Brisbane’s ritziest food festival shows that hospitality still has a major gender problem

You might have heard: James Street Food and Wine Trail returns this Sunday.

Now in its 13th year, this one-day festival brings Brisbane’s ritziest precinct alive with events, activations, chef demonstrations, long lunches and after-hours activities. It’s a potent reminder that there’s more to James Street than just The Calile and high-end retailers.

One event stuck out on social media: the James Street Food and Wine Trail Chef Stage, featuring demonstrations and showcases from some of this city’s very best chefs. The issue? All of them were men.

In 2026, it felt jarring.

I wasn’t the only one to notice. A number of women in hospitality commented publicly on the post, questioning the absence of female chefs. I reached out with a private message: “Adding a woman to this line-up for next year will be an A+ inclusion.”

Not long afterwards, comments on the post were disabled and those who had raised concerns were addressed privately by James Street Initiative, which promotes the precinct. The response was much the same for all of us: the event had been pitched to James Street tenants, and the final line-up reflected who those tenants had put forward.

Initially, I was frustrated – I thought it was a conversation worth having publicly – but it’s understandable that JSI’s priority was promoting the event. As JSI director Marie-Louise Theile told me later: “We had a schedule, and we wanted to push forward with that.” That’s fair.

But it got me wondering, where do we have these conversations, if not in public? We can’t keep having them behind closed doors.

Most head chef positions in James Street’s kitchens are held by men, and those are the people who were put forward for the event. But then that’s simply a reflection of the wider hospitality industry, which in 2026 continues to be dominated by men.

Just this week, a major annual award announced its nominations for Chef of the Year. All were male.

Hospitality is ruthless, and no more so than in the kitchens of our best restaurants. The hours are long, the job often unglamorous. The kitchen brigade system was adapted from the military to apply a rigid hierarchy to restaurant operations. Built by and for men, it normalised long hours and stress.

In the years following #MeToo and the investigative reporting that unearthed a misogynistic culture at Sydney restaurant groups such as Swillhouse and Merivale, it felt like the industry was finally ready to change. But somewhere over the past two years, that appetite seems to have been lost.

Hospitality relies on diversity to remain dynamic and engaging for both diners and the people who work in it. But it also relies on curators, talent searchers and media outlets to accurately represent the industry.

These people influence who the public sees as successful. This affects the way our guests interact with us, controls the opportunities presented to us, and trickles down to our suppliers. As Jade Tareha, co-owner of Humble on Duke in Sunshine Beach, points out, these people affect how we operate our own businesses.

I’ve experienced it firsthand: radio silence from a supplier I’m trying to work with, until I appeared on an article or list of award nominations. That’s just one example, but I think there needs to be a greater understanding of the responsibility that comes with influence.

Obviously, the James Street Food and Wine Trail Chef Stage wasn’t deliberately excluding women. And there is real diversity there, such as Sushi Room chef Shimpei Raikuni collaborating with fishmonger Mitsu Sakurai on a tuna carving demonstration. But the systems we have inherited are naturally producing male-dominated line-ups, unless we consciously work to disrupt them.

I reached out to JSI after the emailed response and Theile agreed to speak to me about the event. In that conversation, she conceded this year’s line-up could have been more diverse.

“It was an oversight for us not to push harder, but at the end of the day, everyone was given an opportunity,” she said. She suggested looking beyond the faces of the Chef’s Stage, noting that some were representing businesses owned by women, such as Anyday, which put forward chef and culinary director Ben Williamson but is co-owned by Bianca Marchi.

This is a systemic problem, but systemic problems aren’t solved in private.

As a chef who’s a woman, I’ve been the one to fill a quota. OzHarvest, for example, asked me to join the CEO Cook-Off, and was up-front about how it would help them achieve a diverse line-up. And perhaps that’s an approach we can adopt: reminding the women you’re asking what impact they will have by saying yes.

Diversity shouldn’t be seen as taking anything away from anyone who deserves it. It’s about adding more and taking a moment of reflection to ask: “Who else deserves to be seen?”

New York restaurateur Will Guidara said one of my favourite things about our industry: “Service is black and white, but hospitality is colour.”

Hospitality is colourful because of the diversity of identities it has become a safe space for, and stories become more exciting when all of these identities are included.

Don’t we want the rest of the world to see how exciting, progressive and interesting a career in hospitality can be? Don’t we want every young person to be able to see a version of themselves on stage?

We cannot stop talking about this, we cannot stop questioning, or the momentum will slow to a stop.