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- He threw a pan in my direction.
And then he said,
"This is why they don't let women in kitchens."
- He told me if I sat on his lap,
he'd buy a lot of wine for me.
- He pulled me in his office
and without knowing anything about me he said,
"If you're gonna get emotional about this,
"you're not gonna work here anymore."
- I had this group of men
that I was taking care of.
They said, "How much would it cost to take you home?"
- He told me to make sure I dressed
and spoke appropriately at the event.
- He said, "I didn't realize a girl
"that looked like you would know something about food."
- I arrived at an event to work a party
that was predominantly male.
And I searched for my manager on duty
to ask for any specific instruction or direction.
And the manager who was also male said to me,
"Oh you know, just flirt.
"Just do that thing that you girls do."
- I was crouched down
in front of another chef taking a group photo at an event.
And when I stand up, he says to me,
"Whoops, I think I just got you pregnant."
- It was always expected that when I would walk
into any new kitchen for the first time,
I would get hard stares, whistleblows, sexual comments
and then it became a part of the lifestyle.
And I just learned to get used to it.
- I remember the first time doning a chef coat
and what honor it felt to wear it.
And then the chef saying to me
how I was not as cute as I was
in my regular front of the house outfit.
- I remember once going on a job interview
for a pastry chef position in New York
and the male executive chef asked me
if I was planning on getting married
or getting pregnant because if I was,
he couldn't hire me.
- Working my way up through the ranks
of kitchens in New York City, it was quite challenging.
And one of the biggest challenges I had to overcome
as a young sous chef
was not because of my cooking abilities,
it was actually because I was a woman.
- One time during the judgment
of one of those cooking competition shows
on food television, I had a male chef say to me,
"You're a very talented young lady."
And I thought, "Why can't you just call me chef?"
- You're gonna meet men in the kitchen
who don't want you around because you're a woman.
You're gonna meet men in the kitchen
who want you around because you're a woman.
And then you're gonna meet other women
who don't want you around because you're a woman.
And I looked at him and I was like,
"Well chef, where do I go from there?"
He's like, "Darling, you go nowhere but up, okay?"
And I laughed and I will never forget those words
that he told me.
And it's true.
I'm Leia Gaccione.
I've been cooking
in some of the most high profile restaurants
for the last 20 years.
I am in a small percentage of women trying
to make their mark in an industry filled with dudes.
I can think back on a lot of female chefs that inspired me
as I wanted to become a chef.
While it may be a cliche, was there anything better
than watching Julia Child on television?
And as I grew further into my career,
I had a meal at Dominique Crenn's restaurant
in San Francisco that still resonates with me.
As I started to put a list of women together
that I wanted to talk to,
I kept coming back to one name that truly defines a shero
in the kitchen, Elizabeth Falkner.
- My least favorite media question I get
is where are all the female chefs?
Where all the female chefs?
I mean, there are a lot of Joan of arcs
in the restaurant world all over.
So like, Alice Waters, Lidia Bastianich,
Barbara Tropp, Judy Rodgers, Cecilia Chiang,
Anne Rosenzweig, Barbara Lynch,
Traci Des Jardins, Daniela Soto-Innes.
Where all the female chefs?
And Nancy Silverton of course,
Joyce Goldstein, Nancy Oaks.
And then you had Susan Feniger
and Mary Sue Milliken down in Los Angeles.
Gabrielle Hamilton and Michelle Bernstein, Sherry Yard,
Jen Lewis, Anita Lo, Lynn Crawford,
Amanda Cohen, Carla Hall,
Tonya Holland, Alex Shelley.
There are so many female chefs.
I don't know why people even ask the question.
People are always asking what it's like to be a female chef.
And I'm like, "I don't know.
"Let's go talk to a bunch of female chefs and find out."
I mean, I don't know what else to say.
I am a female chef
so I don't know what it's not like to be a female chef
'cause I genuinely like female cooking.
It's funny because people always think of me
from my food television times as being only a pastry chef,
but I do make all kinds of food, savory and sweet.
Sometimes I like to mix it up and screw with people.
Today, I'm more interested
in what ingredients tastes like in making sweet
or savory food that tastes like those ingredients.
There's just a lot of life lessons in cooking food.
- Elizabeth Falkner bridges the gap
between generations of female chefs.
She is an artist, an activist
and an advocate for many things.
She was renowned for opening one
of the most famous bakeries
in San Francisco, Citizen Cake,
crushing cooking competitions
and becoming an iconic figure in the food world.
Chef Elizabeth has slayed both sweet and savory.
And with 26 years behind her,
she is just getting started.
- In Northern California,
it felt like the food scene was the scene.
Think about it, I came from where Hollywood was the scene
in LA to this place where the chefs
were the superstars all of a sudden like Alice Waters
had Chez Panisse.
Judy Rodgers had this restaurant called Zuni
and then there was Jeremiah Tower with Stars.
And I worked at Williams-Sonoma when I was still in college
and I started reading everybody's cookbooks.
And finishing college at San Francisco Art Institute,
I was making films.
It was more like I loved the choreography of people
in an open kitchen like this or behind the bar.
And I started wanting to just bring more
and more food stuff into those scenes.
I needed to go really be in a kitchen,
but it was really hard for me to get into the kitchen
because I didn't have any experience.
And then I got a part-time job
at a little French bistro in downtown San Francisco.
I took over as the chef pretty quickly,
but then I staged at a fine dining restaurant and I thought,
"Okay, I need to go work at that restaurant."
And that restaurant was Masa's.
I worked at Masa's for a year
and then I went to work for Traci Des Jardins at Elka.
And then one year later we opened Rubicon
where I worked for three years.
That was a pretty big deal
'cause Traci won James Beard award,
rising star chef that year.
We were 28 years old.
Everybody came into that restaurant.
Julia Child came to that restaurant, Jacques Pepin
Claudine, tons of movie stars, tons of wine makers.
It became really obvious that I needed to open my own place.
And I was like,
"San Francisco needs a really modern, cool pastry shop."
Because it just didn't exist.
At the original Citizen Cake, we had a wood-fired oven
and we did amazing little pizzas.
We made very eccentric pastries and cakes.
Made our own marshmallows,
made our own cream crackers.
I know that's really common today,
but that didn't even really happen.
And then my business partner roasted coffee
so that didn't even exist.
It was really cool.
I learned a lot.
It was really tough.
I felt like our location was too remote
so I moved it to what became a very popular place,
which is Hayes Valley.
And then that place became a full restaurant
and pastry shop.
We made our own ice creams and made all these cakes.
I had an open pastry kitchen
and then we had a full restaurant too
which was right near the theater and always busy.
So I had Citizen Cake for about 15 years
and then I had a little satellite cafe
called Citizen Cupcake for a minute.
I had this other restaurant Orson that we opened in 2008.
That period of time was just rough
after the stock market crash.
I had a life partnership that was dissolving.
We needed to close.
Just real estate was very expensive and greedy
and lots of greedy people around me.
It was crazy.
And the more popular I got, the more Pac-Man it felt.
People were just kind of running after a lot of stuff.
And then I was like,
"I think I'm just done in this town.
"I can't figure out any more.
"I can't make this work."
And I was like, "Okay well, I guess maybe it's time to move
"to New York."
I came to New York after winning a piece of competition
in Naples, Italy to open a pizzeria in Brooklyn.
I wanted to go back to just like cooking in fire.
And then I got pulled into consulting
on a restaurant in the upper West side
and that was a really beautiful restaurant.
I love the cooking competitions shows
because I played soccer so long.
The first shows that I did
were the earliest Food Network Challenges where we had
to build some kind of gargantuan cake sort of thing
and then move it for some reason across the room.
It feels like my culinary and my soccer athleticness
is meeting each other in the middle.
Knowing that it's a fleeting moment of cooking
and not taking it so seriously,
but this is just a fun game
has been my favorite part about it for sure.
- Elizabeth asked me to meet her
at Hong Thaimee's restaurant
in the East village, Thaimee Table.
They are both cooking for a private event
that will raise awareness and funds for RED.
- I was an executive in Taiwan.
Yeah, I ran philanthropy department
for big pharmaceutical company in Bangkok.
- Wow. - And graduated with MBA.
Applied for a job as a hostess at Jean-Jorges spice market
and made my way into the kitchen and walk through fire.
And now I have a couple of restaurants.
- A lot of people would say that we're women
in a man's world doing this.
But then when you really think about it,
when you think about all the women doing it,
you realize there's a lot more women
in this business than what everyone else makes
it seem out to be.
- I feel like people underestimate us sometimes.
They think that women just women.
