What working for a Top Chef (who tried to avoid paying me) taught me about advocating for myself

“You got a lot of balls”

When I was 20, the summer after my junior year of college, I interned for my Congressman on Capitol Hill. This was very much an unpaid internship, so my first priority once I got to DC was to find a 5-9 to work after my 9-5 so I could afford to live :)

I was excited to be hired at a Top Chef alum’s restaurant! I would head over immediately after my day of answering constituent phone calls and run the cash register (endless lines out the door every shift) or churn milkshakes by hand (a truly killer arm workout).

I didn’t mind the work… but I didn’t enjoy it when my paychecks kept bouncing. These were small checks - and I saw the cash we pulled in daily, so I knew they were a fraction of the store’s revenue. After a month, I still hadn’t been paid and my savings were running low.

The person who had hired me and handled the finances was the chef’s mom. She told me one Saturday that the chef would be at the shop that day, and that I should go down in person to get paid. So I went. I walked up to the counter and asked for the chef. When he emerged from the back office, I relayed what his mom had directed me to do. He responded verbatim:

“You got a lot of balls coming down here and asking for that.”

“A lot of balls”! To ask to be paid minimum wage for work I had already done in his wildly successful celebrity chef restaurant?

Now, having run a brick and mortar business and payroll for several months, it’s not that I don’t understand how things can get messy behind the scenes. I was pretty understanding about it at the time as well.

But I had worked food service for years before this, and I knew repeated bouncing of small paychecks wasn’t normal. And shaming me for asking to get paid certainly isn’t normal or how I would handle that now as a manager.

I tell this story not because I’m necessarily a better manager or business owner than this chef - as I said, I still love his food, and hope I can always stop by his restaurants when I’m in DC. I tell it because it’s often what comes to mind when I’m trying to hype myself up for investor and partner meetings in my current work. It’s important to me to advocate for myself, to ask for what I think I deserve, to push for what I think should happen. But doing so is almost never easy.

The Top Chef case was such a simple and straightforward one - I was unmistakably in the right, asking for very little, and yet having to demand it and withstand conflict with a person in a position of power and privilege to do so. This story helps me remember: you can’t always assume that people will do what’s right or give you what you’ve earned or deserve. You’ll often have to ask, and not only that, you’ll often have to follow up; demand; tolerate conflict; and sometimes get shit for doing so.

Unfortunately, I have many more stories about the negative reactions I’ve gotten from standing up for myself, taking up space, making (IMO) very reasonable requests, and even just asking questions or reporting clear violations - both in the workplace and outside of it. And I’ll add that I’ve mostly chosen to work in the types of organizations that ostensibly valued equity and fairness and encouraged employees to voice their views, and almost always with managers I liked and respected. Still, it’s inescapable.

When you’re in the position of having to ask, and even when you’re not getting a response, that’s not a signal that you want too much - but I often find my instinct is to assume that it is. I feel like I should just leave the person alone; they clearly don’t want to work with me. I have to fight this instinct every day, especially as a business owner.

It’s not a hot take that women are socialized to avoid asking for what they want, especially if that requires conflict. Regardless of what you think about Lean In, I think the Tiara Syndrome concept it popularized - that women often “work hard and wait for someone to place a tiara on their heads” - is relevant here. I feel a strong urge to work hard and wait, rather than asking for the “tiara” of pay I’m owed, or recognition I’m qualified for.

Underneath this urge is fear: fear of conflict and rejection. If I keep my head down, the absence of a proactive unsolicited promotion is easier to bear than asking for a promotion and getting turned down. I’d rather have Schrödinger’s Potential Promotion than the rejection.

I take a lot of pride in my integrity, and I think that is the root of a lot of this - that I want others to give me the benefit of the doubt, so I try to do that for them as well. I try hard to do right by my employees, vendors, and partners, and I hate the idea that not everyone else is doing the same. And I don’t believe I’m being greedy or trying to take advantage of anyone when I advocate for myself. But I’ve certainly experienced how much people like the Top Chef I worked for really do not like it when I’m persistent.

As I wrote this letter, my husband and I were discussing how we want our son to grow up advocating for himself, and agreed: we don't want him to be afraid. We don't want him to fear asking for help, opportunities or recognition; and we don't want him to fear sharing his opinion, being honest, or acting with integrity. As I work to fight that fear in myself, I want to help him grow up without that fear as much as possible.

Ultimately, I’m glad I went down to the restaurant that day to ask to be paid - it became a formative experience for me. And for what it’s worth, the Top Chef gave me the cash I was owed then and there, I kept showing up, and my checks didn’t bounce for the rest of the summer.

I’ll share more thoughts in future letters about how this can play out in the workplace, and how I’m developing that internal ability to evaluate “is what I’m asking for the bare minimum, reasonable, a stretch, or a long shot?” And accordingly moderate my approach and expectations - how aggressively do I follow up or escalate, vs. taking “no” for an answer?

Something I think about a lot: if a job has anything to do with making asks and getting other people to do things for you, which most of them do - sales, partnerships, client and team management - I wouldn’t want to hire or promote someone in that role who wasn’t willing to make asks of me, to manage up to me, and to work toward getting the outcomes they want from me. Not all managers may feel that way, but I think it’s shortsighted to not see the obvious connection between the ability to self-advocate and advocate on behalf of an organization. Much more to come here!