WOMEN IN CHARGE: A QUIET REVOLUTION

A woman’s place isn’t in the kitchen. At least not professionally. At least not traditionally. It is one of the great ironies of cuisine that women--so long associated, for better or for worse, with food, cooking, nurturing in our society--have nearly always been banned, or at least discouraged, from the “serious” preparation of food.

“Mama’s” cooking was all right for the little red-checked-tablecloth Italian place, but when it came to creating delicate and complex sauces, ambitious concatenations of meat or fish and vegetables, vast architectural pastries and the like, well, this was clearly man’s work, no? No.

Many old-style restaurants are still bastions of male supreme-de-poulet- acy, as it were, but in more contemporary restaurant kitchens women are no longer a novelty--even women running the whole show. Anyone who doubts this fact, at least insofar as it applies to Los Angeles, should have been at the newly opened Piret’s at Olympic and Robertson one day a few weeks back for lunch. There, at the instigation of veteran public relations specialist and restaurant gadabout Joan Luther, more than a dozen professional L.A. chefs and restaurateurs, all of them women, gathered to get to know each other, trade news and advice and ultimately--as it turned out--establish a regular association of female restaurant professionals.

Among those present were Piret Munger, co-founder of the mostly San Diego County Piret’s mini-chain of restaurants and take-out shops; Cindy Black, chef at the L.A. Piret’s (and preparer of this lunch); Lydia Shire (executive chef at the soon-to-open Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills); Gigi Patout (Patout’s, West L.A.); Elka Gilmore (Camelions, Santa Monica); Evan Kleiman and Victoria Granoff (Angeli, Hollywood); Lisa Stalvey (former chef of Spago, now planning to open J. Paul’s at the Beach in Pacific Palisades with husband Michael Anapola); Annie Rousseau (new executive chef at the Bel-Air Sands Hotel in West L.A.); Victoria Shemaria and Mary Sweeney (Marix, West Hollywood and Santa Monica); Gail de Krassel (Scratch, Santa Monica) and recipe tester and food writer Linda Zimmerman.

Northern Californians Cindy Pawlcyn of Mustard’s Grill (Yountville), the Fog City Diner (San Francisco) and Rio Grill (Carmel) and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse and Cafe Fanny in Berkeley were also invited but, along with several Southern California chefs (among them Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken of the Border Grill and City Restaurant), were unable to attend.

They’ll have another chance, though: The group plans to meet monthly. (Annie Rousseau hosts the next luncheon Wednesday at the Bel-Air Sands.) Thus far, meetings are open to female executive chefs and/or restaurateurs only but may eventually include other female kitchen staffers. Call Joan Luther at (213) 273-4936 for further information.

And, oh yes: How does a woman get to be an executive chef in the first place? “Just work 10 times as hard as anybody else,” Lydia Shire told an ABC News reporter who covered the event.

CHANGES: The aforementioned Evan Kleiman and John Stroble, proprietors of the popular Angeli on Melrose in Hollywood, have signed a lease on a property on Santa Monica Boulevard near Barrington and hope to open a Westside version of their popular restaurant in April or May. “The food will basically be the same,” says Kleiman, “but a lot of people don’t know that we have a full-service restaurant already, with main courses and desserts and so on, and not just pasta and pizza.” She adds that the new place will be a bit larger--90 or 100 seats instead of the Melrose restaurant’s 72--and “a little step up in comfort.” The Westside Angeli is being designed by architect Michele Saee, formerly with Morphosis (which firm has also done L.A. Nicola, 72 Market Street and the soon-to-open Kate Matalini’s as well as the original Angeli). A more ambitious project is planned on the present site of Scratch in Santa Monica: Owner-chef Gail de Krassel (again aforementioned) plans to erect no less than a 65- or 70-room hotel on the spot, to open, she says (optimistically), in about 15 months. There will be a restaurant in the hotel, but Scratch itself will move to another location and continue operating as usual.

EVENTS: Mr. Stox in Anaheim offers a participation-cooking class dinner Nov. 11. For $45 per person, you can help cook your own meal (with tips from chef Scott Michael Raczek) and then consume it, with appropriate wines. . . . Yet another food and wine festival is on tap, this one in the parking lot outside the Parkway Grill, a week from today. Besides the Parkway itself, such restaurants as the Chronicle, La Toque, Cafe Jacoulet and Lalo & Brothers will participate, as will wineries with monikers like Acacia, Chateau Montelena, Grgich Hills, Ridge and Stag’s Leap. Tickets are $40 in advance, $45 at the door, with proceeds going to the Huntington Memorial Hospital’s new Regional Rehabilitation Center. For information: 818-440-5464.