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Cooking, teaching and writing poetry have this in common: All are considered “women’s work” until the elite tier of each is reached. Then? It’s a man’s world, baby. Gender disparity skyrockets. Far more published poets are men, as are college professors, and the same is true amongst chefs and restaurateurs.
But while the percentage of female chefs and restaurateurs in Eastern Iowa doesn’t tip any major scales, the women who run the local gourmet food world have name recognition, and for good reason. Word of mouth, after all, travels quickly when mouths are happy.
“I started with what I had from working in other people’s pastry kitchens, from hotels to restaurants to pastry shops,” said Jamie Powers, owner and head chef at Deluxe Cakes & Pastries. “Once you get up there, it is a male-dominated world.” And Powers has over 20 years of experience in that world. Before opening her Iowa City storefront, though, she drew from the experience of her mother and friends—other women who’d had to balance their passions and pursuits with more gendered expectations.
“I sat down with my mom and I said, ‘Mom, I’m looking down the barrel of starting to have children now, or opening this pastry shop. I can have kids now and work for $10 an hour for somebody else.’ My mom said, ‘Once you have a child, you will not open your business.’ So I took my mom’s advice. I saw her working 50 hours a week growing up. I said to myself, ‘This is my profession and the kids will come if they come. If they don’t, they don’t. But this is me.’”
With the help of two women’s business loans, Powers opened Deluxe in November, 2002.
Meanwhile, in Cedar Rapids, Isabelle Cummings and her husband Ian also ran a bakery—the erstwhile Croissant Du Jour, which recently closed, and re-opened as L’Auberge (“The Inn”), a French bistro offering a dinner service.
Cummings, says she’d have laughed if you’d asked her if she wanted to run a restaurant 30 years ago. Kids, though, change everything, and by running a bakery together, the couple had their afternoons and evenings free for after-school activities and family time. And now that their children are grown?
“It was enough,” Cummings says, laughing. “My husband couldn’t get up at three in the morning anymore.”
Cummings says L’Auberge’s fare may differ from Croissant Du Jour’s, but the restaurant’s guiding principles and ingredients remain the same: “Lots of salt, lots of butter, lots of cream.” Anyone who doubts the authenticity of a French restaurant in Eastern Iowa can simply try their duck, which they confit themselves.
Barb Farnsworth’s beloved South Dubuque restaurant, Her Soup Kitchen, is also a family affair; both her son, Jason, and daughter, Krista, are involved in the soup and sandwich eatery. But before Her Soup Kitchen became a household name in Iowa City, it had an antiquated battle to fight.
As late as the 1980s, many women came up against institutional obstacles while procuring a bank loan—of any amount, or for any reason—unless a man was willing to co-sign. When Farnsworth approached a local bank for a loan to get the restaurant started six years ago, the experienced businesswoman was shocked to be turned down. “My husband and I have had relationships with the banks in town for 29 years,” she said before shrugging, palms raised to the ceiling with remembered surprise and frustration. “But when I wanted to go out on my own?”
The bank’s rationale?
“I’d never owned a restaurant before. Owned a business, yes, but not a restaurant,” Farnsworth says. She was, in banker parlance, “prone to fail.” The same could not be said of her personality. Turned down by a loan officer, she went to the board of directors.
“I was asking for a very, very minimal amount of money to start a restaurant. I was asking for $100,000—and that’s to build what you see here,” she says, sweeping her hand out towards the kitchen and seating area. She and her family did most of the renovation work. She bought almost all of her equipment at auctions.
Now, bankers in the Iowa City area lunch on the soup and sandwiches that have made Her Soup Kitchen a household name in Iowa City.
“When we started out, I wanted to have a place in town that I would go eat at, that we would go eat at,” says Farnsworth. “To me, good food brings a smile to everybody’s face. Even if you’re having a bad day, if you have a great sandwich or a great bowl of soup from some place, it just seems to warm you from the inside out.”
Leaf Kitchen’s Harriet Woodford and her chef and business partner, Masae Yoshiko Judge, share a similar ethos. Their cozy cafe, currently in its eighth year, offers simple foods, expertly made, and warm drinks that, until Leaf Kitchen came along, couldn’t be found in Iowa City. Woodford and Judge come from tea cultures—Korean and Japanese, respectively—and, seeing that there were already plenty of coffee shops in town, offered an alternative.
After selling tea and cookies at the Iowa City Farmers Market for sometime, they found their current location, a quiet spot away from the downtown area, with ample parking and beautiful exposed brick walls.
If there is a feminist principle to restauranteurship, Woodford says, it is the organic dynamism of offering fresh, beautifully prepared food to customers who appreciate quality. That perspective, combined with the business savvy to see an unmet need, and answer it, is something the owners of Leaf Kitchen have in common with Trumpet Blossom’s Katie Meyer.
“I’ve pretty much always worked with food,” says Meyer, she became a vegetarian when she was a student at the University of Iowa and got her first industry job at the Red Avocado, a vegetarian restaurant.
Now, Meyer plays double duty; she owns Iowa City’s beloved gourmet vegan restaurant, and is its head chef.
Doesn’t that amount to a grueling schedule? “Well, of course!” says Meyer, who took only the smallest break from making delicious, eco-friendly, socially conscious food to make another person. And Meyer concedes: balancing time with the kiddo and her time in the kitchen is tough.
But toughness is the primary ingredient in successful business, and these restaurants, like the women who run them, are never out of stock.
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