ASHLEY WENTLING

Generally when thinking of a chef the first image that pops up in our head is the one of a chubby, piggy nosed, white shirted, mustache having Italian man. Possibly with a white hat and throwing up “OK” with his hand.
Sometimes it’s quite the opposite – And this is the case with Ashley.

Ashley is fair skinned. She has beautiful dark hair which she’s known to braid in the quirkiest ways.
She’s tall, slim and most likely to ditch the apron in favor of a black lace corset – when she’s not wearing hot shorts and knee high boots.
Knees that she strategically marked with a spoon and a whisk in black ink as a tribute to her passion.

Born and raised surrounded by the stunning, golden hills of the Bay Area in Northern California, Ashley recently greeted the gritty streets of Oakland goodbye and settled somewhere where the sun is (almost) always shining, Dubai.

Here I met her on a hot, humid Monday morning, typical of that desert that was once also my home.

*
*
*

Naomi. Hi Ashley , thank you for doing this. As a person who loves food, I really appreciate your job. Especially after tasting your Thanksgiving Turkey stuffing. First question: how long have you been baking /cooking? When did you realize you wanted to make this your job?
Ashley. Thank you. I love having people over for dinner.
It’s one of my favorite things about my job, the fact that all of my loved ones can enjoy it too.
I have been cooking for 10 years now. I went to culinary school right out of high school at 17.
I knew for about 2 years prior to that I wanted to go to school for it and skip university.
I would watch so many cooking shows and I always loved to cook for myself and my friends after school,
I just knew I wanted to be a chef and I had to give it a shot.

Naomi. Where did you learn how to cook?
Ashley. My dad and my grandmother were always such good cooks and I learned the basics from them as a kid, but culinary school was where I really learned the most.
I was a complete nerd in school and would go home from class and practice chopping vegetables and making the sauces and techniques that we learned about each day.

Naomi. What is your favorite dish to cook? Favorite ingredient?
Ashley. I always get asked this question and I change the answer each time.
Lately I really enjoy making ice creams and custards. My favorite ingredient has got to be brown butter. I put it in as many things as possible.

Naomi. What’s your best dish?
Ashley. I spent a few weeks in Portugal trying to perfect this really tricky flaky pastry called Pasteis de Nata.
It took me about a dozen tries before I got it right, so I think that is the dish i’m most proud of.

Naomi.  What is it that you love about cooking and food?
Ashley. I love that you are never done learning. Just when you start to feel firm in your repertoire or knowledge you discover an entirely new cuisine you know nothing about. The knowledge is endless and I think that is exciting.

Naomi. What does it mean to be a chef? Tell me about the kitchen life.
Ashley. Well everyone wants to call themself a chef when the reality is that most people are just cooks.
I think that in order to be a chef you need to not only have years of experience in a kitchen but also have great creativity. Writing menus is a huge part of the process. You have to be able to develop original ideas and techniques, which usually requires a pretty extensive knowledge of classical preparations. Without proper studying and education you will just be recycling ideas that already exist, but if you have this bank of knowledge you can innovate pre existing techniques and actually make truly creative and boundary pushing dishes.
To be fair, I might have a high standard for what it means to be a “Chef” because I come from a fine dining background, and it took me years to actually call myself a Chef even though I was writing menus for a few years prior.

Naomi. Why did you move to Dubai?
Ashley. I moved to Dubai from San Francisco to be closer to my only sister. I also saw the job opportunities out here for creatives were plentiful. I think that since this is such a new city and the food scene is still really far behind the rest of the world, that it was a pretty recent development for established companies to be like, “oh shit we need to bring in people with creative ideas to keep us relevant” so I was able to snag 3 menu consultation jobs in my first 4 months in town.

Naomi. Have you had to adapt your skills to the local market?
Ashley. I have had to focus mainly on casual dining out here and have strayed away a bit from the fine dining tweezer food that I am used to. It’s a little frustrating sometimes to have to kind of water down the techniques and preparations I’ve been tirelessly practicing for 10 years just to fit the demand of a city that really doesn’t love fine dining in the way that I am used to.

Naomi. Now let’s move onto the questions we care about the most. Although cooking and kitchen are mostly associated with women, usually the most famous chefs are men. Why do you think that is?
Ashley. I think that it has to do with the majority of chefs being men in the workforce, due to the fact that it is not a female friendly work environment.
It’s not friendly to anyone really, but women have to endure an absurd amount of sexism that men would never really think about.  The hours are brutal, the labor is intensely manual, and the stress levels are almost always high. Few women are willing to stick that out for a job, which is pretty fair, so the number of female chefs continues to be small, and the amount of famous male chefs continue to reflect that.

Naomi. On the other hand, women who cook are almost always given a tv show. What’s your take on that?
Ashley. I don’t think that’s accurate, there are a fair amount of women on food network or cooking channel, but I still think they are vastly outnumbered by egotistical (white) men.