We not, we stronger.
We know how to push through things sometime more than men
because we don't have much of an ego I would say.
The way that we do things, we not do it to fight.
We not doing that, oh I have to be better than you
or you have to be better than me, but we do it
because we truly really love to be in this industry.
I feel like why are we in this industry?
So that we can get Michelin star,
so that we can be number one in the world.
I mean, I don't oppose to that,
but that is not the most important thing.
We here to love and serve people through our food.
I don't know the rest of them,
but that's why I'm in this industry,
that's why I'm working so hard,
14 hours a day on my feet dealing with bunions
and all those stuff.
We have to really look into why are we here?
Going back and ask that same question you asked yourself,
why do you love to cook?
Why you wanna be in the business?
I feel like I wanna live my life with purpose.
And my purpose is to love and serve people.
- One of the most important relationships I have
outside of work is with my brother Gary.
This year for his birthday,
I tried to do something super special
because my schedule has been very chaotic.
Food is love to me.
So I'm making him one of his favorites,
a medium rare cheeseburger with a runny egg.
What could be better than celebrating your birthday
with a burger?
It's really sweet to give the gift
of food to the ones you love,
just like Caroline Schiff does with her desserts.
- It all started with birthday cake for me.
I mean, I would get so excited for my birthday
because it was about cake.
I was like, "Well, I'm gonna get
"to make this cake start to finish.
"It's gonna be exactly what I want it to be."
I was like in elementary school
and I would have never gone out to buy a cake
or have a store-bought cake.
I felt like it was so special.
It was just the most special thing
that I got to do all year was bake my birthday cake.
And then as I got a little bit older,
it was like I wanted to make them for other people.
I really started to understand that,
that is an incredible gift to give to somebody.
They have a slice of it on their birthday
and they're celebrating with friends or family or whatever,
but what I really want them to feel
and for them to take away is just pure happiness.
Strawberries and I go way back.
I remember going to the Plaza hotel with my mom and my aunt.
I remember getting strawberries and cream,
just really sweet sugary, macerated, strawberries.
They were this beautiful, hot pink red color
and whipped cream.
And I made such a mess and I just dove right in,
but to me that was the perfect food.
That moment was the beginning of something for me.
It was the beginning of this love affair with sugar
that I've had and food.
And I think my mother worried
because she thought I was the sugar monster.
She was like, "Oh my God, my child only wants to eat sugar."
And there was no doubt in my mind
or anybody else who knew me well
from a really young age that food
and pretty specifically dessert was the thing
that I loved the most.
When I was young, I would cook mostly by myself
mostly because I was really bossy in the kitchen.
My aunt, my mom's youngest sister,
she was a chef working in restaurants in New York
when I was little in the '80s.
I just thought it was the coolest thing.
She would come over with interesting ingredients.
I knew she was out late working in the kitchen
and she was downtown and I just thought it was so cool.
And I was like, "I wanna learn how to do that.
"And I wanna make food that people are gonna eat.
"Not just for my family,
"I wanna make food that people want to buy and eat
"'cause they think it's delicious
"and they think it's special."
- As she journeyed across the world
discovering the flavors that would ignite a fire in her,
Caroline's path would cross
with the uber-talented Sohui Kim.
- I was looking for jobs
and I have a resume that has nothing on it.
It has my education basically and a little paragraph
about what I love about food so much.
The only one that got back to me was The Good Fork
and the chef owner here Sohui Kim.
So she called me and she was like, "I got your resume.
"And you seem really passionate,
"but it kind of looks like you don't have any experience.
"Is that true?
And I was like, "Well, professionally, yeah, no experience."
I'm lucky that I found somebody who sees the value
in teaching people and sees the value in somebody
who has a ton of passion and no experience.
I owe her a lot because she saw something in me.
- Well, it was very well-written first of all.
And I was very impressed and it's not usual
that you get very heartfelt cover letter on a resume.
And the first thing that I noticed was just her sense
of enthusiasm and her spirit.
I don't know, it's just hard to describe it to words
when you meet somebody and you're like, "Wow."
I was very, very sure from the minute that I met her
that she was gonna do wonderful things.
- I owe my career to Sohui.
For her to be a mentor like that,
she was so generous with her time and her knowledge.
As a new cook, I fucked up so much.
I shouldn't say fuck.
- I love that, say that.
- I fucked up so much and she would kind of use it
as a way to teach you something else.
- More than anything, I've taught a lot of people
in this kitchen and more than anything,
I value hard work, enthusiasm
and certainly passion for cooking.
And she's just had the perfect bundle of all three and more.
When a young person comes in
and they have so much enthusiasm, it's infectious.
And it makes for a very awesome working environment.
So right away, she was an integral part
of the team for sure.
- We are back here with our second contestant.
What's your name?
- Fatima Ali. - Fatima Ali,
where are you from?
- Karachi, Pakistan.
- Listen Fatima Ali, what is unique about you?
- Everything.
I mean, cancer has touched everyone in one way or the other
whether it's yourself, or a loved one
or a friend, it's universal.
The pain that it brings is also universal.
But I think as someone who's gone through it,
you have your good and your bad days,
but it does get better.
There's always hope.
There's always joy to be found
in the little things.
You have to find your own distraction
to kind of get through it.
And for me, that's food.
For me, that's always been cooking.
I think what's interesting to me is that I also realized
how much I enjoy being a part of bigger picture things.
I'm so excited to be a part of someone's dining experience
where they will never forget it for the rest of their lives.
They'll talk about it for years.
And in my own little way may have had a hand in that
and that's something that's very special to me.
And that's the reason I became a chef.
- I have always been an avid watcher of "Top Chef".
Cooking shows are what started my love affair with food.
I was really rooting for chef Fatima Ali
like so many other Americans that were glued
to the screen during season 15.
As I convinced myself to reach out
to my new inspiration Fatima,
I tried not to let my fan girl get the best of me.
After our first chat,
I knew this was a very special person,
not because of how her story ends up,
but because of how it began
and how she literally became a top chef.
- I was very, very young.
According to my mom,
I think I started cooking at about four or five.
I remember really being in the kitchen.
I was probably about eight or nine.
I was too young to cook anything
on the stove according to my grandmother
so she would boil the water for me
and I would make soup.
I remember putting cabbage in it and carrots
and seasoning it and just really just warm water
and barely wilted vegetables really,
but I was so proud of my creation.
The older I got, the more I started cooking,
the more I began to explore different kinds
of cuisines with my dad who was actually a lawyer.
He traveled a lot
and anytime he would go to different countries,
he would bring back something interesting.
My family's basically been my guinea pig.
I've made a lot
of really horrible things over the years too
when I was younger.
If it wasn't for them,
I wouldn't be doing what I was doing.
- As a little girl growing up,
she was very sporty, very friendly.
When other kids her age were watching Cartoon Network,
she was watching BBC Food.
Back in the day, she loved "Yan Can Cook".
- If Yan Can Cook!
- So can we!
- When we were in Austin, Texas,
I still remember her kindergarten teacher, lovely lady,
she used to send
these little pictogram recipes home every weekend.
So every Friday, she'd come rushing home
with that little recipe.
We'd put that recipe together.
Her love for food just naturally started
when she was really, really very young.
And I think as she grew older,
she found a lot of comfort in it.
- My mom's always encouraged me in the kitchen
and she's really encouraged and pushed me to try
and be the best that I can possibly be.
When I was about 17, I sat with her
and told her I wanted to become a professional chef.
And she told me that I could do that
as long as I got a bachelor's degree.
So I hopped on my computer
and I googled America culinary bachelors.
The first school that popped up
was the Culinary Institute of America.
I'd never been to that part of the world before.
And it was just a really exciting,
but also nerve wracking journey, moving from Pakistan,
coming here for college and then immersing myself
in a field that I had so much passion for,
but no actual hands-on experience of yet.
I remember the first time buttoning up
our pristine chef jackets
and assessing ourselves for an hour.
We will remember standing in unknown kitchens, knife in hand
and ready to conquer all.
And we will remember the cuts and burns
in our hands as evidence.
Deep down inside most of us lies this incessant urge
for acknowledgement, for approval.
For if we did not have that need,
we would not have become chefs.
A plate of food
is merely ordinary until someone deems it magnificent.
We are all morbidly afraid of being ordinary
for there seems no other thing so horrific as that.
But today, it has been acknowledged,
you have been acknowledged, we have been acknowledged
as being absolutely extraordinary.
- And I told her, I said,
"If this is what you're gonna pursue,
"this is what you're gonna do.
"You will promise me that you will be the best."
