Madison is lucky. For a long time, its most famous chef was a woman, Odessa Piper — the founder of L’Etoile and an early adopter of farm-to-table cuisine. Piper celebrated all that was best grown in the Midwest and gained fame for doing so. When Piper started her restaurant, chefs were seldom women.
That is changing. While the restaurant industry, like all industries, is beginning to deal with issues of sexism and harassment, Madison is lucky to have a growing group of women in charge and in the spotlight for their innovative cooking, their strong work ethic and for making their way through what is still a male-dominated world. Here we highlight seven culinary trailblazers. Rest assured, there are more coming up through the ranks.
Chris Hynes
Tami Lax of Harvest and The Old Fashioned loves working with smoked lake trout.
Tami Lax
Tami Lax first stepped onto the Madison restaurant scene at L’Etoile 24 years ago, working under the direction of Odessa Piper. Growing up in a farming family in northern Wisconsin, foraging, preparing and cooking food were always a part of Lax’s life. But she didn’t consider a career in the restaurant industry until she read an article featuring Piper and Chicago’s Rick Bayless discussing their local, seasonal approaches to cooking. The connection between restaurants and small farms excited her.
After working with Piper (who encouraged her to skip culinary school and venture out on her own) Lax opened Harvest in 2000 and The Old Fashioned in 2005. Harvest continues to prepare thoughtful, local dishes on an ever-changing menu, while The Old Fashioned celebrates the best of mainstream Wisconsin eating and drinking. Lax carries on Piper’s tradition of supporting small farms and family operations at both. Two of her favorite ingredients are the Lake Superior herring and trout she sources from an Ojibwe man.
Featured in the “No. 6” appetizer at The Old Fashioned, the smoked lake trout and creamed herring is served alongside several other Wisconsin notables: Miesfeld garlic salami out of Sheboygan, Bavaria Sausage’s braunschweiger from Fitchburg and handmade Widmer’s brick spread, with its distinctive aroma, made in the tiny town of Theresa.
Lax is also a co-founder of the Culinary Ladies Collective, a group 100 members strong that supports women working in the food industry while giving back to the community. Lax hopes to see more women in leadership roles who earn salaries commensurate with that level of responsibility: “I’d love there to be a day when there’s no distinction” between men and women in the food industry, she says.
Cheesecake by Carolyn Fath
Lauren Montelbano has perfected raw “cheesecake” made with cashews and coconut milk.
Lauren Montelbano
Raised in a “meat-centric family,” Lauren Montelbano had to fend for herself after she became a vegetarian at age 18. Now she’s experimenting with flavors and ingredients to create a vegan, mostly gluten-free menu at Surya Cafe in Fitchburg.
Montelbano draws from varied experiences. She spent time in a vegan ashram in Thailand and noticed how great she felt eating an entirely plant-based diet. In Thailand and later in India she learned what she terms “intuitive cooking” from the older women in the communities she visited.
“They taught me more how to feel while you’re cooking, and how to communicate with the food,” says Montelbano. “It tells you when it’s done. It tells you what it needs. You just need to learn about flavor development, and you can take anything and turn it into a dish.”
Upon returning to Madison, she worked through the ranks at Oliver’s Public House and then gained vegan inspiration from Jennie Capellaro at The Green Owl. Both Capellaro and Montelbano’s partner, Kyle Julius (an experienced chef and instructor at Madison College’s culinary school), were resources as she opened Surya and designed recipes for the first time. Montelbano went through trial and error to get her recipes right.
She perfected her raw “cheese” cakes, which taste like the dairy version but don’t leave one feeling so heavy and full. Her crust combines dates, walnuts and maple syrup; the “cheesecake” base consists of cashews and coconut milk, with flavors varying from mango turmeric, blueberry thyme and peach matcha. Montelbano also takes pride in her vegan Alfredo sauce, in which she uses cashews and roasted cauliflower, served over zoodles.
LS7 by Candice Wagener
Jean Tran ‘s nem khao tod, or “LS7,” is an amped fried rice with lime juice and peanuts.
Jean Tran
Jean Tran has spent the majority of her time in America working in restaurants. Born in Laos, Tran moved to Iowa when she was 15 and started working at a restaurant soon thereafter. By age 26, she had opened her own Chinese restaurant in Beaver Dam. In 2009, she came to Madison for a change of pace and opened Ha Long Bay, drawing on her roots in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam in creating a menu of foods her family would eat at home.
The “LS7,” as it’s known to regulars, has a cult following. Tran says the dish is a favorite at her family’s gatherings, a ramped-up version of fried rice, with crispy, flash-fried rice with pork garlic sausage, ground chicken, cilantro, mint, lime juice and peanuts.
She goes out of her way to make sure her customers are happy, treating them like family. “I might be different from other restaurants, but it’s something I love to do and I like the people,” says Tran. “I think about what people will enjoy, what people will like, and that’s my happiness.”
Samantha Egelhoff photos
Jamie Hoang of Sujeo presents a crispy, creative take on brussels sprouts and kale.
Jamie Hoang
Jamie Hoang, who happens to be Tran’s niece, works just a short distance away at Sujeo, where she is executive sous chef. Hoang was peeling shrimp as early as age 4 at her parents’ restaurant and gained service experience at Tran’s Beaver Dam restaurant and at Ha Long Bay, where she worked while enrolled in culinary school at Madison College.
