For millions of Americans, Martha Stewart is the holy grail of hospitality and the doyenne of the dining room, providing the last word on everything from how to roast a chicken to how to lay a table. Behind the scenes, Martha has also been a positive influence on culinary professionals. Women working in the heat of the kitchen share their thoughts on Martha.
Martha Stewart — An Influencer of Women Chefs
A quarter of a million dollars was up for grabs but for Chef Emily Brubaker, there was a lot more at stake. Brubaker, like all the contestants on the NBC series Yes, Chef!, was tasked not only with cooking great food but also with working on personality traits that were holding her back in the kitchen and her career. (Spoiler alert: Chef Brubaker won!)
Chef Emily Brubaker, winner of Yes Chef!
Brubaker’s challenges? Stubbornness and insecurity, she says. “So, for me on the show, I was like, focus on what’s imperfect and try to make it perfect.” A nerve wracking goal, especially under the watchful eyes of judges Martha Stewart and Chef José Andrés. Brubaker had been under the Martha microscope before, as a contestant on Food Network’s Chopped. She remembers the first day when she saw Stewart on the set of Yes, Chef! “When she walked out and saw me, she pointed at me and said, ‘Chopped.’ So right away that made my heart flutter,” Brubaker says.
While Brubaker describes Andres as “tender, passionate, and loving” – Stewart was altogether different. “If you overcook it, she’s going to know. You under season it, she’s going to call you out. She doesn’t – pardon my French – bullshit you. She is straight up, this is how it should be. And she doesn’t waiver from that.”
It’s one of the things Brubaker and the other chefs I spoke to like most about Stewart – her complete, unflinching desire for culinary perfection. And while she held contestants on Yes, Chef! to the highest standards, they were no higher than those to which she holds herself professionally. In her lengthy and prodigious food and hospitality career that spans almost fiftyyears (she started her catering company in 1976 and her first book Entertaining was published in 1982), over one hundred books, and countless TV series, she’s made perfection the norm, whether in a recipe for her Five-Cheese Souffle (made with eggs from one of her 200 chickens) or a Frozen Pomegranate Martha-rita (served in a cut glass crystal goblet with a rim of either turbinado sugar or pink rim salt, please).
Yara Herrera of Hellbender Restaurant in Queens
When Yara Herrera – chef and co-owner of Hellbender restaurant, located in New York City and recently hailed by the New York Times as a “beacon of inspired Mexican food” – was asked by Resy – the online restaurant reservation service owned by American Express – to choose ten possible ‘collaborators’ for a dinner at her restaurant and told that “no one’s off the table,” she took them at their word. “We just threw some crazy names out there like Jeremy Allen White, Paris Hilton, and we put Martha Stewart on there.”
Several months later, Resy got back in touch with Herrera. “They contacted us with, ‘Okay, Martha Stewart said she’s going to do the dinner.’ And we were kind of like, ‘What? She’s actually going to be in the restaurant?’” It wasn’t until Stewart walked through the door of Hellbender, that Herrera believed it was happening. “And I was like, you know, she probably lives in a mansion, and my restaurant is a tiny 60-seat restaurant on a corner in Ridgewood, Queens.”
It was a pinch-me moment for Herrera who credits Stewart with much of what she knows about the art of hospitality. “She has that eye for detail and that commitment to precision and doing things right and, you know, a lot of integrity and high standards. And I think those are things that are really important for any chef who is serving food to the public,” she says.
Chef Selina Progar of Big Burrito Group
Details. Precision. High standards. These are all qualities that resonate with pastry chef Selina Progar, too, and ones she absorbed as a kid watching Stewart on television with her grandfather. “We would always watch Martha Stewart together and he would always have me write down the recipes in a little notebook, and then we would make the food together,” she says. By the time she was nine, she was shopping and making an entire Martha meal for her parents. “I thought that she always seemed like a really cool person,” Progar says, “just like she knew all of these things.”
Watching Stewart seeped into Progar’s culinary DNA. She cites her as a factor in her decision to go to cooking school and pursue a career in the culinary arts. “Everything was so mysterious. It was like you were learning something for the very first time by watching her and she explained it all so perfectly. It was awesome.” Progar is a regular contributor to TABLE, and recently developed a series of Martha-inspired recipes. Progar is now Executive Pastry Chef at Pittsburgh’s Eleven and other Big Burrito Group restaurants.
Veda Sankaran, Recipe Developer and Food Stylist of Jalsa by Veda
Veda Sankaran was also introduced to Stewart as a child watching her television shows. She is also a regular contributor to TABLE Magazine, and developed a series of Martha Stewart-inspired recipes. That sense of mystery and magic resonated with her as did for Progar. Sankaran was 4 years old when she moved to the United States from India and only 9 when she and her family moved to Altoona, PA. “It wasn’t really relatable to my experience,” she says of Stewart’s shows. “It was very outside the realm of what I was exposed to but in a way, it was almost magical too, right?”
But that striving for perfection comes at a price, Sankaran says. “She elevates things to such a level and then makes it seem as if that’s the norm and that it’s attainable, when it’s not necessarily so for the majority of people you know.” So yes, magic but also setting expectations that might not be realistic. “We want something outside the norm. And I think that’s what she kind of did. But the dark side of that is also, it was so normalized that we thought it was something we should attain.”
Sometimes You Have to Be Stubborn and Stand Your Ground
As Brubaker worked her way through the Yes, Chef! competition, that sense of perfection was never far from her mind — neither Stewart’s exacting standards, nor Brubaker’s own as well as the twin goals to work on her stubbornness and insecurity. But something Stewart told her stuck with her. “One of the things Martha told me is, with being stubborn, you have to understand sometimes you have to be stubborn. You have to know when it’s assertive, when it’s the right time to stand your ground…there are times when you should let things go, but you should know being stubborn is not the worst attribute.”
Definitely not the worst. When the prize was awarded, it was Chef Brubaker who took home the gold. Richer financially, yes, but also from working alongside someone she respects and admires. “I mean, what a world changing event.”
Story by Julia Platt Leonard
Recipes by Selina Progar and Veda Sankaran
Check out these 15 delicious Martha Stewart-inspired recipes:
Asparagus, Leek, and Jarlsberg Quiche
Slow Cooker Tom Kha Gai
Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Stacked Eggplant Parmesan
Taco Casserole
Whole-Lemon Pound Cake with Pomegranate Glaze
Angel Food Cake
One Pan Pasta
Keto Chicken Roll Ups
Five Spice Pumpkin Pie
Chicken Pot Pie
Focaccia
Focaccia Sandwiches
Apple Crostata with Cheddar Cheese Crust
Hot Cherry Tomato Salad