- See, I wasn't making it up.
- Not because of any pressure,
but because I feel you've got to own it, right?
It's like if this is your commitment,
then that commitment needs to show.
- With her mother's blessing
and a dream in her heart,
Fatima met her uncles Sibte in the city that never sleeps.
- New York is tough, but I know her
and she can dig up a whole mountain with a spoon
if she needs to.
We had a long conversation,
her ambitions, what she wants to do.
She is focused and it's very rare to find somebody
with that much focus.
- I found myself working at Cafe Centro,
which is a part of the Patina group in New York City.
I actually found myself working for Maneet Chauhan.
Seeing a woman of color doing such interesting
and fantastic things in the industry was really inspiring.
- One of the most endearing things
to me about Fatima was her, there is nothing
that's going to phase me out attitude.
- I think it was really important
for me to be able to see a woman
who was running a restaurant and who's successful at it.
- I think as a female chef myself,
it is my responsibility to help pave way
for more young female chefs to make a mark
and an impact in the industry.
She got an opportunity.
She did not squander that opportunity.
She was a shining star and I think
that was the most incredible part about Fatima.
- I think when you talk about Nona or grandma cooking
- in Italy, right? - - Yeah.
- They usually run the restaurant
and the kids just happened to work there too,
but the mom is the boss.
- I mean, being immigrant family,
obviously it's either one of two things.
You're either gonna be a lawyer or a doctor.
And there's no other option, no other career path.
You're either a lawyer or a doctor.
And my parents drilled that into my head
since I was really little.
They were like, "Oh, your sister's gonna be a doctor
"so you're gonna be a lawyer."
And then she chose a different path.
So they were like,
"Okay, so you're gonna be the doctor now."
It's funny, they were very strict,
but my mom, she's a tough woman.
She taught me how to be tough.
As soon as I put on those whites,
I kind of just had this weird, emotional,
that weird feeling in your throat like a lump.
And it was really emotional for me
and I think that I really wanted to try.
I think I really fell in love with the kitchen
and the atmosphere.
I think the biggest thing is commitment, right?
If you're not ready to be committed 150%,
then maybe you wanna wait because once you go restaurant,
you can't go un-restaurant.
It's like, you got to give it your all really.
I grew up in an immigrant family.
My parents are from South Korea.
They came over here, had my sister and me and my brother.
And they needed a work obviously to support the family.
We were raised by our grandparents.
My grandma is this phenomenal cook.
She grew all of her own produce.
So we had this huge garden in our backyard.
And I remember growing up, that was my favorite thing,
hanging around with grandma,
watering the garden, picking all the produce
and then using that produce
to cook whatever she's gonna cook at home.
She made everything from scratch like gochujang
even soy sauce.
Going to school, after that I would run home
to eat kalbi and kimchi with my grandma and cook with her.
And that was one of my favorite memories
of my childhood.
My sister, we're the Choi sisters.
- The Choi sisters. - Yeah.
- It's like a nickname that we had for a while.
- For a long, yeah.
- Are you super close?
- Super, super close, definitely.
- People think it's a little weird
'cause we're too close.
- In my life,
my grandfather was kind of like the stand-in dad
so I understand your bond with your grandmother especially.
- She really taught me sort of how to love food.
It's not like she taught me step-by-step
how to make certain dishes.
You know what I mean?
It was more so her philosophy of cooking
and why you should cook for people
and how to show people that you care through food.
- Ready?
- Our family motto is love is patient
and she's the one who established that
and it's from the Bible.
It's very inspiring and that's what we live by.
- But there was one period of my childhood
where my parents literally plucked me out of school,
put me in a foreign school in South Korea.
It was really difficult,
but it was such an impactful time.
Going back to sort of the roots being around this culture,
it made me appreciate it a lot more.
I remember the food.
I remember the people, the kids that I hung out with
and it was very inspirational for me.
I went to school up until sixth grade
and then my parents brought me back.
I started working in a restaurant when I was 14
at a Korean Japanese restaurant, really small.
So I would run to work and work till midnight
and then go back to school the next day.
When I went to college and graduated from college,
I've always had restaurant jobs.
I was falling in love with it without knowing
that I was falling in love with it.
- Esther would find herself working
amongst the biggest names in food television.
- Honestly, Food Network was such a special time for me.
Position that I chose was more like working
with all of the top chefs, working on "Iron chef"
and being probably one of the most powerful people
on the team because literally,
I was the one buying every single ingredient
for all the chefs, the whole kitchen,
sourcing it from all over the world,
dealing with vendors, purveyors.
It's like, if I didn't have that position
at the Food Network, I probably wouldn't know
how to do half the shit that I do now.
Growing up watching these chefs on television,
seeing what they do, it's amazing.
So it was always kind of there
that I knew I wanted to have my own place.
And we came up with this concept
of Korean ramen because ramen at the time was on the rise.
I remember the day because it was New Year's Day,
January 1st of 2014, they called me
and told me that they're gonna give me this space.
And then that's when the real scare,
real fear started.
Three weeks before I was supposed to open,
the one person that I hired quit on me
and then I had literally no staff
and I was supposed to open in three weeks.
My sister actually quit her job to join me
and help me open this.
She kind of like really came through
and somehow we got through it and we did it.
- One of Esther's culinary acquaintances
is the incredible Chef Bao Bao.
She joined us between lunch and dinner service.
- I feel like it is a little bit intimidating
in the beginning of course,
but it's just about knowing who you are and just embracing
that you are the female in the kitchen
and it's fine, it's okay.
There's different skills that you can use
as a female as opposed to male.
And honestly, I really don't even like to discriminate like,
"Oh, that person's a female."
And my kitchen, I would say it's very 50/50.
Actually, more women work in my kitchen than men.
- Mine too.
- It just happens to be like that.
- Do you think that because you're women,
you attract more women to work in your kitchen?
- Yes, and also a background story also attach those people
to come in because they also believe in themselves
that why can't I?
If male can do it, why can't I?
I just wanna show the skill
and trying to prove that they can do it too.
So, I mean in Asia, most of family,
the female will be the best cook in the family.
We don't see that many males cook in our hometown,
I mean in our country.
But just when I moved here to this country,
I see so many male chefs
and I was like, "Wow!"
- Where's all the females?
- Yeah, where's all the females?
- As I continued hearing
how each of these chefs found their passion for cooking,
I had found out about a rising star
in Harlem, Juliet Masters.
So I drove to The Edge to hear her incredible journey.
♪ You look so lovable ♪
- This business would not exist without family
and it's not just our immediate family,
but it's the family that we have in the kitchen,
all the people who work with us.
We have people who have been with us from the beginning.
And then we have the family of the neighborhood.
We have a beautiful, lovely neighborhood.
And we have a lot of people who walk by
and stick their head in and say hi
and know us when we come out.
They look out for us.
So the family includes obviously our immediate family,
but it spreads out to our community.
The people who have supported us who live down the block.
Family is the backbone of this business.
It trickles from Justine and Juliet, to Justine and Juliet,
and mommy and daddy and son, and then to kitchen staff,
and to floor staff and out into our community.
We are Harlem.
We've lived here for 20 years.
We're from New York.
So for us to open up this space,
it's paying homage to the spirit
of those who've come before us, but also to the fact
that this the community demanded this space
to be born as well.
- The Edge sits on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem.
On Wednesdays, the restaurant is filled
with subtle musical notes from jazz musicians,
beautiful words of poets and others that are a reminder
of the heritage that fills this space.
On the roof of this building,
notables such as Langston Hughes, Ethel Ray Nance,
and Regina M. Anderson shared philosophies
and literary art that lends to the history of Harlem.
And now, it's home to two sisters whose close family ties
were the right recipe to have what it takes
to open this restaurant.
Justine runs the front of the house
and Juliet is the heart of the kitchen.
- I always told Justine as her older sister I said,
"One day we're gonna do something together."
Life before the internet and phones and all that,
there was a lot of pretend games
so we pretended a lot.
One of the things we pretended was having restaurants
and serving people.
We were the hostesses, would make menus
and prepare grapefruit and serve to my parents
with orange juice.
We grew up as best friends. - Using our imagination.
- And using our imagination.
We have remained best friends throughout life.
We're not identical, we're not twins
although everyone asks us every day, "Are we twins?"
- Juliet Masters discovered the flavors
of her childhood living in three distinct regions
of the world.
- New York wasn't that easy where we lived
and when we lived there.
So they took one look at their surroundings,
they were like,
"let's take our daughters to Jamaica and let's live
"in a tropical Island."
And one of the jobs in Jamaica is as a chef or a helper.
