Le Colonial Naples 2024 chefs meal distance.jpg
Photography by Anna Nguyen

The Women Redefining Southwest Florida’s Culinary Scene

From innovators redefining the game to chefs anchored in Gulf foodways—women lead the way at some of SWFL's most dynamic restaurants.

by

Our culinary landscape stands at a compelling crossroads: As new restaurants reimagine local flavors, traditional foodways endure, with women emerging as innovators and guardians of culture. Female chefs helm some of the most coveted new restaurants in recent years, crafting food that honors Gulf heritage while pushing boundaries, breaking barriers and upending longstanding hierarchies. Along the way, they’re crafting dishes that speak to who we are and are becoming.

It is peak afternoon on Sanibel Island, where light falls through a restaurant’s bay windows italicizing all it touches. Chef Melissa Talmage, Lee County’s only James Beard Foundation Award-nominated chef steps in carrying a plate of local red snapper and collard kraut for a corner table. This is Sweet Melissa’s Café—or at least, an iteration. “Right now, the brick and mortar is a pile of dirt along a stretch of sand,” says the chef, who opened her white-tablecloth restaurant on Sanibel in 2009.

After Hurricane Ian claimed the cafe’s original location, Melissa devised a pop-up at neighboring Island Pizza (she co-opts the space on Thursdays and Fridays). Today, a dance emerges through the sports bar’s kitchen portal: flour-dusted dough stretched on one side; duck legs trimmed and cured and collards stripped and chopped on the other. Melissa’s famous fish stew comes out next—bones, claws, fins and crushed crab shells simmered to a deep, rust-red liquor, its surface flecked with brine. If ever there was a soup with a sense of place, this is it.

The Pennsylvania native found her culinary heartbeat in New York, where she attended the French Culinary Institute. “All the instructors were men, and all the assistants were women,” she recalls. “[The women] had gone to culinary school, but they weren’t considered instructors.” As Melissa honed her craft, she fell in love with the food but also the feeling—a rapt audience seated at a hungry table. She earned her stripes in New Orleans, working every station at the famed Commander’s Palace and becoming enthralled with Gulf Coast cuisine. “It was just my curiosity—to learn a place, you must learn its food,” she says, her eyes widening.

Sweet Melissa’s house-made bottarga recalls the traditions of our shores’ earliest settlers. The mullet roe, sourced from commercial fisher Ralph Woodring, whose grandfather was one of Sanibel’s original homesteaders, is cured, then sprinkled like sunlight over a tangle of pasta. Melissa’s efforts to root out the essence of our regional foodways earned her a James Beard Nomination for Best Chef: South in 2019. 

The restaurant has weathered several hurricanes over the years; since Ian, Melissa has been working the pop-up solo. “Women are resilient,” she says. “Little fires pop up, and we fold them into our routine—we keep moving.”

While Melissa preserves Gulf traditions, 30 miles south at Bicyclette Cookshop in North Naples, innovation flourishes, with Kayla Pfeiffer’s revisionist take. The chef’s free-roaming menu transcends expectations, asking each of us to consider the world beyond our plate. On a recent evening, yakitori octopus replaced Florida’s ubiquitous coconut shrimp in a lemongrass-ginger broth, and a charred hamachi collar, an underutilized cut of yellowtail, nestled into yellow peppadew romesco dotted with puffed sorghum.

Kayla observes the world, often traveling with a notebook in hand, letting her findings feed her culinary curiosities. At a cafe in France, she notes the weight and feel of a baguette and the shmear of butter beside a small plate of sardines. She reacts tenderly toward what seems useless, channeling the ancient kitchen wisdom of thrift and alchemy as she sketches the transformation—fish bones become a rich bouillabaisse, scraps turn to broth. The journal’s pages reflect an education unfolding in real-time.

The 28-year-old grew up in her father’s restaurants. “I learned at a young age to push myself to be 10 times better than I needed to be,” she says. “That’s served me, particularly in the male-driven kitchens I’ve moved through.” As she worked her way through the prestigious Culinary Institute of America program in New York, Kayla bolstered her real-world experience, cooking under Michelin-starred chefs Andrew Carmellini and Terrance Brennan. After graduating in 2017, she moved to Southwest Florida and took the helm as executive chef at Vincenzo Betulia’s The French Brasserie Rustique and Bar Tulia.

