âNice work, boys!â was a phrase Hanalei often heard thrown at her throughout her time working in the ski industry and restaurant kitchens. As one of the only women in both fields, one of the youngest, and a new leader, she details her struggles, successes, and failures learning leadership on the job.
Youâll be right there next to her at 1 p.m. on a Saturday, cooking hundreds of lunches at a hole-in-the-wall seafood spot. Youâll get an inside view of what goes on at a ski resort from a mountain operations employee. Youâll meet the people she met and hear what she learned through her experiences.
âNice work, boys!â was a phrase Hanalei often heard thrown at her throughout her time working in the ski industry and restaurant kitchens. As one of the only women in both fields, one of the youngest, and a new leader, she details her struggles, successes, and failures learning leadership on the job.
Youâll be right there next to her at 1 p.m. on a Saturday, cooking hundreds of lunches at a hole-in-the-wall seafood spot. Youâll get an inside view of what goes on at a ski resort from a mountain operations employee. Youâll meet the people she met and hear what she learned through her experiences.
Out of all the places I could be on a holiday weekend night, why here? I thought, as I squeeze-bottled lines of red pepper sauce over a seafood tagliarini dish. (Oh, squeeze bottles, what would we cooks ever do without them?) I couldnât think about how weeded I was, or the heat, or the fresh burn bubbles going all the way up my arm. In restaurant speak, âweededâ or âbeing in the weedsâ means slammed, way behind, struggling to stay on top of the rush. Imagine youâre juggling, but people keep throwing you balls, and you have to keep juggling all of them. Then the balls catch fire, but you canât stop. And people keep telling you, âI need that ball now! How long before youâre done?â
I glanced over to the corner of the kitchen, where a server was rolling silverware and chatting up a storm. She seemed so tranquil, a cool cucumber compared to the madness of the line. In the less than half a second I spent in silverware Zen-land with the server, I thought, What Iâd do right now to be there, with not a care in the world except rolling silverware. I shifted my focus back. I couldnât focus on how weeded I was; I just had to keep cooking. Next pickup: three sea bass, two seafood pasta, a cowboy steak special, and three airline chicken. Focusing on that next pickup was the small thread I hung on to, to keep from drowning in a sea of paper tickets.
Women are expected to cook at home for their family, not in a tough, physically arduous, mentally exhausting, balls-to-the-wall-paced, no-screw-ups-allowed, male-dominated restaurant kitchen.
Why do the people who say âA womanâs place is the kitchenâ usually think this is true unless itâs a professional kitchen, where, instead of cooking for a few friends and family members, sheâs cooking for hundreds, maybe even a thousand paying customers with high standards?
Where, instead of having plenty of time to cook one big casserole for everyone, sheâs cooking to order big-ticket entrees, and has only fifteen minutes to cook each dish?
Where she might be the only woman and may even be in charge of leading a team through a dinner rush?
If a woman can cook, they call her âwifey material.â If she cooks at a restaurant, they say, âYouâre too pretty to work back there. You should be taking my order.â
 âSo, youâre like a prep helper or a cake decorator, right?â
 âYou should work cold stations and dessert. You wouldnât want to get burns from working the grill.â
âCan you make sure itâs a man who cooks my steak?â
âThatâs nice, sweetie, but can I talk to the chef?â
âWomen canât put in the same hours men can.â
These are all real quotes, by the way, that I collected from other female cooks and chefs.
âI bet you make great tips there as a waitress,â they say, after Iâve told them where I work as a cook and have just finished a busy holiday weekend. It stings a little harder when you are at a place that does not tip out the kitchen, which is quite common.
That night I found myself in the weeds, plating up seafood pastas and trying to keep my focus away from the server in silverware land, was one of those busy holidays. I was covering for the main sautĂ© cook over Labor Day weekend while he was out for a few weeks for an unavoidable family situation. Every station in the kitchen has its own hardships, but sautĂ© was definitely the most intricate, and only a few cooks could work it. Just when I thought I was holding it down pretty well, the orders coming in at a decent pace, the ticket printer started rattling off like a machine gun and didnât stop for three hours.
