie, grandma, grandpa, something like that. So that's my village.
Anne Ahmed
I am the chef and owner of three restaurants in Minnesota. And I'm a mom of twins. They are boy/girl twins, they are going to be 10 next month. I was a chef first before I was a mom, I chose to be a mom, I wanted to be a mom. And so I did everything I could to have my twins.... My village is just like you guys, it's our city. And I am lucky enough where the place that I choose to have my restaurants is also home to my family. So I have my mom who helps with my twins a lot. But you know, the restaurant is not just 40 hours a week, it's hundreds and hundreds of hours nonstop, and so I can't just be dumping my twins on my mom all the time.
And so we use all of our resources, whatever was available, our neighbors, the au pair program, hiring nannies, hiring college kids, whatever we had, we use everything. There were many times we would just bring them to the restaurant, that's their second home, they would just hang out in the office with us or go wipe down some tables, just simply to keep them busy or, in exchange, I'll give you iPad time if you come to the restaurant with us. So maybe maybe the iPad is raising them....I think why we're all successful restaurateurs is because we're resourceful.
Darnell
[Discussing advice he’d received from a woman colleague to make sure his fiancée Jocelyn’s needs were taken into consideration as well as the children’s needs.] When I did bring this up with Jocelyn, immediately she was extremely happy about that, even me bringing up the question. I told her I got it wrong, and she started making a list of things that we can do together and when we can do it, things like that, and I had never thought it. And at that point, we had been together for years, I just thought everything was perfect, because as a family, we were doing all these things with our kids. But I never thought that hey, one day it’s gonna be me and you. And when it is just us, what did we do together?
Hamissi
I remember the first time I was talking to my lender, they would say, “Oh, we never saw any other African, we can't fund this project, because we don't see any example of other African restaurants.” I've said to them, this might be the first one and you want to help the next one. Always carry that. Everybody now who's trying to open a restaurant, they come to me and I help them.
Nadia
My mentor, to say the truth, is my husband, who is my partner. He has a degree in business, I had nothing. I was a caregiver. So what I knew was to cook the food. I love the food. So when he said, we're going to open the restaurant, I was like, yeah, let's do it. I’d cook and we’d test it. It’s missing this, we can do this, you can do that. We used to say, I'm a builder, he's an architect.
Anne
I have playdates, what do I do with these other people's kids. I bring their kids to my restaurant, because I want to expose them to the ethnic food that I'm cooking. And they get to be around my kids who are incredibly picky eaters. And so that's my way of showing my kids, look, somebody else is eating mommy's food.
So I think it's all the change that's happening in our industry. It's an incredible, amazing change, and we have to embrace it… I would like to become a mentor to other young people or whoever wants some advice or just have a conversation with me, I'm always open to it.
Note: By coincidence, I was in Detroit on business later last week, and had the opportunity to drop in for dinner at Hamissi’s and Nadia’s Baobab Fare. Unfortunately, I missed them at the restaurant, but enjoyed their delicious food. There are photos below, after the following reminder.
Co-host Chef Sarah Stegner of Prairie Grass Cafe and I invite you to join us for TONIGHT’s free webinar, "Gardens in a City: Cultivating Hope in Chicago.” Our three guests are everyday heroes who are seeking to revitalize Chicago's underserved and under-resourced people of color growing in community gardens and urban farms.
These small growing projects are helping restore hope, jobs and opportunity to challenged communities, while helping residents who face food insecurity to feed themselves — as Chicago manifests what has become a powerful national movement under the banner of food sovereignty.
The program will focus on the work of Community Food Navigator, a Chicago non-profit launched in 2020. Its focus is on providing tools and resources to help people of color in underserved areas produce food for themselves and their communities.
We are proud of the lineup of leaders who are presenting on the webinar:
Nick Davis, managing director of Community Food Navigator
Angela Taylor, wellness coordinator at the Garfield Park Community Council.
Natasha Nicholes, founder and executive director of the We Sow. We Grow. urban farm in the West Pullman neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Click below to register.
This Fare Was Excellent
Having met Hamissi Mamba and Nadia Nijimbere — the owners of Detroit’s Baobab Fare restaurant — at The Abundance Setting panel discussion described above, I was anxious to try their food when I visited their city. With my friend Dan Carmody, CEO of Eastern Market Detroit, as my guide, we stopped by the restaurant for dinner on Thursday (June 13).
The small restaurant was filled to capacity, so Dan and I cozied up to the counter. I regret that we missed the owners, but the food was delicious and the portions were more than ample.
This is Nyumbani, which means “home” in the owners’ native language in Burundi. Described as a Baobab Fare signature dish, it is composed of beef slow-simmered in ripened tomato sauce, and served with superb fried plantains, peanut-stewed spinach, and coconut rice.
This is Kuku, pan-fried chicken in rich, tangy mustard-onion sauce, served with fried plantains, stewed yellow beans, and spiced rice pilau.
It was an enjoyable and (as you’d expect from the photos) quite filling meal.