Along the way, she was often the first or sole woman in the kitchen. “I made it a point to overhaul kitchen culture, leading with kindness,” she says. The kitchen staff is predominantly female at Bicyclette, which celebrated its first anniversary in November. Kayla is mindful to break with the industry’s notorious hostility, particularly toward young chefs. “Instead of ‘No,’ it should be [showing] why—[having] the patience to explain why we make the sauce a certain way. Patience is how we create a better restaurant culture; it’s how we become better people,” she says.

Brooke Kravetz echoes Kayla’s vision at her two local restaurants, Old Vines Supper Club and Old Vines Naples at Mercato—offshoots of the namesake restaurant where Brooke worked her way up the ranks, from hostess to chef, in Kennebunk, Maine. The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts grad opts for a radically different layering of flavors that follows the seasons and embraces the element of surprise. Each ingredient is transformed and transformational: a single persimmon, cooked down in brown sugar and vinegar, disappears beneath brûléed chicken liver mousse but announces itself with candied honey and cinnamon, an orchard unfurling.

After opening the Mercato location in 2023, Brooke recruited 25-year-old chef Sophia Kiasi from the Old Vines Maine location to serve as chef de cuisine at the Supper Club. “I watched Sophia work the pass and bore witness to how capable she is. I saw her, but also a version of myself, calm under fire,” Brooke says. Sophia, who studied at Johnson & Wales in Rhode Island, traces her culinary impulse to her Persian mother’s kitchen, where necessity bred invention. “We didn’t have a lot of money, and somehow, my mom would make it work,” she says. “I became obsessed with rooting out and replicating flavors, like the most delicious puzzle.”

The women’s collaboration focuses on individual ingredients—the effect each one can have on the whole; how it shapes, shifts and evolves; and what it might become. The possibilities are inexhaustible, as is the supper club’s menu. In their take on Italian osso buco, traditionally done as a cross-cut veal shank braised with vegetables, the dish is upended with a potato-based tuile cracker in the shape of a bone stuffed with truffle marrow custard, resting on fregola pasta and wild mushrooms.

The reverence for ingredients takes a different form across town. At the stove of her Fort Myers Jordan’s Wine Bar & Cellar, chef Gloria Jordan de Cabral wipes dried black beans with a napkin, rolling their night-colored skin between her fingers. The act is like a rite of passage in Cuba, a way for young children to learn how to care for those they love. She chops robust culantro, garlic, onion and a sweet-fleshed cachucha pepper to gently fry up a sofrito, the foundation of her beans and rice. “Cubans sell cachuchas along Miami roadsides,” she says, recalling the little plastic bags filled with neon peppers. “I save the seeds to plant over and over again. There’s no telling when they may disappear.” She serves the beans and rice tapas-style at her two-year-old wine bar alongside paper-thin octopus carpaccio or a traditional medianoche sandwich—a soft, sweet egg bread stuffed with Spanish roast pork and ham. The menu celebrates the inventive women of Gloria’s past but also the Cuban and Spanish peoples who have settled up and down our coast since the 1800s, their ranchos rising like shell mounds.

The Havana-born restaurateur left Cuba in 1990 to seek asylum in Sweden, where she enrolled in culinary school and worked her way through restaurant kitchens. “I felt power, even as a dishwasher,” she recalls. “I was doing something on my own terms. My mother didn’t understand; women cooked at home, not beyond.” When she moved to Cape Coral, Gloria spoke little English, and employers often assumed that, as a woman, she’d be well-suited to the pastry station. She eventually landed at acclaimed Cru, in Fort Myers, where chef Shannon Yates served as a mentor, encouraging Gloria to develop her signature style.

For years, her originality shone at La Trattoria Cafe Napoli, which Gloria opened in 2005—the same year she became a U.S. citizen. She’s since sold La Trattoria, but her knack for nuanced flavors, warm hospitality and weaving European and Cuban traditions endures at Jordan’s. Each dish honors recipes once written in her grandmother’s hand, adjusted in her mother’s, and now, in Gloria’s.

