When I opened my own restaurant, nearly ten years ago, I finally put to bed that whole business about being a woman in a male-dominated profession.When I first read these lines in Gabrielle Hamilton’s groundbreaking memoir , I felt a stirring of exhilaration in my core, coursing up my head, and buzzing between my temples. With magenta metal stools still up on the bar from last night’s shift, the “Pruniverse,” as Hamilton and Merriman lovingly refer to their place, reliably began to grind to life. Hamilton is currently married to Ashley Merriman, who is her co-chef at Prune. Is it possible? At 11:30 on a weekday morning in late August, the chefs Gabrielle Hamilton and Ashley Merriman were both a little jumpy, though they expressed this at very different frequencies. Merriman and her wife, Gabrielle Hamilton, are co-chefs at Prune, which Hamilton opened in 1999. According to one fellow chef-owner, the thing we’re observing here, this Pruniverse, “is a cult.” To be clear, she says, that’s a good thing. Hamilton, who moves through the world with spring-loaded intensity, vigorously dissecting every exchange, was pinging around Prune, the 30-seat restaurant she planted here in the East Village 19 years ago this month. In the end, however, they could not find a way to make it work with Mr. Friedman.“I trust he knows better than we do what the path forward is for you all,” she wrote in the email to employees. I haven’t even set foot in the Pig.Mario Batali had really bad behavior at the Spotted Pig, and Ken Friedman had bad behavior at the Spotted Pig, and everyone knows that’s true, including us. Karmically this end result makes sense to me.”Gabrielle Hamilton and Ashley Merriman Exit the Spotted PigThe chef Gabrielle Hamilton, right, and her wife, Ashley Merriman, at their restaurant Prune, in the East Village. I think for starters, I’ll just say I really don’t believe in capital punishment. [Laugh] The burger, that remains to be seen. - Read online for free. Because while I would like to believe, as Hamilton seems to believe, that the food world operates in a genderless vacuum, that’s not the reality. We like the challenge. Merriman credits her wife Hamilton with “inventing” brunch, for which New Yorkers line up and down the block on the weekends. Sign up for the All rights reserved.Letting my mind roll over my own payroll, female after female after female — from general manager to bar manager to sous chef to pastry chef to owner to server — I couldn’t imagine that we were still having this conversation, this draining, polarizing conversation about where the women are in the industry. A lot of things we’ve asked men to do, he did. She recently referred to the Friedman harassment debacle as a And that’s exactly the point. She knows that attaching her reputation and that of her partner Ashley Merriman to Friedman’s notoriety sends a clear message to the women currently in her employ: If they come forward with concerns or accusations of their own, they can expect to be silenced. Should Ken lose all his businesses?This is again — please, I sincerely hope you will not paraphrase me — it’s a real, genuine question: What does it look like, should the guy not make a penny again? But that vision came with a toxic management style characterized by intimidation, a barrage of sexualized commentary, and explosive anger, according to two dozen current and former staffers. Together, they’d been charged with setting back their industry, the #MeToo movement, and womankind in general.And yet, on the day we met, Hamilton was watching the clock. We like the work. A chef would be a chef, a manager would be a manager, a sommelier would be a sommelier, regardless of gender. Updated: October 13, 2018 I’m also totally opposed to Ken’s frankly disgusting behavior in equal measure. I’m not gonna cook her burger; it’s hers. We have, between us, over 40 years of collective experience in this industry. As Merriman and Hamilton put it, … In the book, Hamilton speaks openly about her reluctance to address this group, and there’s something almost defensive about her distaste of being called a “female chef.” While I understood and largely related to the frustration, Hamilton’s determination to remove that phrase from the conversation read as an attempt to ignore the problem rather than address it.partner with Ken Friedman for the post-April Bloomfield revamp of The Spotted Pig, I found myself recalling my reaction to these sections of , and while the sting of my disappointment still hasn’t abated (and probably never will), I wasn’t entirely surprised by the news.