The Lesbian Behind Lesbian Food Account
All about Hayley Yates and her love of beans
Food and queer culture are two of my favorite subjects in the world. Naturally, I’m a fan of Lesbian Food Account, an Instagram profile run by the self-taught home chef-turned-line cook Hayley Yates. I religiously keep up to date with LFA, loving the IG stories that document shenanigans such as CitiBiking with a tub of beef stock strategically strapped in the front basket and whipping up udon carbonara while day drunk. Yates excels at sharing recipes step by step; we get to see her squeezing the water out of cloth-wrapped vegetables and quoting Snoop Dogg while embarking on a korma chicken journey. No recipe is too serious and no mishap is too shameful to share – spills happen and raspberries get fuzzy! Such is cooking, such is life.
One can easily presume from LFA that Hayley has found her calling in the kitchen, and after speaking with Yates, I can definitively say I can’t think of someone I’ve encountered who’s more passionate about their job. After years of cooking for family and friends, and buzzy collaborations with the likes of @butchers.ny and @treetopjourneys, Yates has started her first line cook job at the much-praised establishment Dinner Party. Everyone say congratulations Lesbian Food Account!
Read all about Hayley below <3
Where are you from? How did you end up in New York?
I’m from Massachusetts. New England strong! I was lucky to be raised by people who love cooking, who were also raised by people who love cooking. My house and my home life were always very food and cooking-centric. From a young age, I articulated that I wanted to be a chef, but I think there was a bit of a blockage in terms of the adults around me who saw cooking as a passion and not a profession. As I got older, I sort of recalibrated into a more traditional path of attending a four-year college and gearing my life towards a potential nine-to-five schedule. And that’s exactly what I did. I went to a liberal arts school in Boston called Emerson, which coincidentally was like gay summer camp. I studied marketing and advertising, graduated, and got a job in New York. And that is what brought me to the city in 2017.Â
Since you were passionate about cooking from such a young age, do you have any key memories of taking on a big recipe or throwing a dinner party?Â
Oh, absolutely, I have so many wonderful memories. My parents kept the menus that I would make. I recently discovered a menu I made in 2004 for my extended family. It was so sweet because it was like Caesar salad and baked ziti, which was random because I had never made ziti before in my life and my family’s not Italian American. I made a kids’ menu of buttered noodles and frozen tator tots which is so ironic because I was a child and probably eating off the kids’ menu. I remember the fanfare around the table setting too. I made place cards and considered all the physical elements, all the textural and taste elements.
Are you fully self-taught? Have you ever taken a cooking class or do you have a YouTube channel that’s been your bible?
Long story short, I am officially self-taught, but I’ve also learned from people like my mother specifically. I grew up in a really rural area in Massachusetts but was taught about the world through cooking. I got to expand my worldview from such a young age through my mother’s cooking and her dedication to learning through cooking. I do credit her for most of my cooking skills. In the last year, I started teaching at a cooking school. I initially was a TA which was a great way to refine what I had already known, but from a more technical lens. I TAed for a knife skills class and my knife practices were self-taught, so while educating I was also learning. And then I got to the point where I could teach the classes on my own. So that was a really fun way for me to enter professional cooking because I was a little too green to immediately work on a line. I felt that might be a little too much too fast, so cooking school was a really great outlet. Â
Do you have any chefs you look up?Â
I do have a roster of chefs I look up to. I look up to Hetty McKinnon. I look up to Carla Lalli Music. I look up to Rick MartÃnez and Kwame Onwuachi. I look up to contestants on Top Chef. I look up to people on TikTok. I look up to my mom and her friends and my grandparents.Â
Can you give me the backstory of how Lesbian Food Account came about?
I wish there was a more profound story other than it was this joke of being so on the nose, you know? The name was almost a response and overcorrection to so many brands and concepts right now that are full of fluff words. LFA was an attempt at being very straightforward and originally just a place to share home cooking. At the time I was living with a partner and part of our relationship was centered around a love for cooking. The account was a place to share with family and friends, but a few years into that, we started getting requests to be chefs for hire for a dinner party or a birthday celebration. Together we just started saying yes and it was really beautiful.