My parents didn't necessarily need a helper,
but we had Becky as part of our family.
She cooked for our family.
And I was to go into the kitchen with Becky
and watch how everything was from scratch.
Things that you make in Jamaica like Johnny cakes
and fried dumplings and festivals.
She might've been one of the first people
to start igniting the fires, that culinary desire
that I was going down.
In England, both of my aunts were entrepreneurs.
I have examples, living examples of people doing this.
I had my son, I was in my twenties.
I was working full-time for music for Def Jam Records
as an assistant.
And then I had my son.
They were like, "Okay, see you in six weeks."
I was like, "Oh no, no way, no, not six weeks.
"I will take care of my child rather than pay somebody else
"and I'll figure it out."
I got into catering
because catering you got paid 20 bucks an hour
and it was five hours shifts
so it was something that I could do.
Maybe I can go behind and start working
in the back of the house.
It was right then when I realized
that I really liked the preparation of food.
Researched the Natural Gourmet Institute.
It began there and just grew very organically.
- It wasn't a surprise to me that she chose this path.
What is more surprising is how successful it quickly became.
- I think Juliet was able to do it
because Justine was able to say,
"If you don't do it now,
"it may never be there for you again."
- Either you take this or you walk by this every day
and pissed off that you didn't
because you're gonna be living upstairs.
And I was like, "Oh shit, I better put a menu together."
No, I'm serious.
Basically, we broke it down.
We can do Jamaica, we can do England and we can do New York.
And let's pick a few things from those three places
and that'll be the menu.
- This is the type of space that when you see it,
it demanded to be born.
It is very in line with our personalities.
It's off the beaten path.
It's intimate, it's cozy, it's warm
'cause Juliet and I definitely didn't have a business plan
and definitely didn't have any money.
There was no option to fail here.
- As a woman,
you have maybe a few extra layers to push through
to get to where you're going.
You can't be afraid to do the heavy lifting
and the dirty work.
You can't stay in the box.
You have to be able to do whatever it takes.
- You have to pay attention as a woman.
- You have to pay attention to the details.
- You have to know everybody's position in your business
so that if they're not there, you can do their job
or you know that if they're doing their job well or not.
It's having to maybe even be more sharper
because you're a woman.
- We have a kitchen that is all male.
Sometimes as a woman, when you are the boss,
you have to work harder to earn your respect.
- To assert yourself as the boss.
To just do what I say please.
- People feel they have more leeway
with you when you're a woman.
There are more excuses or there's more of a conversation
than there needs to be.
And I feel as women, we're required
to engage our masculine energy in order to be the boss.
So it's important as a woman to do that,
but then to also find the balance
to do things that are feminine
so that you're balancing those energies.
- As a chef,
I'm aware that opportunities come knocking
and you have to have a certain toughness to answer the call.
As Hillary Sterling got opportunities,
not only did she answer them,
but she also rewrote the conversation
on what it is to be the best.
- Food is about passion and it's supposed to be fun.
And this is what we do for living and we chose it.
It didn't choose us.
We actually went out and sought this career
in this industry and just don't give up.
All right, let's go, I need 17 cacio.
One half, one no cheese, one no butter, one no pepper.
We do the same thing every day give or take.
A vegetable, a protein, a person.
We need four tomato pizzas, one pepperoni,
and one rapini please.
I got two more carrots guys.
If you want it, you can have it.
You just cannot give up.
And it doesn't matter
if you cry in the walk-in 'cause everyone has
and everyone does it.
Guys and girls don't be fooled,
just don't give up.
Honestly, I stand by that 100%
and allow you to be nurtured.
Ask questions and don't just assume.
Even if I'm crazy some days,
if you ask me a question, I'm always gonna stop
and give you some long answer or short answer
or I'm gonna help you through your day.
More carrots please.
Get it in the pan.
Let's go, I need one more onions Daniel
in the corner, come on.
We don't let people fail in this kitchen.
There's no heroes we'd like to say.
You're going down,
I'll be the first person on the line to dig you out
as long as you tried.
You guys fire seven more cocktail.
Fire three chicken.
Fire two tomato pizzas please.
This job doesn't end when the restaurant closes,
it never ends.
There's constant, constant studying that needs to get done.
And I think the smarter you are
and the more comfortable you are with food and knowledge
and cooking principles, you can go wherever you wanna go,
just don't give up.
Good morning to you, welcome.
- We're on our way to Vic's down in Noho.
Tell me what you love about this neighborhood?
- I think this neighborhood still has a little bit
of realness to it especially on Bowery over here,
but there's such a community.
There's seven to eight to nine restaurants
in literally half a block radius.
And it's really nice.
We see each other in the morning.
We say hi, we all get coffee at each other's places
and it's a little family oriented block.
Great Jones is only two blocks long.
Hey Art. - Hello.
- Look at this. - Hi.
- You have quite a bounty today.
- Yeah, what do you have here?
- What do we got?
- We got all this 50 pounds of food.
- Yeah sorry, my bad.
So we got the snap peas today from Phillips.
I think the most important thing is grazing at the market.
You gotta eat, right?
But, we have such an amazing opportunity
to actually taste food before we buy it.
So we have a whole market.
I mean, this stuff is all ordered and we go get it,
but if we don't go to the markets
and actually taste the food, what say we get home
and these taste like nothing?
- Yeah. - Sometimes I do feel guilty
if you're grazing too much
of the market like having breakfast.
- Thank you guys, see you later.
- Especially with berry season, you can get away
with so many.
- The Jewish delis in Sheepshead Bay she frequented
as a child are a far cry
from the incredible Italian dishes she delivers today.
- I grew up in Brooklyn, two parents, both working.
We did have the pleasure of having my grandparents living
in the same house.
So they came back and forth from Florida.
So six months of the year, the food was different.
My mom wasn't that into reinventing the wheel,
needless to say in food that's the nice way of saying it
so we ate a lot of takeout.
We ate a lot of cream cheese sandwiches.
This is like this one thing that haunts me still
to this day, but that's all my parents knew.
It's still the same neighborhood still
to this day in Brooklyn.
There's no fine dining out there.
There's nothing, but what is still there.
So I think it was more of like this interest.
My grandparents would come up from Florida
and then the food would be different.
The smells in the house would change every day
and you'd come home from school
and there was something that I'd never seen before,
I'd never gotten to eat.
But those smells, it's the smells.
It's my grandmother's stuffed cabbage.
It's all those things that kind of intrigued me.
This is a hot commodity in the kitchen.
Basil, we use so much basil in the kitchen
that as soon as it comes in,
the cooks that need it the most,
they will literally grab it, hide it and protect it.
- While vacationers and the New York elite
sipped their cocktails on the beaches of Montauk,
in her teenage years, Hillary Sterling worked
in the front of the house at two busy Long Island hotspots.
- One year I worked in a breakfast spot in the hotels
on the beach so it was totally different.
And one summer I worked in an Irish pub called O'Murphy's.
That was a family run restaurant
and I realized that I do love working
in smaller environments.
After college, I worked at a bar across from Wrigley
which I have to say was probably one of my more fun summers.
If you know anything about Cubs fans,
they've never won until a couple of years ago
so they drank a lot and they had a lot of fun.
- Hillary had banked up enough money to travel.
Along the way, she would discover a dish
that would forever follow her Cacio e Pepe.
- I was traveling with a friend from culinary school
and he's like, "I really wanna go to Milan."
I'm like, "Amazing, I've never been to Italy.
"I have money still, let's go."
And as we're getting to the airport,
he tells me he doesn't have any money.
So I got on the plane.
I found myself traveling by myself for months
and I loved it.
The next day I went and looked
at the Duomo and I had no one to look at it
and be like, "Oh my God, this is amazing."
And I was like,
"Well, I don't need anybody to say, it's amazing."
I was like, "This is amazing."
I met some people.
I found the hostel chain.
I went to Rome, I went to Sorento, I went to Naples.
I just kept going.
I started learning about Italian, real Roman classic food.
The trifecta as we call it in the kitchen,
cacio e pepe, amatriciana and carbonara.
And then I started eating them never knowing
that this is gonna follow me around forever, forever.
My lifelong passion is pasta with pepper.
In my memory, this was the beginning of my path
of falling in love with Italian food.
There is a code of cacio e pepe, no butter, no cream
and usually there's no parm either,
but we break some rules here.
- Hillary's career was launched
by working for two iron chefs, Bobby Flay and Mario Batali.
- I was actually super lost.
I remember I was sleeping on my sister's couch
on Thompson street.
I had literally no idea what to do
so I was answering Craigslist ads.