Early on in that rush, I hastily and carelessly dropped a skin-on airline chicken breast into smoking-hot oil in a pan and it splashed everywhere. I knew oil splattered all over my arm, but I didnât feel any burns; thatâs the kind of adrenaline youâre on during a four-hundred-cover night (covers meaning how many people came through the restaurant, in this case between 5 and 10 p.m. Four hundred butts in the chairs. Four hundred people ordering appetizers, main courses, and desserts). I was cranking out sea bass entrĂ©e after sea bass entrĂ©eâhaving five to seven of those working at any given time throughout the night. I was plating up prime rib sides and seafood pasta dishes to the tune of whirring hood vents, crashing dishes, and the chef calling out our next pickup.
I had all twelve stove burners on and both ovens full. I didnât have time for pain. And the heat? I wasnât even thinking about the heat, even though it was a late-summer evening, cooped up in a windowless, stainless-steel dungeon, reaching into a 450-degree oven every five minutes. At 10 p.m., when the rush calmed down, I showed a server my burns. His jaw hit the floor.
âA grease splash? You look like you pinned your whole arm to the grill!â
I still have the scars as I write this.
So yes, please keep telling me that cooking is a âwomanâs job,â or that a man who can cook is displaying âfeminineâ qualities. Please keep telling me that my place is the kitchen, because it is. But if youâre going to use it as an insult or some sort of way to assert dominance as a man, I dare you to find the busiest restaurant in your city on a day when the line is out the door, peek into the kitchen, and watch. You might not even see a woman, and if you do, you better believe sheâs tough as nails.
***
My first restaurant job was at a place Iâll call the âseafood spotâ in the quaint downtown area of the town I had just moved to. Although it was a mountain town far away from any ocean, the owners had the plug on some high-quality, overnight-shipped seafood, and the restaurant specialized in lobster rolls and fresh-butchered fish, featuring a tank of live lobsters, red picnic benches, and clam âchowdahâ in a bread bowl.
Cooking at a restaurant was almost a bucket list item to check off or something I felt I had to get out of my system for a summer. I had no formal training, but I loved to cook at home, and that summer, I decided I would give it a go. Although I had been into cooking my whole life, I had never considered it as a career. As kids, weâre encouraged to dream about what we want to be based on what we actually like. However, when we are in high school and have to actually think about what we are going to be, we are told to think of what would be sensible rather than what we âlike to do.â I remember saying that I âliked cooking and wanted to keep it that way,â because âif I had to do it for work, I may end up hating it.â I didnât know what I wanted, and I knew that, but it seems we are all pressured to decide at seventeen when we pick our college and major.Â
College is not the only option after high school, but in the academically focused area I grew up in, it was made to seem that way. I figured business was always a good move, because no matter what I did, there would always be a business component. After completing my senior year of high school at a community college, essentially skipping a year, I was able to transfer to my dream school up in the mountains to study business with a focus on the ski industry. I was one of three women in my major in my graduating class, so I knew what was ahead of me in the ski industry. I then finished college at twenty, moved to a ski town half an hour away from the college, worked a winter at a ski resort where I planned to return the following winter, and needed a summer job to tide me over until then.Â
The month I started at the seafood spot, May 2018, was a whirlwind of a month. Having just turned twenty-one, I attended my college graduation, finished up my first season in the ski industry, started at the seafood spot, and got married. I wasnât looking to get married at twenty-one. The concept of starting a family wasnât even a goal I would have listed growing up. I had my first date at nineteen, and I honestly thought Iâd be the last one I knew to get married. I figured I would just do my thing, and if someone wanted to join in, Iâd give him a chance.Â
We met during my junior year of college at a young-adult get-together hosted by an older Christian couple. I sat next to him and was drawn to his friendly and inviting demeanor, and how easily we kept talkingâhe about his summer adventures in Alaska, I about my summer work at a snowboarding camp. When we got each otherâs numbers and started hanging out, we found out we had already seen each other out on the ski hill the previous winter and had talked without exchanging names or numbers. It was almost as if God had given us a second chance at meeting after screwing up the first.
While other little girls played âfamilyâ and pretended their dolls were their kids, I played restaurant, and I was always the maitre dâ. I was the eight-year old girl who did kung fu and kicked Barbies to the curb. My cousin made the fatal mistake of giving me a Barbie doll for Christmas when I was five. I threw a fit and told her how much I hated it. I think that was the day my parents gave me a lecture on how to accept a gift graciously, whether itâs what I want or not.
At my elementary-school-age birthday parties, my parents would set up a ârestaurantâ with a menu of basic kidsâ food like frozen fish sticks or pasta. To a ten-year-old, it was basically a three-Michelin-starred affair.
