How easy is it to be a chef and a mother in 2023?

Only 6% of the world’s Michelin-star chefs are women. In the UK women represent 8% of Michelin-star chefs, Chefs Pencil, 2022.  

In America 25.2% of chefs are women and 74.8% of chefs are men.  

If we want more women at the top, the industry needs to better support and facilitate running a top restaurant with a family life. “More and more women are asking for a better work-life balance,” says Heidi, while at the same time, more women are also opting not to have children and focusing on their careers. 

We spoke to Chef Founder, Betty Cuthbert who runs her own incredibly successful café restaurant in East London, The Allotment Kitchen. Betty is currently 22 weeks pregnant. We sat down for a coffee with Betty and asked her how she was feeling about becoming a mother whilst running a team, kitchen and restaurant.  

Can you tell us a little bit about the Allotment Kitchen? How did your career lead you to the Allotment Kitchen? 

I have always loved food, having studied abroad in Italy and falling in love with Sicilian cuisine. I started my career after university in the management side of restaurants, but quickly realised I wanted to make cooking my job so became a private chef on the side. I decided to take the leap and go full-time as a private chef, which developed into a catering business running events and weddings. The pandemic really took its toll and I decided to close that business, as it relied so heavily on large gatherings. I then found myself jobless in March 2020 and was looking around for new opportunities. We had done a small hen do at Stepney City Farm pre-pandemic and so when I found out the onsite cafe was vacant I applied with my sister-in-law, Lucy, (who had also lost her job as a restaurant manager). It's a lovely little spot, with lots of outdoor seating and produce available to use from the farm. We opened it together with one other chef on board after a quick DIY refurb in May 2020 as a takeaway-only cafe, with fingers and everything else crossed that it would work out.

So I guess you could say The Allotment Kitchen was born out of desperation rather than anything else!

How much did you know about maternity before planning to start a family?  

I only knew what I had heard from friends and family who worked in office jobs, but no one was in a similar situation to me.

“I found it incredibly hard to find a useful template for how to structure the maternity pay, being not only in hospitality (famously lagging behind in most HR practices!) but also the co-director of the business.”

I could find a lot of information relating to your rights as an employee, or how to write a pregnancy risk assessment in the workplace, but very little about the financials. After a conversation with my accountant, I decided that it basically boiled down to a negotiation between me and my business partner.

How do you feel about your future in terms of having a family and running a restaurant? 

Short term- I am incredibly grateful to have such a fantastic team who I am training to take over from me from the end of May until I return from maternity leave next year.

“It helps that my business partner is family so she is very excited about a new member of the family and not resentful of me taking time off.”

Long term I'm not so sure. With your first child, you have no idea what to expect, so I'm purposefully keeping my plans very open.

Do you think there is a way that hospitality can make it work for mothers who are chefs? 

“Yes- it's about flexibility. It sounds so basic but I think dialogue with the employee about what they actually need and would find helpful is so important (Countertalk do a lot to raise awareness about this).”

Throughout my pregnancy, I have suffered from awful sickness, so I changed my rota so that the KP swapped with me and came in to unpack the deliveries to give me an extra hour in bed/with my head down the toilet! My friend has just got a job at Quo Vadis, which has enough staff to enable parents to take adequate time off and not do too many strenuous shift patterns.

How have your colleagues responded to your pregnancy? 

They are very excited to have another girl around (we are a 95% female team)!

Have you witnessed any other issues around women telling their employer that they were pregnant or trying for a baby during your career? 

No, but the first restaurant I worked in was not particularly understanding with the only mother on the management team and - shock horror- she left within 3 months.

As an owner of a restaurant, how would you feel if a female member of your team told you they were pregnant? How would that impact your business. It’s interesting to have your view as both a woman raising a family and as someone who runs a hospitality business.  

1) Delighted for them

2) Be straight on the phone with the accountant to work out how we would make it work.

“As a relatively new business, we don't have huge reserves in the bank, so I'd be working out how it'd be possible to top up their SSP, but I think there are other factors like ensuring they know they have a job to come back to and being as open and flexible with shifts/ weekends off that go a long way to making them feel supported.”

Initially having to bend over backwards to work around someone's new schedule might seem like an inconvenience, but my take is that's much less of a faff than having to recruit and train someone from scratch if they leave.

Do you feel as though you've always had all of the information about what it means to have a career as a chef and raise a family?

No, but that's because I was so focused on work/socialising in my twenties then not going bust in the pandemic etc to even think about having a baby! The stats around juggling childcare costs and commitments with work are pretty staggering, so I'm quite glad I didn't do too much Googling before getting pregnant!

“I have no choice but to figure it out and make it work with my husband.”

At Otolo, we’re on a mission to improve retention in the hospitality industry and to improve the working lives of those who choose this amazing industry for their careers. Growing and raising a family is a major part of life and we want to understand how hospitality stands up across the board.

Parents in Hospitality Survey

We launched the Parents in Hospitality Survey on International Women’s Day on 8th March.

We’ll be announcing the results of the survey at the end of March 2023. The more people that fill in the survey, the better insight we can gain into where we stand as an industry. Regardless of gender or whether or not you have children, we want to hear from you. It takes less than 5 minutes!

Fill in the survey here.

Register to have the results sent directly to you here.