Christine Sanchez happened to actually call me back
and she took a shot on me at Mesa grill.
And the chef was out of town so he kind of showed up
and I'm just like in his kitchen not having a clue
what I was doing.
Bobby walks in the kitchen, tastes that cream sauce
and it was totally wrong.
It was roasted cream sauce.
I don't know how it was wrong.
And he's like, "Did you taste it?"
And I said, "No."
I don't know why I didn't taste it.
And he looks at me and he goes, "Never assume."
And then walked out of the kitchen.
He wasn't pleased.
And I still do line checks to this day, every day.
It was a really a rude awakening
of what New York restaurants were going to be like
at that time until you figured it out.
It was honestly still one of my favorite jobs.
It taught me a lot about getting along
with the staff front and back, being together,
being in a family.
It was a restaurant I really truly loved working in.
After Bolo and Mesa land,
I went to Lupa for three years and kind of fell in love
with that Italian food.
It brought me back to my solo days of traveling in Italy.
- Ayesha Nurdjaja stopped by
to make some pizzas with Hillary.
Ayesha runs the Mediterranean inspired restaurant Shuka.
She is a fellow lady boss
and one of Hillary's most valued friends.
- When I first started,
I went to Lidia Bastianich at Felidia
which was an amazing experience.
She had been an inspiration to me.
- Through this experience,
we've found it pretty beautiful
that a lot of a lot of us support each other
through this kind of crazy thing that we do.
Are you surprised?
- I'm not surprised at all.
I think we should, I think we should more.
- A lot of times we'll go to events
and there are other female chefs there
and then we try our best introduce ourselves,
"Hi, my name is Aisha.
"This is Hillary."
And then some women are standoffish.
And I don't know if it's a competitive thing
'cause there's such few women in the culinary field,
but I think as the days go on
especially from this year moving forward,
there hopefully will be more of a support for each other.
- Another prominent restaurant entrepreneur
is facing claims of harassment
as more accusations emerge against Mario Batali.
- Mario Batali, the celebrity chef who has been accused
by at least nine women of sexual harassment.
- Mario Batali has been taken off the show
amid sexual harassment allegations.
- The culture of our society is changing.
Mario Batali is at the center of a major conversation
about bad behavior and abusive power.
I knew coming here that she had previously worked for him.
I wondered if she'd had a similar story.
- I don't have a bad word to say.
I'm a worker.
I put my head down.
I did my job.
It was an honor to work for these people
and during their time and to be allowed to work
in the restaurants and to cook the food.
I don't have any stories.
I know it's crazy.
I don't know how I've gotten through all these years,
but I've made it.
I'm sure some of the behavior there is valid
in those people that felt that way.
They obviously felt that way
and they were obviously treated in a way that wasn't okay.
I happened to get out unscathed in this manner,
but I feel for them if that's how they felt.
If you don't feel comfortable in your job
and that's how you feel, then it is our jobs as managers
and owners and chefs to help them feel comfortable.
No one should feel uncomfortable in their position.
- So the thing that I feel like I had to do
as a young female chef early on
was kind of develop a pretty thick skin.
I have been an out lesbian since I was,
I don't know, 20 or something like that.
And in the kitchens,
of course some guy might say something sort of obnoxious
and I'd be like, "Please, have you seen my girlfriend?"
Or I had a crude cut back then
and I just looked pretty tough.
I think I've pretty much
just had like a don't fuck with me attitude
or I will hurt you
and maybe that's why I took up sword fighting later.
Or I just was like,
"I don't have time for that kind of bullshit."
So I just never even let it come into play.
I so quickly became a manager and a boss.
For me, it was always like we're not gonna run any kind
of restaurant like that.
We're not gonna act like that.
We're not gonna do anything that's inappropriate
because we have so much work to do.
And I actually am friends with pretty much all these guys
that have gotten in trouble.
It's a really weird place to be
because it's like, "Well, wait a minute,
"I don't even know you guys like that,
"but then I thought you knew the difference
"between work and play?"
Because I've been at parties with Mario
where he hasn't been this piggy guy.
I'm having a hard time with the,
how could you guys not know the difference
between work and play?
And I wrote this piece about how it's so frustrating
because I've had employees like that
and I got rid of them pretty quickly
because I don't have time for that crap.
We have so much to do in our stage
to make the whole team stop
and have to get rid of that player now
because they said the wrong thing to the server.
I just wanna punch those people.
It's like, come on that's not what we're doing.
This is work.
And we call it work and we go to work.
- I think as a mom, one of my fears for Fatima
has been it's such a male oriented industry.
Fatima of course just got into it
because of the love and passion for cooking.
Once she went to culinary school
and she acquired all that knowledge and technique,
will others be able to take her work seriously
and appreciate what a creative chef she is
and that she can be just as skilled, just as fabulous
as any other male chef can?
- Obviously working in New York City and working at Patina,
everyone in management was all male and I wasn't,
and I was very young.
And to me, it kind of fortified the reasons
why I wanted to make sure
that I was equal to everybody over there
'cause in the back of my head, I was still so conscious
about maybe not belonging
and maybe not having the same qualifications
as my male counterparts.
But the truth is that if anything,
I probably was even more qualified than them.
- You have to be like one of the boys.
You have to be tough, whatever that means.
When I first started, I started at a restaurant
that was run by a woman
so I didn't feel that when I first started out.
I felt really supportive female run kitchen.
Then I moved on and there might only be one
or two other women and you have all of these young men
who are cooking on the line and they'll make comments.
I think some line cook once called me Barbie chef
or chef Barbie or something like that.
People have said to me, "Oh, you're too pretty to be a chef.
"You're too small to be a chef."
Then you have to work that much harder to prove yourself.
You're always gonna come across those cooks,
those chefs in this industry who think that you can't do it
because you're a girl and you can't do it
'cause you look a certain way.
I witnessed and I experienced people
who were the harassers not only not lose their job,
but not even really get a slap
on the wrist and get promoted.
There's no reason to have so much screaming going on
in the kitchen and so much aggressive,
just loud banging on countertops,
aggressively throwing plates.
If I don't have this job, I won't have another job.
Nobody will hire me because I'm such a bad chef.
I'm such a bad pastry chef.
Yeah, I felt like my whole identity is wrapped up in food.
My whole identity is wrapped up in baking and cooking
for my whole entire life.
And all of a sudden it was like, "Wow, I'm crap at this."
That sucks, it sucks.
It's really hard to stand up for yourself
and I definitely didn't.
I didn't stand up for myself.
I didn't stand up for other people.
I have a ton of regrets about that.
I've somehow come out of all of this
and I have this platform.
And so now I have this responsibility
to start to speak about some of this stuff.
And I think that that's the way we're gonna make it better
because this industry should be really positive.
- It's just the culture that a kitchen brings
that it's just like very macho
and everyone's always whistling,
but it's also like for me, I was always just like,
"Well, you need to be able to handle that too."
- I used to just stand there and always say,
"Yes chef, yes chef."
Whatever they said, it doesn't matter how bad it is.
They throwing dish in your face
and then you always have to say yes chef
because you don't wanna lose the job.
- I think it's a really interesting point that you bring up
where you kind of have to accept this culture
in a kitchen where men are catcalling you
and whistling at you.
And at the end of the night, you get out of your chef's coat
and you put on a cute dress to get out
and go and have some drinks.
And everybody's like.
- You mean normal looking?
- Yeah, yeah, I mean, we are women.
We're allowed to be pretty in dresses with makeup on
and men just need to accept
that we could still be bad-asses in the kitchen.
- Okay so, the biggest thing is for me,
I remember walking into any kitchen that I work especially
for the first time
and you just have to have to accept or expect
that you're just gonna be harassed like crazy by everyone.
In those younger days, it was my mentality to just
be able to have thick skin and be okay with that.
- Fight back. - Not even fight,
you just accept it and just be like,
okay, they're gonna do it again.
It's just like, it is what it is.
- I don't, I fight back.
- You fight back?
- Honestly, fighting back just gets-
- Worse, worse. - Yeah, it gets worse
or super exhausting and you just need to ignore it.
And I feel like I remember telling other females.
They're like, "Oh, don't you get all weird
"when these guys do that?"
And you're just like, "Well, we're so used to it
"so it's whatever."
- Yeah, that's so sad.
It's so sad that at some point,
we've had to accept that as females in the kitchen.
But me personally,
I feel like as I got more confident working in a kitchen
and I realized I'm not gonna let these guys push me around.
If somebody said something to me, I'd be like,
"Shut the fuck up."
"Who are you?
"Leave me alone."
