The Feminist Queries: Ann Cashion

by Jen Nedeau

categories: Interviews, The Feminist Queries

Published March 27, 2009 @ 08:00AM PT

For this round of Feminist Queries, I interviewed Ann Cashion who has worked intensively in restaurant kitchens in both the United States and Europe for the past 25 years.  She began her career in San Francisco, California, where she worked for several Bay Area establishments before traveling to Italy to apprentice at Francesco Ricchi's trattoria in the hills outside Florence Over the years, she has worked in France, Texas and now Washington, D.C. where she has opened several restaurants including Austin Grill, Jaleo, Cashion's Eat Place, Johnny's Half Shell.

Ann is a native of Jackson, Mississippi and a 1976 graduate of Harvard University.  She also completed two years at Stanford University towards her doctorate in English Literature before leaving to cook professionally. In 2004, she was honored by the James Beard Foundation as Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic region - quite an accomplishment.

I hope you'll take a few minutes to read her interview and respond to the fun question at the end!

Have you ever considered yourself a feminist?

Maybe I was born a feminist.  It just seemed to be part of my DNA.  I remember in grammar school competing to beat the little boys in my class at ping pong and I recall my mother advising me that I should "let them win".  "What nonsense", I thought.  By the time I was in high school I was refusing to make my debut or to shave my legs.  This was considered weird behavior by Mississippi standards of that era, but two years later when I matriculated at Harvard, I fit right in.  These days I hardly think about it anymore, not consciously.  My values haven't changed, but my circumstances have; as a single, small business owner I call my own shots and don't have to justify myself to anyone but myself.

It interesting that you halted your pursuit of a Masters Degree in Literature to become a professional cook. How did you make this decision?

As much as I loved reading all through childhood, as satisfying as my B.A. studies in English literature were, when it came to the pursuit of an advanced degree, I hated it.  It wasn't so much the intellectual rigor and requisite specialization (though I did find that confining) as it was the petty ultra-competitiveness of everyone in the program.  Realizing that I was not cut out for graduate school, I turned to cooking.  Food had always been an obsession of mine and I had cooked at a friend's motel restaurant during high school summers.  I also operated a small late night grill on the ground floor of my dorm during my junior and senior years in college.  I had always loved eating, particularly eating out and experiencing new types of food, and as a disaffected graduate student I had spent more time throwing dinner parties for friends than preparing for seminars.  So the move to cooking just felt right and made sense to me, if not to everyone else.

A lot of people say that the restaurant industry is male-dominated, particularly when it comes to Chefs. What do you think about this and how has it affected your career?

Male chefs definitely dominate in my profession, and there are lots of reasons why.  But I always point out that a big reason why there are so few women in the top echelons are because women generally opt out, either because the work is too stressful and grueling, or the schedule is too unorthodox to accommodate a relationship or marriage, or because they want to bear and raise children.  When I was starting out in the 70's and 80's there were even fewer women running kitchens than there are today, and male chefs were reluctant to hire me.  Consequently, I was forced to think about being in charge and opening a place of my own much earlier than ideally I'd have wanted to.

Why does it matter in your opinion to have diversity in the kitchen in terms of gender, race or otherwise? What are the benefits to challenging a "patriarchal kitchen"?

I don't know that diversity per se is of any importance in the kitchen.  What is important is that a kitchen operate as a cohesive team unit.  To that extent, gender, race, or other differentiators are irrelevant.  You are only as good as your ability to perform and to contribute to producing great food.  Doesn't matter if you're an American girl or an Indonesian hermaphrodite, which is one of the great things about kitchen work...it's truly an equalizer. That being said, the fact that most kitchens in this country are very diverse is a nice perk of the profession.  I can't tell you how entertaining and refreshing it is when a Thai busser starts playfully pulling the leg of a Latino line cook...it's what life in 21st century America should and could be like all the time.

As a female in the food business, what wisdom would you share with other women trying to find similar success?

Think of yourself as a culinary professional, not a female culinary professional.   Why?  Because  you can only be successful if you are willing to compare yourself to and compete with everyone in your profession, not just the relatively small subset of those who are women.   Don't let the press ghettoize you;  try to push back against stories and articles where the idea is to feature "women chefs" since often the underlying assumption behind this is that there's a different yardstick that applies to them.

Finally, in honor of the feminist queries, we like to end these interviews with a question. If you could ask feminists everywhere one thing, what would it be?

An informal culinary research project that has been ongoing for the past two years:   "Which do you prefer, cake or pie? "