Who runs the world? Louisville culinary program proves it's female chefs

In the back kitchen of Mindy Segal’s famed Hot Chocolate restaurant in Chicago, 21-year-old Emie Dunagan was making crepe batter. 

Or at least, she was trying. It wasn’t going well — every time she flipped the crepes they tore. 

She didn’t have a lot to go on. Just a Post-it note of ingredients and an order for a brown butter crepe cake with strawberry ruby buttercream. 

When James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Segal came back to check on Dunagan, she didn’t take over the station. Instead, she made Dunagan think through the issue.  

“Think about what crepe batter looks like,” Segal said. “It’s thinner than pancake batter and it’s smooth. Look at yours. What’s wrong with it?” 

Together, they solved the problem. Dunagan added another two eggs to her batter, smoothed it out in a Vitamix blender and chilled it again so the flour would absorb the moisture.

The next time she went to flip a crepe, it didn’t tear. It was an eye-opening experience, she said. 

“It was a way of critical thinking I wasn’t used to as a baker,” Dunagan told The Courier Journal. “In baking, you’re into precise measurements. But Mindy wants you to have the basic information and then use deductive reasoning to figure it out. Thinking like a cook versus a baker.” 

On the last night of her seven-day externship at Hot Chocolate, Segal offered the 21-year-old budding pastry chef a job. Dunagan accepted, knowing the connection between the two chefs never would have been possible without their involvement in the LEE Initiative. 

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Founded in 2018 by James Beard Award-winning Louisville chef Edward Lee and Managing Director Lindsay Ofcacek, the LEE Initiative is an answer to the growing need for more women to be in higher-ranking positions in the restaurant industry.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2018, just 22% of the 427,000 chefs and head cooks in the U.S. are women. Those chefs and cooks make just under $48,500 a year, while cooks in lower-rank positions made around $25,000 a year. 

The conversation on gender parity has been growing in the restaurant industry, just as conversations about lower pay, maternity leave issues, misogyny and harassment in the kitchen have been given more thought. 

Lee, who owns 610 Magnolia, MilkWood and Whiskey Dry in Louisville and Succotash in Washington, D.C., and National Harbor, Maryland, wants to further that conversation.

“We have to take a fresh look at the industry because frankly there’s a lot that’s broken with it,” Lee said. “If we want it to thrive we have to find fresh perspectives and ways of doing things, or else the industry is going to flounder.”

That's why the LEE Initiative's Women Chefs Initiative is shining a spotlight on little-known female chefs in the industry, intending to elevate their presence, skills and capability in the fast-paced and often grueling hospitality industry. Just two years and 10 graduates in, the program's impact is already being felt nationwide.

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Building a chef's toolbox

The yearly program pairs five chefs starting out in their careers with five skilled professionals in an effort to bridge the culinary industry's gender imbalance. The five female mentees also go through business and media training at the 48-hour FAB workshop in Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in 2017, the FAB workshop was created by women, for women in the hospitality industry. 

At the end of the program, mentees are invited to cook at the renowned James Beard House in New York City alongside Lee. There's even a re-creation of the James Beard dinner held in Kentucky — this year on Saturday at Maker's Mark Distillery — as a fundraiser for the following year's LEE Initiative students.

Lee said the initiative is a long-term investment to “plant seeds for a future generation of chefs.” Giving the participants knowledge, context, training and mentorship will prepare them for a job in the competitive and male-dominated restaurant industry, he said — but great leaders and great chefs aren’t built overnight.

“What we’re doing is giving them all the tools they need,” Lee said. “I think it will be interesting to see them grow and evolve. I have a thousand percent confidence they are going to change the culinary landscape. I just don’t know how. That’s up to them.” 

Lee limits the participants to five people per year in Kentucky, Southern Indiana and Cincinnati to provide the most tailored training possible. Instead of adding more students, the LEE Initiative plans to add partnerships in other cities, starting with chef Kelly English leading a program in Memphis, Tennessee, with the 275 Food Project, an organization that aims to strengthen farm-to-table ties. 

“I can’t take on 200 mentees,” Lee said. “But I can call out to other cities and chefs. If 20 chefs take on five mentees, that’s huge momentum.” 

While the impact of the program may take some time to come to fruition, the LEE Initiative’s initial graduates have already gone on to take higher positions in restaurant kitchens. Dunagan now works full time with Segal. Another mentee, 22-year-old Nikkia Rhodes, started a culinary arts program at Iroquois High School in 2018. Steph Callihan was promoted from line cook to lead line cook and then sous chef at 21c in Lexington.

The training is invaluable.

So is the much-needed funding. Because as far as Lee and Ofcacek know, the LEE Initiative is the only chef training program that actually pays its participants. 

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Forming culinary connections

Young chefs generally participate in “stages” where they work for free under high-profile mentors to gain skills and experience in the restaurant industry. Lee himself staged in France and worked in several high-profile New York City restaurants before opening his first restaurant.