Just because I'm a chick doesn't mean
that you could treat me like that.
- There are 20 males in the kitchens of course
and it's only two females in that kitchen.
And of course, it feel like ridiculous and not confident
to work with them, then I have to push myself even more
to prove that hey I can do it.
- It's funny that every female kind of has that experience.
- There's a couple of guys that it took me a really,
really long time to get them to accept the fact
that I was A, was a woman,
B, that I'd only worked there a year
and I was being promoted past them.
Eventually, I got the guys but it took a while.
You'd wanna walk out of there and cry and be like,
"I can't believe these guys just tortured me all day."
But for some people, they'll walk away from that,
for other people, I was like, Goddammit, no way,
no way are these guys gonna break me.
- I didn't feel like I was good enough
to call myself a chef yet.
I hadn't sweated out in the kitchen of a restaurant yet.
It was very difficult for me to do that.
- She was always at the top of her class
with the cooking and everything,
but she would be like, "No, my food sucks.
"I don't know."
But we'll be like, "Esther, you're way too humble.
"Get over it, your food is really amazing.
"You're very talented."
And we always had to push that to her.
- It's hard and as women,
I think that one of my biggest struggles
is definitely the confidence issue.
I've always had that issue.
I just don't feel like I'm good enough.
- I had a guy once that we had a radio in the kitchen,
in my kitchen it doesn't exist anymore.
I like it nice and quiet and peaceful.
And at the end of service, he hopped up on the table,
sat down on the table, put the music on, still cooking.
And I asked him to not do that.
And next night, same time, same thing.
Next night, same time, same thing
until eventually he understood that I had earned my title
of a sous chef and I could still cook
and I was still just as good as he was.
The first couple of days, I got really mad about it.
And I was like,
"I don't understand why he's not listening to me."
And then I kind of had to delve in
and figure out where the line was?
What he needed from me and what he wanted to see from me?
And then to earn my title
and to actually for him to respect them.
- But don't you think that that's female perspective
to earn the title?
Because I mean, the last time I took over a kitchen
was three years ago and I felt the same way.
I had earned the title when I first got there.
And the first thing I did was I started to clean
because the kitchen was just not to my standard
and what I wanted to do.
And then I was doing all the butchering
and showing each person that I can work each station.
And I feel like another person can walk into that kitchen
and then visit the chef,
And then from day one, it starts to go from.
I think that's a female perspective.
- Another person meaning a man?
- A man can walk into their kitchen and say,
"We're changing the menu today and this is what it is."
Not even say what my name is.
I really think that that's a female perspective
of how to do things.
I don't think it's wrong or right,
I'm just saying that that's what my experience was.
- The younger you are, the kind of more insecure you are
as a female in this male world.
And I think as you do it,
you do become a lot more confident
and you do understand I'm gonna get respect from people
by showing them what to do, by showing them I can hang.
And I wonder if a male thinks the same thing when he comes
into the kitchen?
- He probably doesn't, but that's what separates us.
Some cooks really like working for women,
some cooks obviously don't.
But I think I have a breed
of cooks in here that are sensitive,
they're caring and they help each other.
And that machismo attitude doesn't really fit
in here very well.
- That's the environment that you've created.
- So those guys don't last here very long
and it's not because of me,
it's because of the other staff members.
If you can't fit in and respect the kitchen
that they believe in and working in,
then there's no place for you.
- I feel for women, it's easier to get intimidated by men.
When she was still in college,
she'd be weeping and crying.
And I still remember one conversation I had with her
and she said, mom, "There's this one chef.
"He asked us to put a steak together.
"He took a bite of it and he threw the plate
"and he said, 'What's this shoe-leather?'"
- The more confident you have in your craft and your skill,
the more that you're working,
the more your repertoire grows,
all those things come full circle.
And you're able to basically exist in your space creatively
as a chef
and not worry too much about what's happening around you.
- You don't learn by sort of just taking in advice.
I think that you learn by sort of example,
people setting examples for you.
And that's certainly how I've learned.
I don't always see things sort of in black and white,
but you're right, there is a sense,
there is a different energy,
I feel like when you have sort of a mixed team, right?
It's not just all boys.
It's not just all girls.
And I feel like you wanna sort of strike the right balance.
And it could be all female, it could be all male,
but it has to be one that is based on respect.
And I think that the culture of restaurants
and sort of cooking in general has been very throw a fight
if that is a word that I could is very sort of dude,
tough guys throwing pans, swearing a lot,
sexist, racist jokes it's okay
and there's an absolute disregard for sort of humanity
when you really look into it.
So I'm a little bit more protective I would say
of my cooks, female cooks.
You have to watch yourself
and you have to protect yourself and know your rights
and really seek a place 'cause you don't need all
that macho to cook well, you don't.
- And for every place that does treat their cooks like that,
there's a place
that treats their cooks like you treat your cooks.
So that was something that I learned
was how to find those places
where I was gonna be treated with respect.
- Because I feel like honestly, this might sound cheesy,
but a happy, respectful place produces food
that is more delicious than one that is filled
with antagonism, and anger and rage.
- Yeah, and food is love.
You can't cook good food without love.
- But then, that is too sort of female to talk that way.
You know what I mean?
And I think even women's chefs,
they sort of take on a persona of,
if I'm gonna survive in this kitchen,
I have to walk a little bit like this
and I have to sort of be hard
and yell like the best chefs out there.
It's that kind of crazy mentality
that I knew long time ago
that I didn't want to have anything to do with.
I mean, don't we all wanna be treated
with respect and kindness?
But at the same time, I'm not talking soft.
You know what I mean?
Opposite of hard doesn't have to be soft.
It could be disciplined, it could be well managed.
And it's about sharing knowledge, passing on knowledge,
All of that doesn't have to be hard at all.
- That my love for food and preparing food
and serving the food, those are all elements
of being a chef.
It's not just being able to cook it,
but loving to serve it.
Being able to say this comes from my heritage
and I want to share this with you.
- Being a chef isn't really just about food.
To be a successful chef is more about your environment
and about your kitchen, and it's about your staff,
it's about being a leader.
And what makes an incredible leader?
There's no male or female.
A good leader is a good leader.
Why do I have to be labeled as a female chef?
I'm just a chef.
I can do whatever you do.
Don't look at me like, I'm lesser
or I can't do a certain thing
because of my size or the way I look.
- We just wanna be in the same category.
- Yeah. - - Yeah.
- If you're in a place in a restaurant working for somebody
or somebody's acting inappropriate, bring it up,
talk about it or get out if it's not the right place.
There's so many other restaurants that need your talent
so you don't have to put up with that stuff.
- What would you give advice for a woman
who was dealing with something like that in the workplace?
- "Is this Chef Fatima?"
I'm like, "Yes."
And she was like,
"Hi I was actually doing some research
"and your name popped up and we're actually casting
"for the next season.
"I would really love if you could join us
"for the next season."
- Oh my God.
- And I was just like, "What?"
I didn't even know what the fuck to say.
I was like, "Wait, you want me to?"
No, she wants me to be one of the contestants.
She's like, "Yes and I'm gonna send you all the paper work."
She's like, "Just talk to me for like five minutes.
"I would love to know more about you."
And she's all energetic and shit.
My fucking heart is pounding.
I was like, "Oh my God, you gotta be fucking kidding."
I was like, "I can't do "Top Chef" right now.
- I feel blessed
that I got to spend the day with Fatima Ali.
- Don't worry, you'll warm into it.
- At the time we filmed with her,
she shared with us her story
from getting on "Chopped".
- I was 21 at the time
and I didn't think I was even close to capable
of doing something like that.
I tried out for the show, went on the show,
ended up winning by a fluke
and that kind of opened up
this whole other aspect to cooking.
I really want to be that Pakistani girl
that other Pakistani girls can look at
and be like, "You know what, I can do it too."
- To meeting her hero Padma Lakshmi.
- One of the shows that I watched growing up
was Padma Lakshmi's show.
She had this travel show
where she would go around through India
and sit with all of these villagers
and kind of recreate recipes.
And I thought that it was so fascinating to watch someone
who looked like me being able to do this in her country.
And it made me so hopeful to think
that maybe one day I could do that too.
I was obsessed.
She was actually the only brown woman
on that cooking channel.
She's opened a lot of doors in a lot of different ways
and I want her to like my food, I do.
I want her to respect me as a chef.
Before I knew it, I was accepted onto the new season.
Was told we were gonna be flying to Colorado.
Had never been there before and was just incredibly nervous.
Hi Padma, hi Tom, hi.
- What did you make for us?