The chef often emerges from her narrow kitchenette to work at the small cooktop behind the restaurant’s bar. “This is so I can cook and talk,” she says. “It’s where I make black beans and rice, sharing the recipe as I go.” Her accent rolls out like Latin jazz, enveloping the emerald-green room. Gold-framed expressionist paintings mingle with family photographs along the walls, while black marble tables laden with china glisten below. “This is mine,” Gloria says, first as a whisper, then as a fact. “This is me.”

Vickie Jones, the matriarch behind Jonesez BBQ, prefers the title ‘cook.’ “I’m not a chef. I didn’t go to culinary school,” she says. “But my grandmother instilled in me how to taste, how to coax out flavor. I was in a sort of school and didn’t even realize.” Her recipes have been made a thousand times over by generations of women, each dish a soulful classic holding fast to the traditional cooking of the South—one enslaved Africans were instrumental in creating—from slow-smoked pork wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper to ever-bubbling pots of greens and fat-back.

Since 2005, Vickie and her husband, Andres, have been barbecue nomads, with multiple food trucks traversing the region. Three years ago, they opened a brick-and-mortar in LaBelle, where Vickie’s from-scratch green beans, collards, macaroni and cheese, potato salad and cornbread sell out daily alongside the family’s barbecue chicken, pork and spare ribs. Vickie, her sister-in-law and daughter-in-law prepare every side dish, knowing each pot feeds the soul and carries their history forward.

Vickie begins her day with two stainless steel pots—one for collards, the other for green beans. The latter is the source of her soon-to-be-launched bottled cooking base, Green Bean Dream. A forest green pot liquor flecked with ruby and ochre spices, the rich elixir, a riff on her grandmother’s recipe, seeps in and doesn’t let go. Measuring in pinches and handfuls, Vickie feels her way. If it’s salty, she adds sugar; if it needs a twang, she adds a touch of vinegar. “I put my foot in it,” Vickie says with a laugh.

The poetry of generational cooking also holds sway over Alejandra Landin, executive chef at Del Mar in Naples. Rather than distancing herself and her kitchen from the mantel of womanhood, she embraces it. When plating a dish, Alejandra asks her chefs, “Would you give this to your mother?”

As a child, Alejandra was fascinated by the baking of her grandmother and mother, who emigrated from Mexico to Texas. At 24, Alejandra pursued a career in the kitchen, starting at Columbus Culinary Institute at Bradford in Ohio. She had planned to become a pastry chef but soon fell in love with every aspect of the line, where dishes are cooked and assembled. “My grandmother worked in hospital cafeterias and school kitchens, and that’s where she was expected to stay,” Alejandra says, smoothing the lines of her chef coat. “But I wanted to feel the fire.”

The 33-year-old began her career with Cameron Mitchell Restaurants (CMR) in 2015 at Ohio oyster bar The Pearl, prying open silvered shells each night. Last year, she returned to Naples (she’d been here temporarily with Ocean Prime’s opening team) to take the helm at Del Mar, one of Fifth Avenue South’s highest-profile restaurants, with more than 300 seats spread across two floors and an ambitious menu spanning several Mediterranean cuisines.

Promoting from within while evolving her team is at the core of Alejandra’s leadership style. Her kitchen breaks traditional hierarchies—Del Mar’s former pastry chef is her newest sous chef, and everyone is cross-trained from salads to fire, tearing leaves of dandelions one day and charring octopus the next. Eschewing fine dining’s traditionally tweezered approach, Alejandra asks her cooks to imagine the way their matriarchs might present a given dish—a bounty of lobster, scallops, and prawns get roasted over an open fire and delivered in a paella-style vessel in lieu of a cold tower; tuna tartare bursts out of its mold and spreads across interlacing layers of sliced cucumber, orange oil and pickled vegetables. Hands move earnestly in the kitchen, so many generations following behind—the finest foods revealing their soul.

In the evening, Alejandra often finds a moment to stand on the street outside Del Mar’s deep eaves, looking for the flame at the heart of the open kitchen. “You see the smoke and fire, the machine and all of it so thoroughly orchestrated. It shines so bright,” she says. “Mi madre visited the restaurant last week. The kitchen shone even brighter.” 

Hair and makeup by Duality Artistry 

Shot on location at Le Colonial, 5th Ave Naples