Naomi. Recently you flew to Kuwait to train the kitchen staff on the menu you created for your client. What was your experience like?
Ashley. Where to even start. I was there for 35 days. It was very rewarding on a professional level.
We had lines out the door everyday from the day we opened until the day I flew home to Dubai.
I was able to teach a staff of all men a menu that was about 100 recipes long. The hours were very long and the management was super high strung.
I’m used to male managers being volatile, but this was on a different level.
It was this guy’s first venture into food and beverage and his privileged upbringing/ lack of knowledge made us clash pretty hard. He was underpaying his staff, overworking them and was constantly paranoid about other business owners coming and trying to steal them away from him.
He started getting jealous and paranoid if I was talking to people at the bakery, thinking I was scouting for jobs or future work, like I was going to sell someone all of his secrets. It was bizarre to say the least, but it was a good lesson on what I need to do in the future going into a huge project like this.
Such as having an iron clad contract that protects not only me, but my staff from working too much (we are talking 14-16 hours a day 7 days a week) and an exclusivity clause so I can shut someone up when they start interrogating me about who I’m talking to about what. I felt like a teenager who was grounded. I’m no longer working with that bakery, but the success on a consumer level was really empowering.

Naomi. Personally, I don’t think there are enough well known “cool” young female chefs in the world. All the “street” cooking shows created by new media outlet always feature annoying tattooed men. What do you think stops women to trying out a career as chef? Do you think it has a connection with the feminist movement where girls nowadays don’t want to pursue jobs that were often given to them as a way to keeping them “tamed”?
Ashley. I don’t know why annoying tattooed dudes are so plentiful, but I do know a handful of badass women chefs, most of them live in Portland or LA.
I’m always looking for more female chef friends close to my age. I think being a chef is actually a super empowering career, especially if you have the dedication and patience to make it to the top. Since it’s kind of like a military brigade style hierarchy, once you become and chef, (well a good one) your staff really respects you and listens to you since you are like a mentor or teacher more than a boss. I almost always work with men, and I love that in my work I ge
t to boss them around and tell them what to do. What’s more empowering than facilitating a matriarchal work environment?

Naomi. What is your experience in the Middle East like as a young American chef with tattoos?
Ashley. So far so good. All of the chefs I have mentored out here so far have all been men, and have all been super receptive to the knowledge i’m offering. I think people are surprised when they see what I look like who have never met me and have just seen my cv or my portfolio. When I first got off the plane in Kuwait, my bakery client was super shocked. He said, “What the hell? How old are you? I should be teaching YOU how to cook”. Which is a typical attitude that I find easy to disprove as soon as someone tastes my food and sees what kind of kitchen I run.

Naomi. What made you go freelance? How does it work?
Ashley. I was tired of living my life indoors for 80 hours a week. I go through phases. I have taken about 4 years doing freelance or small business ventures since I started cooking. I devote one or two years to a restaurant, 70-80 hours a week and then I break away again and do staff training stuff or wholesale my pastries. For me it is how I stay sane, the work is always going to be labor intensive but when I freelance I can still be creative, work in kitchens, and maintain that work life balance.

Naomi. My dream was always to be able to chop things up quickly. How does a chef learn the perfect cutting technique without being rushed to the emergency room?
Ashley. It takes years of practice. Some people are just naturally gifted with their knife skills, but it took me a few years of cutting thousands of vegetables before I felt comfortable enough to go fast.

Naomi. Do you think the “F&B” industry is still very conservative? I am asking because as an Italian food nazi, I pride my cuisine and I get really angry when I see people from other countries making disgusting mixes and claiming they are Italian food.
Ashley. I think there is a huge difference between tweaking a recipe and making it your own and destroying a classical preparation by bastardizing it with your fusion nonsense. Respect your ingredients by not combining a million things in one dish, or totally disrespecting classical preparations, it goes back to what I was saying about having a knowledge of chefs past. Respect the history, respect the classics.

Naomi. Based on the above, I think it’s awesome to mix traditions and flavors from different countries in the world but it must be done in the right way. Do you have any specific cuisine/foods that you are dying to learn how to make from the local masters?
Ashley. I feel this way about literally every country I have ever visited, but I think Japan is top of my list. I spent a month there weeks before I started culinary school, and it changed my life. Their discipline is so real, the sushi masters spend a lifetime perfecting just raw fish and rice.

Naomi. Apart from being a chef, you are also extremely creative with paper and pen. Is your illustration work influenced by your other talent?
Ashley. Drawing was always a huge part of my life, i’ve kept a sketchbook since I was kid. I think that in order to be happy in my everyday life I have to create something everyday. If it’s not food it’s illustrations and vice versa.

Naomi. Is there a relation between you cooking and illustrating? Do you marry the two disciplines or keep them completely separated?
Ashley. As I started developing menus and recipes I began drawing my ideas to help me visualize them. Although my finished dishes don’t usually look just like my sketches, it is an important part of my creative process.

Naomi. Will you eventually work on your own F&B concept?
Ashley. I have a few plans in the pipeline. I don’t plan on investing my own money into a concept anytime soon, but I am keen to get some VC so I can have a place where I have the freedom to make what I want each day and have a little more routine to my life.

Naomi. What is your advice to people who are thinking about making food their career?
Ashley. It is a tough career path, but it is very rewarding. Diligence is key. Keep your head down and do the work, put in the hours. You will get verbally abused, you’ll burn yourself, cut yourself, hurt yourself in more ways than you could ever imagine, but the risks are overshadowed by the rewards. If you are truly passionate about this career it won’t feel like work to you.

*
*
*

Ashley Went interviewed by Naomi Accardi and lensed by Anwar Aqib.
Dubai, March 2018.