Katrina Higham, the executive chef at Joe’s Bar and Dining Hall in St Kilda, says she’s learnt to build skin like a rhino working in the male-dominated and demanding restaurant world.
Climbing up the ranks from apprentice chef to business owner and now head chef, 31-year-old Higham doesn’t take no for an answer, especially if she’s being told she can’t because she’s female.
“There are stories that would make your eyelashes curl,” says Higham of the treatment she’s received being a female chef in the male-dominated hospitality industry. “I’ve been told, ‘You’ll get nowhere because you’re female’.”
Leaving the army to become an apprentice chef at Melbourne-based two-hat restaurant Scusami, Higham went on to work at The Point in Albert Park and The Bridge Hotel in Richmond before starting her own café business, Windsor Deli, with her husband and fellow chef, which they ran together for three years until 2012.
Although she’s now reached the level of executive chef at Joe’s Bar, there were times when Higham doubted her career choice.
During her three-year apprenticeship at Scusami, Higham says she almost quit after just three months, finding it difficult as one of only two women in the kitchen. Later in her career and disillusioned with the way the industry worked, Higham took some time out.
“I stepped out of the industry for nine months and did sales and marketing in the hospitality industry … I just got to the point when the guy that employed me refused to tell people I was the sous chef because I was female, and I thought, what’s the point?” says Higham. “But I missed being in the kitchen, the camaraderie, the adrenalin.”
While being in the kitchen and cooking great food is what she loves, being the co-owner and chef of Windsor Deli presented some challenges for Higham when she became a mother.
“It was extremely challenging. I got pregnant in 2011 and I was in the kitchen right up until the day before [my daughter] was born,” she says.
“We had made it into a profitable business, but with Eleanor we decided it was time to move on. It was hard because being the owner, you’ve got different expectations and different hours – I’d bake cookies when [Eleanor] was asleep.”
For Higham’s husband, moving on meant leaving the industry altogether, while Higham went on to become executive chef at Joe’s Bar.
Having led the kitchen at Joe’s Bar for almost a year now, Higham is thankful for an “amazing boss” who allows her to pick up her daughter, who’s now 18 months old, from childcare and bring her to the restaurant for an hour or two before her husband comes to pick her up.
“It’s hard. My expectation of what I want to be as a mum is the same as what I want to be as a chef – the best I can and as involved as I can,” she says, adding that her husband works days while she works nights to make it work. “If I miss putting [Eleanor] to bed, that feels awful, but I hope she won’t remember that I’m not home but she’ll remember that I’ve been a chef, a head chef at a successful restaurant, and that there are no limits.”
Although she’s once again working in a kitchen full of men, Higham says her chefs at Joe’s Bar respect what she does and the fact that she’s a mother as well. And while she’d love to see more women in the industry, she recognises that the challenges are still there.
“I think the respect [within the industry] has definitely improved, but being a head chef with a daughter as well is incredibly hard. The industry is getting less and less women. They’re getting out of the industry to have children, to get married. The hours are so demanding. There are some people believe that you can’t do both,” she says.
“I don’t take no. I’ve been told ‘But you’re a girl’, but I don’t care. You’ve got to develop a rhino skin. That’s what I say to any girl standing in my kitchen.”
Higham says her success in an industry where ‘being emotional’ isn’t accepted is the result of her ability to avoid bringing emotion into the kitchen.
“Persistence,” Higham says, as the reason for her success. “Continually saying, ‘This is not good enough’ to push me … Continually asking myself for better.”