Women were once deemed too weak to work in Chinese restaurant kitchens

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Women were once deemed too weak to work in Chinese restaurant kitchens


Archan Chan recalls her first experience working in a Chinese restaurant, more than 14 years ago.To get more news about traditional chinese women, you can visit shine news official website.

Employed as an apprentice chef, she was one of just two women in the kitchen – the other’s sole job was to beat eggs.“She was unbelievably fast at beating eggs. I guess for a woman to survive in a traditional Chinese kitchen back then, you had to be the best in something,” says Chan.

Today, Chan helms the kitchen of Ho Lee Fook, one of Hong Kong’s most popular restaurants.

After spending more than a decade working in fine dining restaurants and gastro-bars in Australia and Singapore, Chan is one of the few female chefs to rise to top of a high-end Cantonese restaurant.An impressive feat, given how incredibly challenging it has been for women to soar in high-profile Chinese kitchens.

Why are there so few females willing to don the chef’s apron? The physically demanding kitchen tools and setup, the fierce fire of the wok and a male-centric culture are just a few of the deterrents, with women once told they lack the strength to handle such a grueling industry.Female chefs have long been a minority in professional kitchens around the world. But the situation is even bleaker in Chinese kitchens.

In traditional Chinese kitchens, where all sorts of regional cuisines are served, chefs are generally divided into two groups: there are those who man the stove station, preparing wok and stir-fry dishes; and then there’s the pastry station, where the dim sum and noodles are made.

There’s no denying the work is physically demanding – an empty wok weighs about 2.2 kilograms – but there are other factors at play.In the past, many Chinese kitchens focused on mentor-protégé relationships, meaning masters would recruit apprentices and pass their skills to them. Few chefs would risk recruiting a female trainee into that harsh environment.

Given all of these barriers, not many women would even consider this male-dominated industry as an attractive career path.

“Until about a decade or so ago, the only women I met working in Chinese kitchens were kitchen hands, who clean and do some basic preparations, or dim sum cart pushers,” says Chun Hung Chan, who has been a chef for the last 46 years and an instructor at Hong Kong’s Chinese Culinary Institute for 28 years.

In an ideal world, a story like this one, or the annual awards that highlight the “best female chefs,” wouldn’t be necessary. Women would simply thrive alongside everyone else in the kitchen, and be treated with the same level of respect.

Thankfully there are signs of a shift in mindset – the number of female Chinese chefs de cuisine has been rising in recent years.Among them is Zeng Huai Jun, the executive chef of Song, a one-Michelin-star Sichuanese restaurant, in Guangzhou.