She also has cooked at Forequarter, L’Etoile and Estrellón, and is settling in after almost two years at Sujeo. “I feel like myself here,” says Hoang. “It’s farm-to-table and local. I’m able to do things that are Wisconsin but at the same time I’m allowed to bring my own ethnic background into the picture with [foods] I grew up with.”
A simple but notable dish that Hoang takes credit for on the menu at Sujeo is the fried brussels sprouts and kale. While brussels sprouts are becoming a mainstay on menus around town, Hoang’s creative take is possibly the most inventive. She separates the brussels sprouts into leaves, mixes them with chopped kale, fries them crisp in a savory Golden Mountain sauce (a Thai staple) and tops the whole thing with deep-fried shallots.
Hoang has a calm, quiet demeanor, and her management style is open; she listens to others’ ideas. “Never assume that you already know everything because you could miss out on an opportunity,” she says.
Borokhim by Stacy Bruner
Laila Borokhim turns her specialty flatbread, malawach, into an open-face sandwich.
Laila Borokhim
Inspired by cooking with her Jewish Iranian grandmother while growing up, Laila Borokhim takes her family’s old world recipes and makes them her own. She served traditional Persian food at her first restaurant, Layla’s. That cuisine is often vegetable- and herb-heavy with meat as a flavoring. Borokhim adapted dishes like ghormeh sabzi (a green herb stew) by adding more meat and changing the texture to appeal to Midwestern palates. Having recently stepped away from Layla’s, Borokhim is now running Noosh, which she dubs a “new-age Jewish deli with seasonally-changing menus.” She has also recently taken over running the bar at the Madison Labor Temple and is revamping that menu.
Borokhim aims to use the freshest ingredients possible and cooks in small batches. At Noosh, she’s serving delicious, simple comfort food. A specialty is her malawach, a traditional Middle Eastern flatbread that’s sometimes likened to a Yemeni pancake. At Noosh, Borokhim turns it into the base for a sandwich with a fried egg atop a layer of sun-dried tomatoes and cilantro chutney.
Borokhim — who once planned on going to med school — says that “If you don’t put good things in your body, then your body’s going to give out on you.”
As a fledgling restaurant owner, Borokhim felt there wasn’t much support for a woman just starting out in the industry. That experience led to her joining the Culinary Ladies Collective. That dovetails with her strong desire to build community through food: “I thought a restaurant would be the way to build community, build something that I like doing, and could maybe be a good place for people.”
Dahl by Paulius Musteikis
Elizabeth Dahl and her hickory nut cake, plated with persimmon puree.
Elizabeth Dahl
Elizabeth Dahl, a James Beard award semi-finalist for best pastry chef in 2013 at Nostrano, now displays her mastery of desserts at Graze and L’Etoile. She got early baking lessons from her Lebanese grandmother. High school jobs at a bakery and a gourmet food shop/catering business in Peoria, Illinois, led to culinary school in Chicago. She later cooked at many Chicago restaurants, including Boka, Charlie Trotter’s and NAHA. After relocating to Madison, she and her husband, chef Tim Dahl, opened Nostrano, where she was the pastry chef. After they made the difficult decision to close Nostrano in 2017, Dahl came on as pastry chef at Graze and L’Etoile.
She loves experimenting with ice cream, and looks for balance by playing ingredients off each other — sweet and salty, smooth and crunchy. Her latest creation is a smoked maple flavor; she smokes the maple syrup through an intricate stovetop process, then adds it to the ice cream base and lets it sit overnight. The ice cream pairs well with her hickory nut cake. Layers of almond and hickory-flavored cake alternate with sweet pastry cream dotted with persimmon. It’s garnished with shaved persimmon and a persimmon puree on the plate.
Dahl is grateful for her current position, where the environment is similar to what she had at Nostrano: “I feel just as comfortable with the respect towards the food and quality ingredients and also having a professional environment and good people.”
Satsuma fries by Laura Zastrow
At Morris Ramen, Francesca Hong created much of the “not ramen” side of the menu, including the Satsuma sweet potato fries.
Francesca Hong
Francesca Hong has always seen the connection between food and community, cooking Thanksgiving dinners for her family at an early age, and taking inspiration from female chefs like Ina Garten, Giada De Laurentiis and Lidia Bastianich. She immersed herself in the Madison restaurant scene as early as high school. Her first executive chef role came in 2012 at 43 North, under the direction of the owner, Shinji Muramoto. She later moved to Restaurant Muramoto and now co-owns Morris Ramen with Muramoto and her husband, Matt Morris.
Hong specializes in the “not ramen” side of the menu, noting her simple dish of Satsuma sweet potato fries with deliciously smoky gochujang aioli for dipping is something she is proud of, as well as the beef bun, which has short rib thinly sliced, served with ssamjang, sesame seeds and miso, and a minty shiso leaf. “I think our food is really approachable,” says Hong. “People will come if the food is good and the service is good.”
Hong considers her staff like family, and is very hands-on with addressing concerns. As another founder of the Culinary Ladies Collective, she would love to see Madison kitchens have 30 percent to 40 percent female representation. “I think we can get there,” says Hong. She sees the Collective as a safe space for women to share their stories. “From there, we can collectively think about what we can do to move forward, what we can do to make sure people have resources.” Hong is positive about the prospects for women in Madison’s food industry: “I think the future for women is going to be a more supportive and productive one.”
