Brixton’s All Roads, The Dog House pub in Dorset and Edinburgh’s Lannan Bakery are all very different hospitality businesses, in very different parts of the UK. But they share a common thread: they’re all owned or co-owned by women – and they’ve all been added to a new map that documents women-owned hospitality businesses around the UK. The map is the work of Teal chef-founder Sally Abé and Topjaw producer Kayla Lawrie.
The idea for its creation was sparked last year, after the Times published an interview with chef and restaurateur Jason Atherton, who operates more than a dozen restaurants around the world, in which he responded to a question about whether women still experience sexism in kitchens, “No, not really. I’ve not seen it.” (He later defended himself on Instagram, stating “I do not condone sexism in the industry or anywhere.)
The article was the catalyst for an open letter signed by 70 leading women chefs, led by Abé, Tiella’s Dara Klein and chef and author Poppy O’Toole, detailing the sexism they had faced and the discrimination that’s systemic within the industry. Afterwards, Lawrie reached out to Abé – who runs a majority-female kitchen at her British restaurant Teal in Hackney, and published A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen, a memoir offering her vision for change in the industry – asking how she could help. “[We] came up with this idea of mapping out the women-owned restaurants, because I get contacted so frequently [by people] asking how we can support more female-owned businesses,” Abé tells Broadsheet.
The map is now live, marking out more than 350 restaurants, cafes, bakeries, bars and pubs stretching from St Ives to Aberdeen and over to Belfast. Lawrie worked to sort them into type: restaurants, pubs and bars, and bakeries and cafes, and the pair hope that it will be an ever-growing resource, gaining new venues as they open or are made known to them.
While the map is a handy eating-out guide to cities and villages around the UK – and a way of creating visibility for women-owned businesses – Abé also hopes it becomes a trigger for women in the industry to network with one another. “My whole goal … is to try and get women to network, because they don't network in the same way that men do,” she says. “The more people that are sharing this map the better, because it gives an opportunity for people to see where the women-owned restaurants are, but also for women to learn about other women and restaurants. Maybe if … there’s two restaurants in Bristol … they might get in touch and then go for coffee or do a collab together.”
Lawrie adds that it will also act as a useful resource for people in roles such as hers looking for talent, but also providing “access to festivals, or to catering jobs, to find these women specifically. That’s why each pin on the map has [the owner’s] name”.
While both Abé and Lawrie work full-time in demanding jobs, they foresee the map expanding into an app or even beyond the screen. “The potential is quite high, and … there’s so many ways it could go, whether it’s supporting these women in connecting, or whether it’s legislation and access to funding.”
“[The map] is sort of something to say, look, let’s start somewhere and do what we can do with time and the resources that we’ve got,” says Abé.
Find the Female Owned Hospitality map here, and suggest additions or changes here.
