The male boss who burned my hands with a hot pan every night: Top chef and MasterChef judge ANNA HAUGH’s devastating expose of kitchen sexism – including female chefs groped and bombarded with explicit images

Every night, the senior chef would do it. I’d be standing at the pass, where dishes are finally dressed before they go out to customers, and he would deliberately come at me with a hot pan. On purpose, he would burn me.

Why? I was baffled by his hatred of me – real, visceral hatred, it seemed. Was it because I was a young woman? Because I had potential to be as good as him? He was a classic bully.

That was more than a decade ago, but plenty of men still bully and humiliate women in the restaurant industry today. I hear the stories from female chefs every day, which is why Jason Atherton’s comments last week were so bizarre.

A Michelin-starred chef and owner of six restaurants in the UK, Atherton told The Times he had ‘not seen’ sexism in today’s professional kitchens, it was best not to dwell on the past and ‘there is way too much focus on our industry’ because of its attitude to women.

Personally, I felt confused. I wondered how somebody as successful and as bright as him could have such a poor grasp of reality. When you’re not affected by the negative impact of sexism, or you’re not insulting women, or you’re not being inappropriate, maybe you think the problem isn’t there because it isn’t you. That is the bones of sexism.

Atherton’s comments were not just poorly judged, but poorly timed. They were published just after this year’s Michelin Guide Awards which gave only one female chef a star. 

In fact, his words sparked such outrage that 70 female chefs – including me – signed an open letter, condemning the sexism and inequality we have faced in the hospitality business, prompting what many are calling the restaurant industry’s #MeToo reckoning.

For the truth is, the magnitude of sexist behaviour – even sexual harassment – that young women still endure in professional kitchens up and down the country today is shocking. And it has to stop.

I’ve heard of women in kitchens receiving unsolicited ‘d**k pics’ from male chefs, most of them married and some famous enough to have been on TV.

A young woman chef I know was working in a Michelin-starred kitchen in London in 2021, when her Head Chef and Sous Chef joked about ‘spit-roasting’ her. In the same kitchen, another male colleague asked her during service: ‘Do you make sex tapes with your boyfriend? Can I watch?’

When she worked at a London fine dining restaurant in 2022, she suffered sexual and derogatory comments about her body, including one chef telling her: ‘You were skinny when you joined, now you’re fat.’

Another woman chef left professional kitchens in 2022 after appalling treatment at the hands of male colleagues – including one incident of a male chef inserting his finger in between her buttocks when she was bending down to pick up a pan.

I grew up in Tallaght, a working-class area of Dublin where there is a lot of drug abuse and unemployment. I remember taking some friends home to my parents after school one day and I could see they were amazed that my dad had made sandwiches – and that he was not abusive or an addict.

The only other time I’ve witnessed the same level of surprise is on the faces of male chefs when they discover that women can stand the pressure of a professional kitchen just as well as the men. That we can do more than just the pastry section, and that we are talented in our own right, not just ‘pretty good, for a woman’.

My first proper job in a kitchen was at L’Ecrivain, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Dublin. I was surrounded by gifted women who were in control and the topic of gender never came up. It just wasn’t a factor in our work.

When I moved to London in my early 20s, I joined a new kitchen and attitudes were very different. The initial reaction among the men was: Ooh, there’s a girl in the kitchen, who’s going to get to ride her?’

I was told women can’t cook and one chef pulled me aside to say: ‘If you get pregnant, you’re leaving.’

Much of what happened to me was frankly against the law, even 20 years ago.

When I went to the loo, I was expected to press through a tight corridor past male colleagues using the toilet. A male colleague once deliberately stood in my way without his trousers or boxers on, expecting me to squeeze through the narrow space past his naked lower half.

I was told on a regular basis by male counterparts that women ‘aren’t good’ at being professional chefs, and though I knew instinctively this was rubbish, when I looked around, I could only count on the fingers of one hand the number of women who had made it to the top of the profession. Why were they being held back?

Still, I befriended a sous chef at that kitchen – he was so nice to me, really funny – and he gave me lots of attention.

One day we were prepping before service and I mentioned my boyfriend in passing conversation. That was it. He was horrible to me from that point onwards. He didn’t even acknowledge me. At first I blamed myself. I must have done something wrong – maybe I’m not good enough or fast enough, I thought. 

And then I realised it wasn’t that at all. It was because my value, in his eyes, lay not in my cooking, or even my character. The simple fact was I had a boyfriend, so I was no longer of interest to him.

But the worst, most disgusting behaviour I had to bear was from the bully with the hot pan.