At the time of our uncoupling, I had started to change my life to do this professionally, full-time. Our separation was really respectful and loving and [my ex-partner] was like, run with [LFA], this is all you. And then I took that as a runway to really lock the hell in. I wanted to dedicate as much time and energy as I could to cooking in general, which helped me decide I wanted to work in a restaurant, start a Substack, and expand.
I love your Instagram stories and your writing. They’re always really funny but at the same time informative. Has it felt comfortable and natural to share yourself and your recipes with the world?
I’ve always loved writing and my voice has always felt really solid, so I’m glad it comes through. I feel really comfortable sharing my tone of voice, even when it’s not like, the most professional. I mentioned this chef, Carla Lalli Music. She has this interesting Substack series that’s a boot camp on how to write a recipe. So much of what she explains and teaches is about how to have a voice and a personality in the recipe you write. It helped me practice and explore and realize I was really good at this.
Will there ever be a Lesbian Food Account cookbook?
Well, I’ll never say never but I don’t think it would be in the near future. That possibility is so cool, but I also recognize I don’t have the experience right now or the knowledge. I don’t have recipes that I want to get out there at this time, but totally one day for sure. Maybe, like, decades down the road.
Do you have a favorite restaurant in New York?Â
Of course, I’m biased and want to say the restaurant I work at, Dinner Party in Fort Green, is the best. It’s so hard to say because my favorite is also the deli on the corner where I get my sandwich. I have different favorites for different reasons. The spot you take your parents to is gonna be different from the spot where you go for a burger and a martini. It’s too hard to pick a favorite!
What are you obsessed with making right now?
At the moment I am obsessed with making udon carbonara. I’ve eaten it so many times this season. But I would say this whole year I have been obsessed with making refried beans, I can’t stop eating beans. I make them all the time. I eat so many beans.
Do you have a favorite type of cuisine to cook?
For this season of my life, I’ve been most drawn to Southeast Asian flavors because I think there are such interesting combinations of savory and sweet. There are such pungent, intense, umami, savory flavors as evidenced by the popularity of fish sauce. There are such interesting aromatics, but also such interesting sweetness as well with palm sugar and coconut bases. That’s what I’m drawn to right now.Â
Do you have an ingredient or a utensil that you’re really snobby about? I am obsessed with olive oil and I’m very picky about what olive oil I use. Is there anything like that for you?Â
Maybe salt, which I think is definitely a baseline for all chefs and home cooks. Salting early and often in your cooking is obviously important, but so is the kind of salt you use. Have you ever been to an Airbnb and you go to cook a meal and there’s just a salt shaker of iodized table salt in the kitchen? That’s not good salt. I’ve gotten to the point where I actually can’t do it, I can’t cook the meal, and I’ll go out to the store and buy a box of Kosher salt.Â
I know you recently started your first line cook job. Has that been amazing? Exhausting? Tell me about it.Â
It’s been all of the above. I’m in a very lucky spot where the restaurant I work at is sort of this unicorn scenario. I really sought out some specific variables of my dream job, which included, to be blunt, no men in the kitchen. I wanted a women-owned and operated space and a pooled gratuity tip jar so that the back of house is included. I wanted pretty fair and respectable hours. Dinner Party is a prix fixe menu restaurant, so the last seating of the night is at 9:00 PM. We usually get out around midnight at the latest on the weekends and busy nights. We have an environment where you can balance your shifts in prep shift or service shift. A lot of times back of house roles are delineated into either being a prep cook or a line cook and when I was thinking about roles, I really wanted to try both to see what I liked.
Getting to have all these really amazing variables has made this experience amazing. With that being said, you know, being a line cook is a complete lifestyle adjustment. It’s a physical body adjustment. But it’s been such a gift to walk into an environment that is so supportive and trustworthy and fun and silly and dedicated to good food. It’s been amazing, but it’s been exhausting of course.
May we all be so lucky as to find our own man-free kitchens and dream jobs!
Follow Hayley on Instagram @lesbianfoodaccount and read her Substack
.