Carlos Dragonné
March is over. So are the women chefs
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Carlos Dragonné
March is over. So are the women chefs
March is gone. And with it, the tribute dinners, the press releases with photos of women smiling in front of stoves, the announcements of “culinary empowerment” in chain hotels with waiters trained for the script. Right on schedule, the narrative returned to where it belongs: men at the forefront, women back in the corner. The boys’ club takes the microphone again. The women go back to the metate.
There is something profoundly cynical about what we do every year. And I say this with all the deliberate discomfort that the word cynical implies. It is not neglect. It is not accidental forgetfulness. It is a system that works exactly as it was designed: to acknowledge just enough to ease the conscience, and little enough to avoid changing anything. The Sunday confession that absolves the sins of the entire week. The March 8 dinner that cleanses eleven and a half months of structural invisibility.
I am writing this on March 29, when no one is paying attention anymore. Which is precisely when it matters most to say it.
Let’s start at the beginning. Or rather, in the year 1750 BC.
The Code of Hammurabi already understood what we still pretend not to grasp. The term tavern keeper—the one who receives travelers, who feeds, who cares—was, in its original Babylonian usage, a feminine term. Tavern women. Innkeepers. Even beer was born with a woman’s name in the land of Ninkasi. 3,700 years ago it was already written, and yet today, in 2026, we continue to treat women’s participation in professional kitchens as if it were a recent conquest—something to celebrate with a wine pairing in March, before putting it back in the drawer until next year.
The kitchen as a political space, as a space of resistance, as a space of collective identity has always had female hands. Always. What changes, depending on the era and convenience, is who we choose to give credit to.
The 20th century arrived, and we invented the hero: Alain Ducasse, Joël Robuchon, Paul Bocuse. The chef in a white toque, commanding voice, and name in gold lettering. The profession ceased to be a craft and became a personality. A brand. A spectacle. And in that moment of transformation—as in so many historical moments we study—women disappeared from the official narrative, even as they continued to sustain the real work.
No one talks about how much of French haute cuisine was shaped by Catherine de Medici. That long before Gordon Ramsay turned shouting into a business model on television, there was Julia Child doing something Ramsay never will: emotionally connecting millions of people to the idea that cooking is an act of life, not performance. The most cited gastronomic texts in history are written by men, even though the knowledge they codified was, in large part, born in kitchens sustained by women.
The media did the rest. They turned Anthony Bourdain into the backpack-wearing adventurer with charming cynicism. Meanwhile, they placed women on sets that resembled their mother’s kitchen—warm lighting, apron neatly tied. The message was never subliminal. It was always explicit.
Mexico. Hypocrisy has a name—and it tastes like seven-chili mole.
We have the recognition of Mexican cuisine as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. A distinction that, if we are honest—without the anesthesia of easy pride—would not have been possible without the voices of traditional women cooks, without the hands of the mayoras, without the knowledge of the guardians who have spent generations sustaining a culinary culture that is, above all, a collective and female project.
That recognition is not for Enrique, Antonio, Edgar, Saúl, or Ricardo to fill their Instagram bios with a mention or their presentations with a contextual slide. It belongs to Gloria, María Elena, Alicia, Margarita, Patricia, Mónica—and to all those I fail to name, because the list is so long that this editorial would become an encyclopedia.
It is worth stating it with the clarity that no one seems willing to use: when a chef proudly says he has “mayoras in his kitchen,” he is doing the same thing as the racist who says, “I have a friend of X race” to prove that he is not. The mayora is not a trophy. She is not a branding element used to justify a $2,400 tasting menu with wine pairing. She is the source. Treating her as an accessory is the most refined way we have found to perpetuate exactly what we claim to fight. We turn Fonda Toña into Bistró Antoniette. We remove Doña Toña from the kitchen because her knowledge does not fit within the average check. But of course, the tribute in March must not be missing.
Numbers do not lie, even when discourse does. Michelin Guide, The World's 50 Best Restaurants, and La Liste share a characteristic that is far from accidental: female representation in their top positions hovers, at best, around 10%. The fact that 50 Best created a specific “Best Female Chef” award is not progress toward equality. It is an explicit admission that the playing field is not level—and that, instead of leveling it, they prefer to create a separate category where women can win without disrupting the established order.
The debt is not only with women chefs. It is with all women in hospitality. Those who clean rooms from dawn to dusk for wages that are a slap disguised as a contract. Those displaced from their communities by hotel-driven gentrification that we, as travelers, have faithfully funded with every reservation at that concrete resort embedded in the jungle. Tourism gentrification is also gender-based violence. When a destination grows without community planning, women are the first to be displaced.
The responsibility is shared—and that includes all of us. The media, for continuing to cover the same names. Diners, for continuing to go to the same restaurants run by the same media-driven chefs. Chefs, for speaking endlessly about preserving traditions while their kitchens remain male monoliths. And organizers, for filling March with tribute dinners and the following eleven months with complicit silence.
Our gustatory memory—the most powerful of all, the one that turns an experience into something that lives within us for years—was built by them. Grandmothers. Mothers. Aunts. Cooks without Instagram accounts but with forty years of knowledge in their hands. Our culinary identity belongs to them. Our cuisine, in the broadest and most honest sense of the word, has always been theirs.
And as long as we continue to remember it only in March, we will remain—bearing the full weight of the word—an absolute disgrace.
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Author: Carlos Dragonné
Sabores de México - Sabores del Mundo
The authors are responsible for the choice and presentation of the facts contained in this document and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those of Tourism and Society Think Tank and do not commit the Organization, and should not be attributed to TSTT or its members.
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