FSR August 2022

Perspectives BY NICOLE DUNCAN

Restaurants Walk ‘A Fine Line’ Joanna James highlighted the challenges facing

female restaurateurs in her 2017 documentary. Now she’s building a network to change the status quo. THROUGHOUT HER CAREER, Joanna James has worked to tell the stories of unsung heroes. First she did so as a newspaper reporter and later as a documentary filmmaker. Her debut film, A Fine Line , explored the high-intensity world of restaurants through the lens of female restaurateurs and chefs, includ ing Dominique Crenn, Mashama Bailey, Barbara Lynch, and her own mother, Val erie James. It also brought to light the myriad factors behind a glaring dispar ity in the restaurant world, where women make up less than 7 percent of head chefs and restaurant owners. The film, which debuted in 2017 and later aired on PBS in 2020, received crit ical acclaim and was named Best Doc umentary by a First-Time Filmmaker by Vanity Fair . Its success also spurred James to build a new platform for a dif ferent kind of storytelling, one that invites women from across the indus try to share their experiences and sup port one another. MAPP, standing for Mentorship, Advocacy, Purpose, and the Power of women, started four years ago and just hosted its first conference this summer. As the organization con tinues to grow and launch new initia tives, it’s James’s mission to bring more women into leadership roles and ensure

‘A FINE LINE’ PREMIERE (LEFT TO RIGHT): CHEF ANGELA RAYNOR, PAST JAMES BEARD PRESIDENT SUSAN UNGARO, JOANNA JAMES, CHEF DOMINIQUE CRENN, CHEF VALERIE JAMES, AND MARKHAM VINEYARDS WINEMAKER KIMBERLEE NICHOLS. “It was really unearthing what has been there well before the pandemic. No one can deny that COVID impacted the way the industry is run, but many issues were just exacerbated and have always been there.”

they have the resources and network that female restaurant owners, like her mother, have historically lacked. MAPP just held its inaugural conference in June. How did it go? It went so well that we’ve already signed up for year two. We had women chefs, farmers, restaurateurs, and food activists from most states—even as far as Hawaii and Alaska. It wasn’t just about getting established restaurant groups from New

York or Chicago or L.A., although a lot of them were there. It was really about making an inclusive and well-repre sented audience, especially because many of the voices of women and women of color haven’t been part of the conver sation for so long. We wanted to make sure the people who we thought should be there were there, and so we provided scholarship tickets. It was great to hear from so many of these women. They said, ‘Well, it was hard to get the time off,’ or

CLAY WILLIAMS

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AUGUST 2022