Ofcacek pointed out that like unpaid internships, stages are geared toward one set of people — those who can afford them.

“Most culinary students don’t have the money to go to Los Angeles for a week, not be paid and have to find lodging,” she said. “This barrier makes it impossible for someone to dive in and learn. Many young chefs don’t make very much money and usually have a mountain of student loan debt.” 

The LEE Initiative eliminates this barrier by fully funding each participant’s expenses as part of the mentorship program. The program also pays each chef the same rate as her current place of employment during the seven-day externship and demands a written agreement guaranteeing the chef her position after the full six-month program ends. 

With the funding taken care of, mentees in the program are free to focus on learning. The real-time advice comes from several directions: their mentor chefs, Lee and Ofcacek, and the first class of graduates. 

An active group chat, called “WCKY” or “Women Chefs of Kentucky,” pings 15 to 20 times a day. 

“We’re all friends now,” Dunagan said. “It’s such a unique bunch of people with very different lives but very similar mindsets and goals. To have the collaboration of cultures in that group is amazing."

This year’s participants attended the FAB symposium in June, which included sessions on how to build a business plan, how to build a brand and market it, how to get funding and how to manage work/life balance in the restaurant industry.

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“It’s amazing the amount of information we learned in two days,” Dunagan said of the FAB event. “They talked about impostor syndrome, and how you should ask for what a successful white male chef would ask for. It sounds simple, but hearing all these successful women tell us this directly was like, ‘you know what, you’re right.’” 

Beyond the business skills, the LEE Initiative’s mentees learn confidence. And if they didn’t have it before, they receive validation, too. 

“I learned how to call myself a chef,” said 2018 mentee Jen Rock, who studied with Portland, Oregon, chef Jenn Louis. “Not just a cook or a line cook. In the beginning, I thought well, I didn’t go to culinary school, my career is all experiential learning. I called myself an amateur. Now I’m a professional chef. That was the biggest thing for me.” 

For Rhodes, who studied with the James Beard Award-winning chef Anne Quatrano in Atlanta, the LEE Initiative helped speed up her career plans. Instead of having to wait to earn a spot as a culinary teacher, she landed one at Iroquois High School by age 22.

Telling her students she’d cooked at the James Beard House definitely “gave me street cred,” she said. 

“No way in hell did I think I would be 21 years old and cooking at the James Beard House. To be a woman, at the infancy of my career, doing something chefs wait their whole lives for,” Rhodes said. “You can’t help but be confident after that. I couldn’t have expanded myself or my career without the LEE Initiative.”

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A chance for success

In the middle of Dunagan's externship with Segal in Chicago, there was a freak snowstorm at the end of April. She didn't have a coat or boots, so Segal picked her up and dropped her off after her shift. 

It's one of the reasons Dunagan isn't as worried about her move to Chicago, despite her hatred for the cold.

"Mindy said something to me in my last meeting,” Dunagan said. “‘I want you to do this, and it’s going to be a lot, but I’m not going to let you fail.’"

That's the whole point of the LEE Initiative — giving these women chefs the tools and training they need to succeed, Lee said. 

Segal can be an intense character; she's bold, eccentric and amazingly successful, Dunagan said. She's also extremely dedicated to her restaurant and her team. 

Working in her fast-paced kitchen is the kind of offer a 22-year-old baker doesn't say no to. Dunagan packed her cats and cookbooks and moved to Chicago in late September, beginning her new position Oct. 1. Now, she has a bright, 350-square-foot studio apartment in Lincoln Park, where the menus from the LEE Initiative James Beard House dinner hang on the wall. 

It's a short bus trip and walk to her new job, but it's a whole different path. 

"I think Mindy is the perfect person to teach me," Dunagan said. "It’ll be a new adventure.”

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Reach reporter Dahlia Ghabour: 502-582-4497; dghabour@gannett.com; Twitter: @dghabour. Support strong journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/subscriberguide.

LEE Initiative 2019 fundraiser

WHAT: Sound and Spirit: A lively Southern evening to benefit the Lee Initiative. Guests board a fleet of luxury buses, where they are offered champagne and canapes on the way to Maker's Mark Distillery. Dinner for 300 guests will be prepared by chef Edward Lee and the mentees of the LEE Initiative. There will also be a live performance, curated cocktails, a live auction, and coffee and chocolates on the way back.  

How to apply for the Lee Initiative:

Interested in being part of the LEE Initiative 2020 class? Here's what you need to know:

• You must be a woman who does not own her own restaurant and who resides in Kentucky, Southern Indiana or Cincinnati 
• You must be currently working in the restaurant industry and have at least two years of experience 
• You must be at least 18 years old with legal status to work 
• You must send in educational transcripts, application forms and at least two letters of reference by email to Lindsey@610Magnolia.com or by mail to Lindsey Ofcacek, 610 W. Magnolia Ave., Louisville, KY, 40208. Applications are due by Feb. 1, 2020
• To apply in person, call 502-636-0783 to arrange an interview time.