Soft Power in the Kitchen

Crowned Asia's best female chef this year, Lolla's Johanne Siy explains why gender-balanced kitchens are the way forward.

- ANDREW LECI

“A woman’s place is in the kitchen,” say some male chauvinists still alive today. On the other hand, many in the restaurant industry believe “women have no place in the kitchen”. Apparently, females lack the wherewithal to thrive in what is unquestionably a physically demanding workplace. 

Johanne Siy is out to prove both assertions wrong. The head chef of Lolla, an intimate restaurant that celebrated its 10th-anniversary last year, is at the vanguard of the industry’s movement to change the time-dishonoured tropes.

The 42-year-old Filipina contends that fine dining is currently a male-dominated world and that’s not sustainable. “We’re not tapping into half of the world’s population,” she says. 

One could infer that the restaurant world is nuts for not being gender inclusive, but it’s a long-standing practice. “We’ve been groomed to expect an authoritative male yelling in the kitchen,” Siy says, drawing on her experience as a dogsbody in New York City. The male chef would “direct everything in a very dictatorial way”. Intimidation in the cauldron of a restaurant kitchen was often rife