Honey & Co is an unusual restaurant for many reasons, not least because it hardly feels like a restaurant at all. At first glance, this tiny ground-floor space in Fitzrovia in London, which opened in 2012, resembles someone’s front room with a few extra tables squeezed in. But then you enter and an outpouring of warmth hits you, along with the aroma of cardamom coffee and the sight of cakes lined up on the rear counter. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a regular, a tourist or someone famous,” says Bridget Fojcik, who runs its sister deli Honey & Spice across the road. “Everyone gets the same welcome at Honey & Co.”
It’s unusual in another way, too, although this didn’t fully occur to co-owner Itamar Srulovich until late last year. He and his wife Sarit Packer had just opened Honey & Smoke, a much bigger grill restaurant nearby on Great Portland Street, and they were sitting down with their managers for a long overdue catch-up. As the nine of them gathered in the new space, Srulovich noted everyone else in the core team – from head chefs to restaurant managers to office managers to the head of pastry – was a woman.
In an industry where men dominate across the board, this is unusual. According to a 2016 survey by the Office of National Statistics, only 18.5% of the 250,000 professional chefs in the UK are women – and they earn about £4,000 a year less than their male counterparts.
It’s not much better at a management level. Figures from 2013 show that women hold less than 40% of all manager and supervisor positions in the international hospitality industry. And it gets worse the higher you look: a 2009 survey found only 6% of board director positions in UK hospitality were held by women.
Given how many stories get written about the experience of being the lone woman in a kitchen full of men, it’s refreshing to hear about a man outnumbered by women eight-to-one at a senior level. So what’s it like when the situation is reversed?
“It works for me,” says Srulovich. “Of course, I think this is the best place to work in the world.” We are sitting under the blue canopy outside Honey & Co with glasses of orange-blossom iced tea and a sweet cheese bun, enjoying the spring sunshine. Srulovich, who grew up in Jerusalem and met Packer in Tel Aviv, is genial, with a fine line in self-deprecation. “Sarit is at the centre of it all,” he says. “I’m just the guy carrying boxes of lemons up and down the stairs.”
This is not entirely true. The couple may fulfil different roles – he spends more time charming the customers, whereas she’s happier in the kitchen – but Srulovich is no less integral to the operation than his wife. Nonetheless, he says, the managers tend to bypass him whenever there’s a problem. “Every single time I go into the kitchen or the office, the first thing they ask is: ‘Where’s Sarit?’ ‘Is Sarit coming?’ I offer to help and they say, ‘No, it doesn’t matter,’ and go back to whatever they were doing.” He shakes his head in amused consternation. “So, yes, I’m more for the grunt work. Sarit is the powerhouse.”
Rachael Gibbon, who was the first-ever employee at Honey & Co and now manages the restaurant, puts this in a different light. “He’s always saying: ‘No one cares about me, it’s all you women’ – but I think he likes it.” Would he be more at ease if all his managers were men? “No,” she says, laughing. “I don’t think so.”
How is Honey & Co, with its predominantly female management, different from other restaurants? I get varying and sometimes conflicting answers over the course of the morning I spend between the three locations. At the deli, Fojcik believes women bring greater attention to detail to the job, but Louisa Cornford, who runs the office downstairs, isn’t convinced. “I don’t think any of the restaurants are particularly feminine,” she says. “I’m not sure gender has anything to do with it.”
There are a few things that everyone can agree on. For one, they all say it’s a nurturing place to work, though this may have less to do with gender than the attitudes of the owners. “It’s a big family,” Cornford tells me. “Everyone cares for everyone here.”
Two stories back this up. Fojcik tells me she tried to go back to work as a chef after she had her second daughter but nowhere offered her the flexibility she needed, until she approached Packer and Srulovich. They adjusted the schedules so she could work nights at the bakery and be with her kids during the day.
Later, at Honey & Smoke, I talk to the head of pastry Giorgia Di Marzo as she shuttles breads in and out of the oven. “It’s much better to work in a kitchen with more women,” she tells me. “There’s no screaming. I worked in kitchens in Italy and it was awful. The men didn’t believe women could do this job. There was no chance to learn.” Under Packer’s guidance, she says, “I’ve had the chance to grow up.”
That said, working here isn’t easy. Packer is by all accounts a tough, strict boss who demands a huge amount from her employees – an assessment with which Packer herself cheerfully agrees. “We’re very difficult people,” she says over a plate of grilled sea bass at Honey & Smoke. “We want things done a certain way and we can be extremely obnoxious and not very patient if things aren’t going how we want them to go.”
Both Packer and Srulovich insist the gender make-up of their managerial team was entirely accidental (and Srulovich notes that the balance across the entire staff is about 50-50). “Were we consciously recruiting women? No,” says Packer. “Actually, I had the impression that I worked much better with men.” She clashed with a female boss on her first job in London, she tells me, and she thinks women in the kitchen often get a harder time from members of the same sex.
That said, does she find it easier to work with women in her own restaurants?
Her reply is characteristically unvarnished. “I think that women can multitask – and the way we run this business, it’s a madhouse. We don’t tick boxes and do what we’re supposed to do. We try to see the bigger picture. We try to care about whether the KPs have eaten lunch and whether the bins are empty and the toilets are clean, as well as cooking – and I’ve not seen many men who can do that.” A more structured environment might suit male chefs better, she says, “but none of the women here are like that. And that’s why I think they’ve stuck. They are all passionate about jumping around and doing lots of different things.” She shrugs. “This is what we are. We get a bit bored with similarities.”
Several people I speak to, including Srulovich, emphasise how tough the core team is. “All of the women here are strong and dominant – more than the men I’ve worked with,” says Gibbon. This, she hastens to add, is not a bad thing. Julia Chodubska, the head chef at Honey & Co, agrees. “You can communicate with everyone in a straightforward way,” she says. For her, this has nothing to do with gender. “It’s not about men or women,” she says. “Ego is the main thing. And no one here has ego.”
