Whether real or imagined, the mystique of the French woman is recognized far and wide: She’s chic, svelte and sensual – and savvy about fashion, food and wine. That enduring image may even be one of France’s biggest exports, alongside French cuisine. Yet as the latest male-dominated Michelin Guide attests, women remain vastly under-recognized in the national culinary scene. It’s time for the archetype and stereotype to get a much-needed rethink. “Parisian women, in particular, are the most fetishized women, the subject of so much mythmaking,” says author Lindsey Tramuta, whose The New Parisienne portrays a far more complex and powerful feminine energy reshaping restaurants and more in the nation’s capital. “White, tall, affluent, straight. Think Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jeanne Damas. It effaces a big chunk of the population. Can we stop doing that?” she asks. Yes, we can. We set out to speak to women in the food scenes in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, and Nice about what makes them tick.

“I grew up in a restaurateur family. For my parents, food was a way of showing love – that’s also true for me,” reflects chef Khánh-Ly Huynh. The creative mastermind behind two buzzy Paris restaurants, The Hood and Nonette, is redefining the standards of Singaporean and Vietnamese dishes in her native France. A MasterChef France winner and graduate of the Paul Bocuse Institute, Huynh says she couldn’t find a satisfying bánh mi in a country home to one of the world’s largest Vietnamese diaspora populations. With business partner Pearlyn Lee, she set out to provide fresh options using housemade condiments and charcuterie sourced from sustainable farms. “The road is just starting to really open up to people issued from immigration,” Huynh remarks. “For a long time, it was all just cuisine asiatique and now we’re seeing a change in perception.”

If there’s one figure in French culinary history who paved the path for female restaurateurs, it’s Eugénie Brazier. The legendary mother of French cooking was an unmarried farm girl with a baby son when she moved to Lyon in 1915. She went on to become one of the Mères Lyonnaises, matriarchal powerhouses who built the city’s culinary reputation in an era when the silk and auto industries were flourishing. Brazier was the only-ever recipient of six Michelin stars, until Alain Ducasse in 1998. “For women in the business, it’s a question of character. We are not power-hungry but we have strength,” muses her granddaughter Jacotte Brazier. The third-generation restaurateur of La Mère Brazier (which still serves regional haute cuisine on Rue Royale under Mathieu Viannay), she now oversees Les Amis d’Eugénie Brazier, an organization that gives scholarships to young women attending culinary school – and she does so with sparkling savoir-faire.

“We kept meeting women who were doing incredible things related to food and agriculture, but we noticed that men kept getting the spotlight,” says Sophie Franco, who co-founded La Food Locale with former restaurateur Estelle Elias. Their business directory and Prix Femmes de Food awards promote women in the industry from Toulouse and the surrounding region, an area she feels is deserving of wider attention. “Sure, people talk more about Paris or Marseille as gastronomic destinations, but the scene here is evolving,” Franco says. She points out that Occitanie, an administrative region formed in 2016 to encompass rolling hills east to the Mediterranean and south to the Catalonian border of Spain, produces the most organic products in the country. “Now I can have a glass of wine with local oysters from the Bassin de Thau, while just 10 years ago that wasn’t possible,” she says.

Chef Julia Sedefdjian left her hometown for Paris as a teenager, and just a few years later, at the age of 21, she became the youngest woman to be awarded a Michelin star. No small feat in a field where only six percent of chefs etoilés are women. “Maybe women are less at the forefront commercially,” she notes. “But there are many more of us in schools now, and we are strong behind the scenes. I love the sense of community I feel when we meet at events.” Busy with her own Paris restaurant, Baieta (which means “kiss” in her native Nissart dialect), she still likes to get home to Provence to see family. “Nice is the most beautiful city in the world,” she says warmly. “What I adore is that you have the mountains in the background and scenery all around. You can go out into nature and access the landscape easily. When I get some sun, I come back to life.”