It was an extremely tough kitchen and the rule was, every time a plate was being dressed before it went out, anyone who was not busy should come up to the pass and help because there were so many final details.

I wanted to be involved, to learn, but every time I came up to help, he would burn me. He would put a pan on the back of my hands and say: ‘Move! You’re too slow, get out of the way.’

But I wasn’t – and it didn’t matter where my hands were. He would do it every single day.

My hands looked like they had cornflakes on them, I had so many burns.

There is no way that no body in that kitchen noticed how often he was burning me. But people were busy and stressed and no one said anything.

Imagine that. You are in the middle of doing your job to the highest possible standard and your male superior inflicts punishing physical pain on you in front of your colleagues. No one reacts, or they pretend not to see it happen.

Eventually, I did stand up to him. As I went to dress a plate, I saw him coming towards me with a pan in his hand, hovering above mine, but this time I grabbed his wrist, looked him in the eye and said: ‘No.’

He didn’t do it again after that.

But he did continue to actively try to sabotage my work – though often I saved his. Something he was making would be over-reducing and I would come along and pull the pan aside. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did it deliberately. For him, it was all about power and making me as uncomfortable as possible. He was an awful human being.

I have thousands of stories of terrible outbursts, too. I always say it’s ironic that women are called emotional when, with a man, one minute he’s angry, the next he’s sad, and oh look, now he’s moody because a woman hasn’t given in to his grim sexual suggestion.

You get men in kitchens in their early 20s who still have hormones like teenagers and need to learn how to regulate their emotions and communicate their feelings. It’s a skill, but for some reason they haven’t been taught it and the ones who bear the brunt of it are women.

To be fair, it’s not just women who are bullied – I saw men crumble at work, too. If a man was short or feminine-looking or perhaps slim rather than bulky, he would get a lot of abuse.

One of the chefs used to severely bully an Indian kitchen porter called Adi (not his real name) who couldn’t speak English and had a disability.

The chef would say the most horrific things to him like ‘Hey, Adi, you love f****** children, don’t you?’ and Adi would just say ‘yes’ to everything without fully understanding that the chef was saying something terrible to him.

He knew on some level he was being ridiculed, but he was just so desperate to have a job, he put up with it.

The immaturity and sheer inappropriateness of some male chefs was staggering. When we were clearing up, they’d take a piping bag of puree and then pretend to ejaculate on each other.

The chief bully would do it to Adi, making all the noises and pouring puree all over him. Poor Adi would just stand there and say nothing while the rest of them laughed.

I started to grab all the piping bags after service and throw them away, pretending I was just tidying up, but of course, they knew exactly what I was doing, and I got disciplined for it.

The environments I worked in didn’t break me, but that doesn’t mean they were OK. I would have flourished more in a better environment.

I remember one night when, after service, I turned to my partner, who was also a chef at the time, and said: ‘One day, I’ll be in charge, and it will be different.’

I have stayed true to my word – but I run just one kitchen and it’s not enough to turn the whole industry around. In my own business, I feel as defensive and protective of the boys as I do the girls, because they all work for me, and they all deserve respect.

A brand new problem faced by women in kitchens is the unsolicited ‘d**k pic’. It’s very common and I find it very upsetting because I think it’s likely most men – unlike Jason Atherton – do know other men are doing it. That is a big part of the problem. Those d**k pics aren’t about guys fancying a girl. They are about dominance and trying to intimidate somebody.

It’s the same when advances are rejected, no matter how politely or gently. One woman told me she only lasted a few months in her first professional kitchen role because a chef asked her on a date and she said no, so he made her life miserable until she quit. I know the feeling.

What can we do to make meaningful change in our industry? Men will listen to people they respect, and if they don’t respect you, they don’t care. Women talking about this is only half the battle.

We need men like Atherton to look around them, ask their female colleagues what is happening to them, and then reveal what they find. It is not enough to refuse to tolerate sexism in your own kitchen alone.

We need people with the right morals and the right beliefs to represent the industry and speak out. There are lots of kitchens that are celebrating women, and we need to find them and shine a light on them, so they become the norm. Then, if a woman does find herself in a bad environment, she knows she can say: ‘I don’t have to take this. This is not acceptable.’

I want male chefs to call out sexism no matter that they might personally admire the culprit for their talent. No matter how much power the bully has in the industry at large.

I think those men prepared to stand with their female colleagues show a real glimmer of hope. We just need lots more of them.

As told to Lara Olszowska

Anna Haugh is the Executive Head Chef and Owner of Myrtle, an Irish fine dining restaurant in West London, and Wee Sister, a wine bar. Her BBC series, Anna Haugh’s Big Irish Food Tour, aired in January.