It'd be an avalanche, do it, do it.
That charred padi feeling in here.
- Being able to watch someone on TV growing up
and then getting to meet them
and actually have a relationship
with them was really wonderful.
The more they tasted my food,
the more they understood
what I was trying to accomplish.
And I thought that was really heartening
and it was definitely a confidence booster.
I was just having so much fun challenging myself
in these kinds of like dire straits.
I love that kind of chaos
and I love that adrenaline rush.
I've always been pretty competitive.
- To watch Fatima grow into this extremely skilled
and crafty chef who comes up
with the most innovative recipes,
who has taken her inspiration
and influences from her cultural heritage and background
and what she grew up with and taken all the fabulous things
that she's learned in college working
with all these wonderful chefs,
taken French techniques
and kind of amalgamated and collaborated everything
and put it together
and has come up with a whole new world of Pakistani food.
And that is what makes me super proud as a mom.
That's actually been a wonderful thing to watch,
to see her grow into such a talented chef.
- Thanks mom.
- Yeah, there we go.
- Yeah, I was really excited about having the show air,
making plans to possibly think
about opening up a restaurant in New York.
There were a lot of things
that I was looking forward
to doing once we wrapped up with filming.
The day after I landed in New York, I got a call
from my aunt who needed my help taking care
of my grandmother who had fallen ill.
While I was staying with her,
I noticed that there was an ache in my left shoulder.
I was sleeping in one of those hospital's recliner chairs.
I hadn't been exercising.
And so I shrugged it off.
So about August of 2017 when I came back,
while I was working there at the U.S. open,
I had a huge VIP table that I was cooking fresh pasta for.
And while I was flipping this pan of pasta,
the ache in my shoulder just grew exponentially overnight.
My shoulder had swollen up so much
that the bartender was handing me a bag of ice to put on it.
And he took one look at me and he was like,
"Chef, your shoulder is huge.
"You should go to a doctor."
And that took me about three days to get to an orthopedic.
And he took one look at me during his physical exam.
I burst into tears 'cause I was in so much pain
that he knew something wasn't right.
And he got me an MRI that very same day.
He thought it was a good idea for me to call someone
from my family to help me through
because he had this strange feeling
that it might be more serious than he was anticipating.
And I'll never forget hanging up the phone
and kind of being numb and being really scared
that something really ominous might be in my future.
And I called my brother who was in Sydney, Australia.
He told me not to worry
that he was gonna get on the next flight over.
He called my mom who was in Palm Springs at the time.
And we ended up going to see this oncologist in Long Island,
but my mom was just not convinced,
call it a mother's instinct
that she just wanted to get a second opinion.
And thankfully, we got that second opinion
from doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
In the meantime, I started losing sensation
in the left side of my face.
My brother and my mom just knew that they had to rush me
to the emergency room
and thankfully they did at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
We got there at five in the morning.
And within five days I was sitting
with my now oncologist.
His name was Dr. Wexler.
And he was holding my hand telling me
that I had sarcoma, which was a malignant tumor.
And being 28, healthy, a non-smoker,
getting a cancer diagnosis is just something
that nobody can prepare you for.
Hair loss, infertility, weight gain, weight loss,
hot flashes, early menopause, you name it.
He's going for all of these things
and I'm just nodding my head going like,
"Okay, I can deal with that.
"Okay, I can deal with that."
And I just had one question for him.
I looked at him and I was like,
"Am I gonna lose my eyebrows?"
And he looked at me and he was like, "Yeah."
And I burst into tears.
To me, that was just like such an emotional thing
for me to have to go through being 28 and not knowing
what was gonna happen in my life.
Yeah, it's a lot.
- Oh, it's been very difficult.
It's been extremely intense, very devastating
for us as a family.
I think there are days when it's just tough
to see her go through it.
It's not been easy,
but she's a real fighter.
She's a trooper, she hasn't given up.
And I guess being a chef like I said,
food is such a comforting thing
for her that even through her journey with cancer,
she continues to go back to either cooking
and even eating her food.
I'm sorry I got distracted.
- No, it's okay, it's okay.
- But, it's been difficult for us as a family.
It came as a huge shock.
- Let's be realistic.
She is not an ordinary person.
She is very, very strong in a lot of ways
which you have never seen her before.
So that's her.
And she's quite unique in that sense.
- Thank you.
- And it's been a rough road for all of us,
but we're nearly there now.
So I'm hoping that it will be behind us.
- It's something that doesn't leave you,
but it's something that you kind of get used to every day.
I'm definitely not the same person
that I was before I was diagnosed with cancer,
but it makes you really appreciate
so many things about your life.
It's been a really tough journey for me.
It's been a really tough journey
for my family, but now that having gone through that
and seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,
almost being done with treatment, yeah it's amazing.
I've been incredibly lucky having the kind of support system
that I have around me during this really horrible time
in my life and that has made it impossible
for me to be anything but positive.
Just having all these wonderful people around me pushes me
to make sure that I'm okay.
I have to believe that everything will work out
because I truly believe that it will.
- New York, please welcome Fatima Ali.
- So in July I had clear scans.
I was technically cancer-free and I had this weird ache
in my left hip after we moved to Los Angeles
and I had this nagging feeling that something wasn't right.
So we went back to New York,
got another PET scan and my doctor sat us down
and they were like, "Look, the cancer's back.
"It's metastasized, the chemo has not worked."
And I looked at my doctor and I was like,
"Tell me straight, how long do I have?"
And he's like, "A year."
It's a lot.
- Yeah, that's a lot to hear.
- Well, I get to cross this off my bucket list.
This is huge.
Honestly, I have so many restaurants I wanna go
to around Europe.
You're obviously invited so is Portia.
And go to Italy, go to France, go to Spain,
go to South Africa, go on a Safari.
So many things I want to do.
It tastes like water.
- You said the other day,
when you were talking to friends,
you were like, "It doesn't feel like me.
"I'm watching these things."
- Yeah well, it doesn't feel like much my life.
Yeah, it doesn't.
- So what does it feel like?
- I know all these things have happened
and I know I've done them, but it's like, I don't know.
It doesn't feel like it's still my life.
I watch these clips, like I said,
I know that isn't me.
I may know what that feels like.
I know what it felt like to be in that moment,
but I don't know, it just doesn't feel real.
People say the craziest things to me
and I'm like, "I'm not that."
It's like I don't feel like what they're saying.
- What are they saying?
- Because they're like, "You're such an inspiration."
And all these really, really nice things
and in my head I'm just like, "I'm just me."
I just said and did whatever I thought.
Being in the moment, being myself
so it just feels like even more of a fraud.
I just feel like even more of a fraud.
- You feel like a fraud?
- [Yeah. - {Mohammad] Why?
Why do you feel like a fraud?
- Because, I don't know,
I'm not an inspiration.
- But you can't say you're an inspiration
or you can't decide that.
That's not how it works.
When you look ahead, does anybody inspire you?
- Lots of people inspire me.
- And what do you think,
they wake up every morning and be like,
"I don't wanna be an inspiration."
- No. - "Or I'm trying
"to be an inspiration."
- It's hard to talk about someone
that isn't with us anymore that we lost.
I don't even think there are words to describe the amount
of aspiration that can be drawn from her story.
- She was incredible on so many levels.
First and foremost, it's just one of those people
who instantly when you met,
you were like just a magnet.
She was just an absolute magnetic person
to the truest degree of it.
- She's special, she sparkles.
Her spirit, her energy, it draws you in.
- It's hard, she was one of a kind.
- She was talented, she was fierce, she was funny,
she was beautiful.
She was absolutely,
but I think that's what made her great too.
- She's a beautiful ball with contradiction.
She's a tomboy, but she's girly.
She's fearless, but she still questions for herself.
She is wise and mature, but she's still excited
about life and learning new things
and experiencing the world.
She's ambitious and driven,
but still just wants to spend time
at home with her family and the people that she loves.
- She was the strongest, strongest person I know.
- She is truly the best of all of us
and everything that we can hope to be as human beings.
- She never had it easy and took everything
with a smile and with strength and with positivity.
So I think that shows how powerful her life was
that she was able to keep it shining no matter
how dark it was becoming.
- We had somehow found each other in this life as friends.
It was a very kismet thing
and we loved her like our own, like our sister.
And she's unreplaceable and we just had the privilege
and the burden of trying to carry on her legacy,
carrying on everything she did
and I hope we make her proud.
- So thank you so much Padma for taking some time
to chat about Fatima.
You know Fatima mentioned in many places
that you were a big influence and hero on her.
How do you feel about that?
- I'm happy she saw me that way.