Although I had an interest in food and restaurants as a child, eating at an actual one was, and still is, a once-a-year-treat. I was taught from a young age to always tip the server based on the original bill, not the bill after coupons and gift cards, which we always had. I was taught by my ninety-year-old Dutch grandma, who we called âOmsâ to order steak rare or bleu (rarer than rare), when we went to one of those âsteak on a stoneâ places where they give you a hot plate to cook your own steak, and I watched her give it a quick sear on each side like ahi tuna and dig in. Many people learn a special recipe from their grandma. Mine taught me how to eat a steak.Â
This lack of going to restaurants was mainly because both of my parents cooked. My mom did most of the cooking and taught me the basics, but my dad would often cook as well, introducing me to the finer side of food. I was born and raised in the United States, but I wouldnât say I grew up American. We ate every dinner at an actual dining table, as Europeans do, and we watched mainly British childrenâs TV shows, like Wallace and Gromit or Jellykins. We were also a frugal household. We had a drawer full of used aluminum foil, twist ties from bread, and plastic bags in our house, and we would be scolded if we dared to use one of those items only once before throwing it away. My parents always drove cars to death, buying an already-used minivan when I was born, then legally teaching me to drive it sixteen years later. We never, ever, ever threw away food. We boiled any bones into stock.Â
We saved the parchment from butters and used them to grease pans, which was also something passed down from Oms, my bleu-steak-ordering grandma. She had learned frugality from her time in World War Two prisoner of war camps, but that time had also given her a sense of gratitude and appreciation in her postwar life. As a prisoner, she didnât even have the luxury of knowing that she would see the next day.Â
âI eat ice cream for dessert every day,â she would say, scooping a nice dollop of vanilla ice cream into a bowl. âI didnât make it through prisoner of war camp to deny myself the simple pleasures of life.â
For her, life is too short to cook your steak well done.
Although my entire family besides my parents and brother lived in the UK, we managed to see them at least every few years, even as adults. When my husband, Gavin, and I were dating and had saved up enough to go to the UK with my parents to visit the rest of my family, we were sitting at the dining table, eating âsupper,â as they say there, and Gavin was being a bit of a âloud American.â
Oms held up her fork and told him, âHas anyone ever told you to fork off?â
We all laughed. Thatâs when we knew he would fit right in with the family.
My other Grandma, Nai-Nai, from my Momâs side was a soft-spoken, four-foot-ten, Burmese princess. My mom and her five siblings were born there in Burma, now Myanmar, and moved to the U.K. after political unrest and a military dictatorship drove them out. We didnât see Nai-Nai as much as we did Oms, but rumor has it she was an amazing cook. My mom talked about how she would cook with every single part of the animal and could debone an entire chicken while keeping it all intact. Iâve never been back to Burma, but Iâd like to. I was even given a Burmese royalty name, Lady Golden Palm. Had political unrest never happened, I would probably be sitting on some Burmese throne made of gold, but there I was, applying for line cook jobs instead. I guess you can call me âlady garlic palmâ for now.
My grandfathers both passed away when I was young, but I remember making bread with Omsâs husband, who we called Tadcu. Thereâs a story circulating from when my other grandpa, Nai-Naiâs husband, was able to make a whole gourmet meal from only an onion and a bottle of gin. I was used to seeing both men and women cooking in the home, both from my parents and my grandparents
Whenever we would go back to England to visit my family, which was about once a year as a child, and less often as a teenager and adult after airline prices soared, we stayed at Omsâs house in Crawley, a small town about an hourâs train ride from London. It is the same house my father and his two siblings were born and raised in. That town feels like home, even though I never lived there. On street corners, there are those classic red phone booths and red mailboxes you see in movies. There is a park my brother and I would always walk to and play on the flying foxâa seat attached to a rope that slid down a cable about a hundred feet long. That kind of unregulated park feature would never exist in the United Statesâtoo many lawsuits.
