Restaurant kitchens are a pressurized stew of brutal hours, high stress and sleep deprivation. Acting out goes with the territory and anyone lower on the totem pole is fair game. But the familiar macho posturing of celebrity chefs has reached a tipping point. Now with an influx of women at the helm of restaurants, and a younger generation unwilling to submit to the brutal conditions once considered the norm, the rules of kitchen culture as we know it are being rewritten.
The Heat takes viewers behind-the-scenes to meet pioneering women chefs who broke through the glass ceiling, including Michelin-starred chefs Anne-Sophie Pic (a.k.a. the Dz Queen of French Cuisine) of Maison Pic in Valence, France; beloved UK star Angela Hartnett (and Gordon Ramsay’s former protégé) of Murano; and award-winning New York chef Anita Lo (who closes her iconic New York restaurant Annisa after 17 years). We’ll also meet the hungry talents of a new generation, including Amanda Cohen of the trendy vegetarian restaurant, Dirt Candy in New York’s Lower East Side; Victoria Blamey of the famed Greenwich Village Chumley’s in New York; Suzanne Barr of Toronto’s trendy Saturday Dinette, who is diversifying her kitchens one restaurant at a time.
Maya Gallus is a major award winning Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of Red Queen Productions with Justine Pimlott. Her films have screened around the world at international film festivals, including Toronto International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, Recently she was honored with a major career retrospective in 2017 at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival for her incredible body of work.
Her films include The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution,Derby Crazy Love (2013) The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche (2012) Dish: Women, Waitressing & the Art of Service (2010) and one of the best portrait docs ever created in this country, Elizabeth Smart: On The Side of the Angels (1991) featuring Jackie Burroughs as Canadian poet Elizabeth Smart.