I'm sad that I am the only one she saw for so long.
I had my own version of that and so I'm always flattered.
I'm always pleased that I could do that
for Fatima especially.
She just was such a bright light in the kitchen.
I was flattered.
- And then she gets this horrible news
that she's got sarcoma.
What was your reaction to that?
- I mean, I was devastated.
I have to tell you I can count on one hand the amount
of South Asian contestants we've had across all the seasons
of "Top Chef".
Not only because of that,
but because she was such a special human being
and it just seems so cruel
because she was so young and she had so much going
for her and it's never the boring ones that cancer gets.
It's always these sort of bright, charismatics,
special, special people.
And Fatima was like that.
She had a great sense of humor.
She was witty and whip smart and a pleasure to have around.
And you couldn't look at her smiling face
without smiling yourself.
- Just so you know what happened.
It came back and then we lost her.
- It was terrible.
It was absolutely devastating.
And when we heard that the cancer had spread,
I kinda knew that was the end.
Then I came to the hospital a few times.
I met her sisters and they're such a wonderful family
and they reminded me of my family.
I saw that look of worry
for your child that I saw on Fatima's mother's face.
I saw it on my own mother's face when I had a car accident.
I know that look.
It's the look of a mother who feels completely helpless
and no mother should ever feel that way about their child.
I grew to be really fond
of her parents and her brother Mohammad.
And I came to see Fatima as kind of a younger sister.
I'm very close to my family
and my cousins function like my siblings,
but here was a sister in the kitchen.
But then when I got to know her family
and her again under these very extreme circumstances,
I kind of fell in love with her.
And I guess I saw my younger self
in her too and I wanted her to have the opportunities
that maybe I hadn't had or women
in my generation didn't have.
And I'm just sorry she didn't get that chance.
Fatima may have been inspired in her life
by me again, which is super flattering and such an honor
but in the end of her life,
she was quite inspiring
in the way she trudged forward full steam ahead
and made plans, started writing
because she was in a hospital bed, went on Ellen,
did whatever she could to remain active in the face
of such monumental opposition because of her cancer.
I'm just sad.
I think about her.
I look at pictures of her and she had so much possibility
and she saw so much possibility.
This is a girl who grew up in a school in Pakistan saying,
"I wanna be on "Top Chef".
And then she's on "Top Chef".
This is a girl who admired Susan Sarandon
and somehow she got to meet Susan Sarandon.
And then she got to go
on "The Ellen Show" and she was a force of nature.
And I'm just sorry that cancer took her away
from us so early.
Really, what can you say about a 27 year old
who gets Ewing sarcoma who hasn't really had a chance
to spread her wings?
That she was kind, that she was funny
that she was a good writer, that she loved really hard
and was very warm and there for all her friends and family,
that she was a magical thinker
and made you laugh all the time.
- Everyone at home who voted for fan favorite,
I have good news.
I'm announcing it now.
The winner and the recipient of $10,000
is Fatima Ali!
- I think the most important thing
for female chefs in general is just to build each other up.
I think having that kind of network
and reaching out to one another and having the opportunity
to collaborate is so important.
And that's the only way we can become better and rise up.
And I think that's the most exciting thing
is having the kind of infrastructure
all around the world really,
having these really fantastic female chefs helming kitchens
and being able to use each other as resources.
- My inspiration, I know this is so cheesy,
but I have to say it, it's my grandma.
How can it not be?
She taught me how to love food.
She taught me how to cook for people.
- In her heart, family is really precious to her
that's number one.
In our culture, it's very hard to express verbally,
but we know from how they look at her,
how they treat her, it's like beyond words.
It's amazing what she accomplished
and I'm very proud of her too.
- Thank you.
I was a nobody.
I didn't really have chef friends
or industry people or whatever.
I was just so young.
It was hard because I had to make the mistakes to learn.
And I guess that's sort of my personality too.
I'm very stubborn.
I just have to do it my own way
and figure it out because I feel like you have
to make every experience your own.
Somehow I managed to put something together.
- I would definitely say that The Edge was born
from Juliet and myself taking a leap.
There's this quote, "Leap and the net will appear."
Thank goodness the net appeared
'cause we leaped off the cliff.
And I think you don't have all your ducks in a row
but you take risks and chances anyway.
Of course, you try to be as organized
as possible and as researched as possible,
but sometimes you're not completely clear on what it is
that you want to do and how you wanna do it,
but you just have to throw yourself into it.
I will say that I'm tremendously proud of my sister.
I also have been humbled by the fact
that she did always tell me that it's okay,
this is gonna work out
and we're gonna do something great together.
She led the way to create this space.
It has been an absolute joy to watch.
- I can't imagine having this place now without Justine.
I mean, she's such an integral part of the everyday
of the restaurant and feeling the way it feels
and she's the most trusted person in my life.
Tell each other, honestly and truthfully
when things go wrong or right.
She's the person I can celebrate this with
and she's on the battlefield with me
and I couldn't ask for a better person to be
on the battlefield with me.
I mean, this is my sister who is not my twin but my twin.
- And then they cleaned the green beans.
There's no tops on them?
Fuck yeah, it's green bean time.
I just said fuck yeah, it's green bean time.
Totally 100%, it's amazing.
Who's more excited about green beans?
Obviously we are.
I've worked alongside some amazing chefs and restaurateurs.
And maybe not by coincidence,
some of the hardest working most innovative
and passionate among them have been women.
Missy Robbins is a woman that stands behind
what she believes in.
The importance of ingredients, the integrity of flavor
and the delivery of honoring tradition in tandem
with authentic Italian hospitality.
To this day,
we still exchange recipes and stories of travel.
For that matter, one of the greatest things about working
with Vicki Freeman is her love of travel,
her love of exploration
and her love of finding the next best thing.
Whether it's something new or a time honored tradition
at risk of being lost,
Vicky is always a proponent of capturing the wisdom
of travel so that we can take that back to the restaurants
and learn, teach, and share that inspiration with our teams.
I love travel so much.
It has become one of my greatest teachers.
I think part of our industry that is so special
is this kind of education, the constant vulnerability
and the constant growth it brings.
- My career has taken
this interesting full circle path,
which I don't think is,
if it happens for you, great, if it doesn't, that's great.
I started with Sohui at The Good Fork over a decade ago
and I did this big kind of circle and she was always there
as a mentor for me throughout the whole thing.
Returning to her kitchen, it's such a sense of homecoming.
It's not about me saying,
"Hey, when you met me, I didn't know anything
"and look at me now a decade later,
"I'm this chef and I know all this stuff."
I just wanna show her how important that relationship
is to me.
That mentorship, it'll make your career.
I'm emotional about it because it's those good mentors,
we owe them everything.
And if I can do that for somebody,
that will be better than anything I ever cook.
- I mean, we've never worked together before,
we just ate together.
And it's just one meeting planning the menu
and we make all things happen.
So I said the more the merrier
and whoever said girls can't get along?
- That's just crazy.
I've never heard that.
I honestly think that
that comes from women having to be so competitive
in a man's world.
For so many years,
people have grown up thinking
there's not enough room for me.
There's only gonna be one woman at this event
and that's not true anymore.
So we don't have to act like that anymore.
- Cool. - Cheers.
- Cheers, let's rule the world!
- It actually boils down to a very simple, chefy kind of way
of thinking for me.
I've seen so much and I've evolved so much
in this business and television shows,
and restaurants and seasonality, different environments.
It kind of comes down
to I said I like female sort of nurtured food.
And I think what I mean
by that is not necessarily just a gender,
but I like the sensitivity
that maybe we've just sort of put on females,
but I actually love so many ingredients
and so many different kinds of people.
And I think about it as if I'm at the farmer's market
and there's all these varietals of heirloom tomatoes
and I don't have a favorite one.
I just like all of them
because they're all unique and all so special.
And so now I'm gonna have to buy like 20 of them
because I wanna celebrate all of it.
For me, that's exactly what we should look at people like,
and food and all of our traditions and innovativeness.
There's a lot of information here
and we need to celebrate and take care of that angle of it
because that actually is the most important thing
about the planet.
- You plan a lot.
You're sitting over there, you make plans for your life.
You make plans for your work,
plans to open up a restaurant, plans to travel.
And sometimes you just don't get
that timeline the way you wanted it.
And I think for me,
the biggest takeaway from this whole experience
is that you just got to do it
and it's just really pushed me to make things happen now.
When I was younger,
I think I always had all these big dreams in my head
and I was maybe a little bit hesitant to always follow them,
but there's no holding back anymore.
- This is the story of a woman and her name is Chef.