It was at my grandmaâs Crawley house where I cooked my first Christmas dinner. I was fourteen. I had been cooking at home for two years at that point, and my family saw enough potential in me to let me have at it with the most important meal of the year. I loved juggling all the different parts of the traditional British Christmas meal, each being its own masterpiece: the turkey, the homemade cranberry sauce, the roasted vegetables. We also pulled Christmas crackers, which are cardboard tubes that you have to pull open with another person, and they make a loud bang, like a party popper. They look like a big piece of candy and are usually the size of a water bottle. Inside are a collection of small gifts, usually including a corny joke written on a piece of paper, and colorful paper hats. Then there was the Christmas pudding, which is like a rum- or brandy-infused fruit-and-nut cake, which you douse with more rum and light on fire. The fire burns up all the alcohol and caramelizes the outside of the cake before extinguishing itself. Every year we would crowd around the table after our turkey dinner, with our silly paper hats on, turn off the lights for added suspense, and watch the blue flames circle around the pudding faster and faster until it went out. I sat there at fourteen, âchuffedâ as the Brits say, having served all those dishes at the same time perfect, hot, and from scratch, all without stressing for a second.
Iâm still not sure how I really started cooking in the first place. One day, when I was twelve years old, I just decided to take over dinner for the day. I still donât know why or exactly when. Maybe I wanted a break from playing Hot Wheels with my brother all day. I donât even remember what I cooked. I didnât take cooking classes in school, but I knew the basics from my parents. I could cook pasta, a basic protein with a store-bought sauce like teriyaki, and a vegetable. Again, I still donât know how or why this happened; it just kind of did, but from then until I moved out at eighteen, I willingly cooked almost every family dinner.
I was still just experimenting and using whatever cookbooks we had in the house to learn. Cooking was never a stressful activity for me; if anything, it was stress relief. Along with Christmas dinners at fourteen, I started making silly cooking videos on the weekends. My brother would film and make silly noises in the background, and I would demonstrate some recipe I had found online, adding twists of humor. I was hustling at the age of sixteen, selling cooked dinners to my parentsâ coworkers and friends to raise money for my first mission trip to the Navajo indigenous land. I cooked curry for the Indian, sushi for the Japanese, and clam chowdah for the New Englander. They all raved about my creations.
Somehow I still didnât get the memo that I should be a chef. Throughout high school and college, I worked a few different jobsâmostly related to my love of snowboarding and my desire to work in the ski industry. I coached kids and was an overnight counselor at a summer snowboarding camp. I worked as a marketing manager for a local ski-related nonprofit. I had a full-time data-entry office job for one summer. Just one. Never again. Then I had that mountain ops job right out of college and planned on working at least another winter there. Finally, somewhere in the middle of wedding planning, in that whirlwind that was spring of 2018, I thought, Heck, why not try cooking professionally, just for a summer? It canât hurt.
Which brought me to the seafood spot.
I love any writing that focus on the female experience, female strength and female empowerment in all its multi-dimensional breadth and nuance. This memoir did not disappoint. What I loved about this in particular, is that Hanalei is just like you or me. So many of the memoirs that hit the bestseller charts are written by celebrities, global CEOs, or politicians who whilst being uniquely talented and deserving successful in their own right, can often perpetuate the feeling that to be heard is something reserved for those at the top. 'Nice Work, Boys!' gives voice to the every person, the every day occurrences that all women, of all backgrounds, at all levels experience. After reading this I was left with the distinct feeling that everyone deserves to write a memoir, and from every person's story we can empathize and grow.
The scenes I loved most were set in the kitchen, as a lot of this memoir is. Hanalei's seemingly unflappable nature in the face of immense stress and pressure is incredibly impressive. She has mastered the art of simultaneously "just getting on with things", and also reflecting on what those moments meant for her, and actually what they represent for the progression of women in society as a whole. Capable & talented, she is thrown in the deep end, as she herself admits, are in ways beyond her own experience. Yet as she rose to the challenge time and time again, Hanalei skill and competence, combined with her mental resolve quickly earn her the promotions and the respect she deserves, in an environment where she is frequently (to quote Shonda Rhimes) "the first, only different".
I think every woman should write a memoir. I loved that Hanalei chose to write this at this particular time in her life. You do not have to be "done" to be able to write a memoir. You do not have to be a certain age, have accomplished what you may believe to be a unique or extraordinary feat. Because we are never done. If every woman wrote a memoir at any time in their life they would see in the words the evidence of our strength, growth and ability to overcome all the things that we do in our everyday. Things that life's default setting are not often constructed by or for our gender. I think Hanalei gives women that strength. With more people like Hanalei in the work place, in the kitchen, on our bookshelves we can all continue to demonstrate and fight for that equality we all know and deserve.