WFM Whole Foods Market, Inc.

By Sophia Hollander 

When Daniela Soto-Innes visited the Flatiron space that would become Cosme, she stared in horror. It was an abandoned strip club, poles still poking up from the floor.

She was 23 years old, tasked by one of the world's most famous chefs, Enrique Olvera, with opening his first New York outpost. "I'm, like, trying to not cry," she said.

Two years later, Cosme is one of New York City's hottest restaurants and in May Ms. Soto-Innes was named rising-star chef of the year by the James Beard Foundation.

In a famously male-dominated industry, Ms. Soto-Innes, chef de cuisine at Cosme, is one of three 25-year-old women shaping the city's culinary scene.

Liz Johnson, from Scotia, N.Y., is winning raves as executive chef at Mimi, a 27-seat restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Stephanie Nass, from Westchester, has attracted sponsors like Whole Foods Market and BMW of Manhattan to her art-themed supper club and is developing products to position herself as a next-generation Martha Stewart.

Ms. Nass, who majored in art history at Columbia University and attended culinary school, started hosting dinners in her cramped Manhattan apartment two years ago. That evolved into Victory Club, which has now hosted more than 40 events in galleries, museums, artists' homes and restaurants with art collections.

Members, who must be between 22 and 40, pay $100 a month, plus the cost of the dinners they attend. In June, she launched Chefanie Sheets, a line of painted fondant-like sheets that customers can apply to their own cakes for a professional look. She also consults with restaurants, using social media to help make dishes like lobster pizza and sushi burgers go viral.

Ms. Nass's goals include "cookbooks, tableware, cookware, packaged-food online content, absolutely everything," she said, with an emphasis on artful home entertaining. "It's about using that recipe to bring people together."

Whereas Ms. Nass spent a year of high school cooking in the French countryside, Ms. Johnson grew up eating Subway and working at her local pizzeria. Her father was a chemist, her mother a church organist, but since kindergarten, she has wanted to be a chef. "I've just never really had any other ambition," Ms. Johnson said.

She has worked in Japan, at Noma in Copenhagen and Má Pêche in New York, but her French cooking -- which includes veal Oscar and escargot butter as well as Asian seasonings and ingredients like ankimo -- has earned acclaim.

Ms. Johnson would prefer the focus stops there, that her age and gender were considered irrelevant. She would like to be known simply as an excellent chef, who will drive to Canada for the right foie gras and pick up a whole cow in Vermont to butcher in the restaurant's basement kitchen. "I'm not about a girl-power thing," she said.

She has encountered sexism in the kitchen but prefers not to discuss it. "It's done, and I didn't let it bring me down," she said.

Instead, Ms. Johnson has doubled down on the food, fighting with the owners over adding vegetarian options and soups, and opening for lunch, she said. "I'm not on great terms with them, to be honest."

One of them, Evan Bennett, disputed that.

"I have literally done every single thing in my power in order to support her doing whatever she wants to do," he said, adding that he and the other co-owners offered her a stake in the restaurant, which she declined.

In a subsequent email, Ms. Johnson responded that "they have given me full reign over the menu for a long time now."

Like Ms. Johnson, Ms. Soto-Innes at times has grappled with her youth while running the show. As a 19-year-old chef in Houston, she was the only woman among the savory sous chefs.

"I didn't want to mess up, and I really didn't know how to delegate," she said.

Ms. Soto-Innes would arrive at 6 a.m. and leave at 2 or 3 a.m., "until I completely burnt out," she said. "I felt bad to tell people what to do. I wanted to do everything myself."

That is no longer a problem. When Mariana Villegas, 30, started in the kitchen, there were times when she wanted "to kill her," Ms. Villegas said.

Now they are friends who spend off days together at the beach or gym.

"She will take everything away from you in the kitchen because she wants to push you as hard as she can," said Ms. Villegas, who now handles guest relations. At the same time, "she sees Cosme as her home and everyone who works here is part of her family."

Ms. Soto-Innes hugs and kisses every member of the staff good morning. She chides them to eat.

Before dinner service every night, she leads an energetic stretching session to music. "Sometimes I forget, like, 'Oh my God, I'm 25. I shouldn't be telling people that are older than me what to do,' but they need to be told," she said. "They need to be reminded that you can also be a person."

Even Ms. Soto-Innes was skeptical when Mr. Olvera asked her to move to New York after working with him for about a year at Pujol, his acclaimed Mexico City restaurant.

The investors had some questions, Mr. Olvera admitted. He told them: "The minute you see her cook and you see her in the kitchen, I think you'll be sure that she's the one."

"I'm not concerned with gender," he said. "Just leadership."

Write to Sophia Hollander at sophia.hollander@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 05, 2016 19:26 ET (23:26 GMT)

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