Women at the Grill: What Running a Fire Kitchen Actually Asks

Our co-founder and head chef has been asked, more than once, whether she is built for this. She summarised it for The Beat Asia in January 2024:

“People often assume I am not suited for the kitchen based on my petite size and gender…I mostly just roll my eyes at such comments.”

The tone is the interesting part. Not an incident, not a grievance — an eye-roll, the register you reserve for something that happens often enough to be weather. That is worth sitting with for a moment before we get to the cooking.

The assumption, and why it is the wrong test

The assumption runs roughly: fire cooking is heavy, hot and physical, therefore it belongs to whoever is biggest. Charcoal in particular has collected a mythology — the primal-fire, tongs-and-forearms version of cooking that turns up in a certain kind of restaurant photography.

Some of that is true. It is genuinely hot, for hours, and the work does not stop to accommodate you. But strength is close to the least of it, and anyone who has actually run a coal bed through a full service knows why.

What a fire kitchen actually asks

Here is the thing gas people find hardest to adjust to: you cannot turn charcoal down.

A burner has a dial. A bed of coals has a geography. It has a fierce middle, cooler edges, and a lifespan — it arrives, peaks, and fades over a service, and it does not consult you about the timing. You do not adjust the heat; you move the food, or you move the coals, or you accept the consequence. Every decision is spatial.

Layer the menu on top of that. The same fire has to deliver a 200g Blackmore wagyu karubi that wants seconds of contact, a Margra lamb rump, a whole Lebanese charcoal chicken our menu describes as “45 mins of loving”, and pita that chars in about a minute and is meant to reach the table warm. Those things do not share a timescale. They share a fire.

So the job is: read the bed, know what is ready and what is past it, hold four clocks at once, and be right about the middle of a piece of meat you cannot see into — while orders keep landing and the coals keep changing under you. That is a judgement job with a physical tax attached. The strength framing asks whether you can lift the thing. The work is knowing when to move it.

None of which is an argument that women are secretly better at this. It is an argument that the test people apply at the door is measuring the wrong variable.

The statistic we are not going to give you

This is the point in an article like this where a number usually appears — the share of head chef roles held by women, quoted with confidence and no source.

We looked for one we could stand behind for Singapore kitchens specifically and did not find it, so we are not going to print one. What we can say is the thing anyone who has worked a line already knows: kitchens skew male, fire stations skew male harder, and the assumption our chef described is common enough that she has a stock response to it. That is observation, not measurement, and we would rather label it correctly.

What we will and will not claim about our own kitchen

We are a small restaurant with one grill and a menu built around it. One chef and one award — Rising Female Chef of the Year in 2022, the only award we have ever won — does not fix an industry, and we are not going to write the paragraph where it does.

We are also not going to present ourselves as a model employer or quote a gender balance for our own kitchen, because we have not measured it and inventing it would be worse than saying nothing.

What we will say is narrower and true: the person who wanted the fire in the first place is the person who built the menu around it. The charcoal is not a design flourish somebody specced into the fit-out. It is there because the chef gravitates to what she described in that same interview as “the combined flavours and scent of smokiness and caramelised exterior”, and the rest of the restaurant was arranged to serve that preference.

What actually shifts it

Two unglamorous things, on the evidence of one career.

The first is a section that runs. Assumptions about who belongs at a grill do not survive contact with somebody sending correct food out of it for five years. Nothing else argues as efficiently.

The second is that somebody points you at a door. Nadine’s route into cooking started as part-time service work at District 10 and turned into a career because a chef — Anthony Yeoh — influenced her decision to go to culinary school, and then took her on as an intern at Summer Hill. That is not a slogan, it is a mechanism, and it is cheap. Telling someone where to go and then letting them in costs a kitchen almost nothing and changes the entire shape of a working life. The five years that followed are the receipt.

Come and look at it

The grill sits in the open at 29 Hamilton Road rather than behind a wall, which we recommend as the fastest way to settle the question for yourself. Sit where you can see the coals, order something that takes fire seriously — the charcoal chicken if there are a few of you, the karubi if there are not — and watch how much of the work is standing still and deciding.

The menu is here, there are pictures of the room and the grill, and you can book a table for dinner Tuesday to Sunday or weekend brunch. If you want the cooking argument rather than the kitchen one, the Middle Eastern thread explains where half this menu came from.