It was a throwaway line in a cookery column that got me thinking. Allegra McEvedy, who co-founded Leon restaurants and has cooked in kitchens as diverse as the River Café and Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Grill in New York, wrote that men and women approach food so differently that she reckoned she could tell the sex of the person who made any plate of food in front of her.

She’s not the only one. Alice Waters, whose cooking has influenced and inspired restaurant cooking around the world, also believes that “men and women bring different things to the kitchen. The simpler the dish, the chances are it is probably made by a women,” she says. “Women’s natural instincts, especially if they have children, are to be nurturing. Our main focus is to feed people something that is good for them and that will make them happy . . . some men are in touch with that side of things, but educationally and culturally they are encouraged to look at cooking from a career point of view, to see it as an artistic endeavour. They tend to be more self-absorbed and involved in their own creations and self-expression and more disconnected from what’s happening in the dining room. Instead of ‘Are people liking the food?’ they are more likely to think: ‘I am the Chef, they should be liking it’.”

On the whole, the male style of cooking as wizardry – think of Heston Blumenthal, Pierre Gagnaire and Ferran Adrià – wins the accolades. Scroll down the newly announced S. Pellegrino World’s Fifty Best Restaurants list and the top places are dominated by men famed for their artistry, and dedication to experimentation and surprise. The first two restaurants where women are in charge of the kitchens – Alice Waters’s legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, and the River Café, run by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray – are establishments with a completely different style. These are places where simplicity and seasonality reign supreme, and the pared-back approach wins over complex technique.

Clearly there are dramatic contradictions to such generalisations. Chefs such as Simon Hopkinson, Rowley Leigh, Alastair Little and Jeremy Lee embody the simple, honest ingredients-led cooking pioneered by Waters, just as at the Connaught Angela Hartnett has taken on the Gordon Ramsay mantle. But Waters’s view is wholeheartedly endorsed by Skye Gyngell, continuously winning applause for her fresh seasonal cooking at the restaurant at Petersham Nurseries, where the herb and vegetable gardens are overseen by Lucy Gray, daughter of Rose Gray of the River Café. “I think we find it easier to step away from the food and do less and less with food than men do,” says Gyngell.

Like Waters she feels the simple approach comes more naturally to women than men, who invariably have to shake off the influence of centuries of old-school, testosterone-fuelled tradition in which elaborate techniques and macho skills are the measure of the chef. “I’ve had endless conversations with female chefs about this and I think men are much more ego-bound and competitive and their food is often more showy,” she says. “The whole idea of experimental ‘molecular gastronomy’, for example, is a phenomenally male concept. It reminds me of those Transformer toys: ‘Can I take all these elements and turn them into an aeroplane, or a fast car . . .?’ Women don’t have that desire to make a big impact in the same way. The differences go way beyond what you see on the plate. I think I am as demanding as a male chef and our kitchen is very emotional, but not in a high-octane, screaming sort of way. Personally, I also think of myself as a cook, not a chef. I’m not worried about what other people are doing or what’s fashionable, and it doesn’t matter to me how fast I can chop.”

Sophie Cookes, who works with Gyngell, agrees. “I think I could mostly tell whether a man or woman has made a dish and people have said they can recognise the same thing about my food. I cooked for the male editor of Gourmet Traveller, and I had gone out of my way to make the food look simple but beautiful. He took one look at it and immediately said: ‘You can tell a girl made this!’ ”

Jean Cazals, a food photographer whose life is spent taking pictures of chefs’ dishes, believes that “women are more relaxed and spontaneous in the way they put together dishes. I don’t feel they need to impress so much,” he says, “whereas men can be very strict and ordered about their food. But, you know, that is the same throughout nature. It is usually the male bird or animal who has all the colours and markings, because we need artifice to seduce women, whereas women are more concerned with substance.

“The differences start with the choice of menu and ingredients and go all the way through to presentation: men are more robust and artistic; women have a much more honest, lighter, healthier approach,” agrees David Selex, formerly of the Sugar Club and now in charge of the kitchens at Mews of Mayfair. “My wife, for example, is a very good cook; she seasons perfectly and has a very feminine touch, whereas my flavours are much bigger, stronger, bolder. A girl in the kitchen will be more consistent. She will get on with things and work well in a team, whereas the boys just want to get on to the most difficult section of the kitchen. It’s all about being The Man; young butts strutting their stuff like peacocks. In Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential there are some very funny stories about the chefs he worked with in his first job in Cape Cod, who swaggered around like gods, dressed like pirates with their ‘bad-ass knives’, and their ‘moves’ like skate-boarders at their grills . . . and you know it’s true”.

Not everyone is buying the sex idea, however. John Torode, of Smiths of Smithfield, who as well as guiding his own brigade of chefs has watched countless amateurs and celebrities cook spontaneously for him as a judge on Masterchef, is adamant that “a good cook is a good cook, and that’s that. For me the chef’s sex has far less to do with the way a dish is put together than the cultural background of the person cooking, and how much they have travelled,” he says. And at Leith’s School of Food and Wine, Jenny Stringer, the principal, says that the school’s teachers are divided on the debate. “The consensus is that individual personality comes through more than sex. However, many of the women felt that the girls keep things more simple and the boys are more extravagant; whereas many of the male teachers thought just the opposite, that the male approach was more rustic.”

At Moro, where the husband and wife team of Sam and Sam (Samantha and Samuel) Clark are celebrated for their vibrant, flavour-packed, Mediterranean-inspired food, Samuel believes that although they are joined at the hip when it comes to their feelings about food – “we both think alike” – his wife “finishes a plate with a little bit more je ne sais quoi, a little more flair and finesse than me”.

Though the majority of restaurant kitchens are still dominated by men, Clark feels that even in male bastions the macho image is softening. Marcus Wareing, of Petrus, double Michelin-starred stalwart of the Gordon Ramsay empire, agrees. Like John Torode, he has no time for the idea that you can tell the sex of the cook purely from a particular plate of food. “So much depends on your background,” he says. “Take Angela Hartnett at the Connaught. She has worked with me and with Gordon in male-dominated kitchens and as a result her menu is very robust. I don’t think you would look at her food and say there was anything obviously feminine about it.” However, he believes that women, left to their own devices, do tend to cook food that is lighter and healthier, and that many male-dominated restaurant kitchens are becoming more attuned to the feminine attitude, “because, especially at lunchtime, we are designing our food much more around what women want to eat”.

As someone who eats out constantly for a living, Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic, is also sex-sceptic when it comes to restaurant food, but believes cooking in the home tells a different story. “Any dish that doesn’t involve meat is probably made by a woman,” he says. The same is true of chefs’ books. “I think I could tell after reading a few lines from a recipe book whether it was written by a man or a woman,” he says.

“If you read Nigel Slater, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or Jamie Oliver, three men who are more different than you can imagine, they all have in common the same basic ethos . . . buy a fantastic piece of meat, slam it in the oven and crack open a bottle – Keith Floyd used to be the same – check your meat after a while, poke it about a bit and eat it when it’s ready. Whereas you take a book by Delia, or Sophie Grigson, and everything will be broken down, minute by minute, what to do if this happens or that goes wrong. Just like women are in real life, they are always giving little warnings and instructions. I find myself thinking, like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady: ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man . . .!’ ”

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