For Left-Handed Chefs, Navigating a New, Uncharted Kitchen Can Feel Daunting

Chef Todd Duplechan knew he wanted to become a sushi chef, he just didn’t anticipate how expensive the equipment would be. “I had to buy a $500 knife that I didn’t get for like four or five months,” he says. As it happens, Japanese knives are typically single-bevel, meaning the cutting edge is sharpened at an angle on just one side. “It had to be directly ordered from Japan because they didn’t have any left-handed knives in the United States.” The challenges didn’t stop there. As a lefty in an industry of mostly right-handed people, Duplechan had to do some mental gymnastics each time he tackled a new skill. “The onus is on you as the learner to rearrange it in your mind.”

There aren’t any solid numbers, but by some estimates roughly 5 and 30 percent of the human population is left-handed, with men being slightly more likely than women to be lefties. That means right-handers with the dominant trait tend to shape the way the world operates. Most southpaws can attest to some regular inconveniences to their daily lives, from right-handed pants zippers to credit card swipers to doorknobs. For cooks working in the extremely tactile food industry — and who often have to contend with shared tools and limited kitchen space — doing typical tasks can feel even more inhospitable.

Most kitchens are usually designed to conform to right-handed people, according Carlos Arreola, a commercial kitchen design expert with food service consulting firm Cini-Little International. To create an efficient flow throughout the kitchen, “typically we design from right to left,” he says. That means that doors, drawers, and cooktops are generally on the right, where right-handed people can more easily reach them with their dominant hand. “I guess it’s just standard industry,” he says. Refrigerators, for instance, often have doors with hinges on the right; when placed to the right of a cooktop, the door is easier to open for a right-handed chef. Below-counter refrigerator units also sometimes have the door on the right and the non-usable portions of the unit on the left. That can make for some needed maneuvering for left-handed chefs.

“Whenever I renovated my kitchen the last time, I moved one [station] to where an oven was, and it basically made it a right-handed station, which works out wonderfully for everybody because they’re all right handed,” says Duplechan, who’s a chef and co-owner, with wife Jessica Maher, of Lenoir in Austin, Texas. “But for me, it makes it not fun to work that particular station.” While elsewhere in his kitchen the layout is “modular” enough that Duplechan can orient everything that he needs to grab for food prep on his left side, the oven doesn’t have counter space to the left for those items. “So much of good cooking is getting into a groove and having everything exactly where you want it,” he says, “[and] that particular station is not set up in a way that I would want it.”

In addition to the line layout, right-oriented tools dominate the kitchen and can make for a cumbersome cooking experience. April Anderson, owner of neighborhood bakery Good Cakes & Bakes in Detroit, vividly remembers culinary school instructors asking her to pour flour while turning on mixers and awkwardly reaching over the top of the machine to reach the switch. Some objects like cake icing turntables can be adapted to Anderson’s hands, but other items like a multi-wheeled croissant cutter have sharp edges that didn’t cut properly when flipped to suit a left-handed baker. “At some point as I kept going to class, I was learning to use my right hand just a little bit more,” she says, adding that she also made sure to bring her personal set of left-handed scissors to school.

For many left-handed chefs, navigating their workspace requires a level of ambidexterity. Sarah Welch, the executive chef at Marrow in Detroit, says that like many naturally left-handed children, she learned to do many tasks in her daily life with her non-dominant hand. “It’s shocking. The only thing now that I do comfortably left-handed is write and for the most part I trained myself to do everything else right-handed,” she says. She’s learned to use a knife with her right hand (to the point where she’s not confident she could do it with her left), but the trait still occasionally surfaces in odd tasks. “If I’m going to crack an egg, I do it with my left hand. It’s super weird,” she says.

Occasionally, being forced to use both hands surfaces in skills cooks didn’t even know they had. “I figured out the other day that I use my paring knife in both hands,” Duplechan says matter of factly. He was training an employee on how to use a knife and explaining that it would be backwards for them as a right-handed person. “And they were like, ‘Why?,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘Because I’m left-handed.’ And they were like, that’s in your right hand.’”

It’s in these moments when lefties are asked to teach skills to others — a huge part of the job for chefs at a certain level — when being ambidextrous comes in handy. Making sushi is a particularly meticulous and hands-on style of cooking with strict methods based in tradition. So when Duplechan, as a student, deviated from the processes demonstrated by his instructors, it often caused confusion. “If you’re breaking down a tuna or something like that, I would take the whole thing and turn it over” to cut it with my left hand, he says. “You get a lot of weird looks from people and people are always trying to say, ‘No, no, no, no, don’t do it like that,’ but it works for you in a different way.”

These days, Duplechan is more often is acting as a teacher demonstrating techniques for younger cooks. He more frequently finds himself saying, “‘Okay, now you’re going to do the exact opposite of that because you’re right handed.’”

Emmele Herrold, a chef and co-owner of Hazel, Ravines and Downtown in Birmingham, Michigan, can’t escape the unnerved looks from staff as they watch her chop. “They have a hard time watching me cut things because it’s so backwards to them,” she says. “They feel like I’m gonna hurt myself.” Other times, she struggles to translate her left-handed knife skills to fellow restaurant employees. While her kitchen is designed for righties with tools always oriented to the right of staff, Herrold finds refuge at her expediting station where her tweezers, garnishes, and tools such as the toaster are arranged to the left. She notes that the raw bar helmed by oysterman and fellow leftie Richard Washington is also suited to southpaws, with his tools kept on the left side where he can easily reach them. “It’s never been a hindrance for me. It’s never occurred to me that it’s difficult,” she says of being left-handed.

Still, with proper foresight, it’s relatively easy to order equipment that’s “reversed” with left-handers in mind. “The equipment is very flexible in that sense and typically there’s no upcharge unless there’s something very, very custom-made,” Arreola says. “But in most cases it’s mostly to do with left-hand doors and hinges that are typically optional.”

Arreola can recall at least one instance in which a client requested a reversed bar setup. Generally, he says, the ice box at a bar might be on the left with the liquor bottles on the right. However, on that occasion the bartender requested to have the layout flipped. “They [wanted] to hold the glass with the ice in their right hand and grab the bottle with their left hand to pour,” he says. That sort of input is an important part of the design process, Arreola says. Unfortunately, many restaurants also don’t necessarily have a chef or staff hired when the buildout is in the planning process, and thus the people that use the kitchen almost never get the opportunity to weigh in on the flow of their workspace.

“My kitchen was set up for a right-handed person and that’s because it wasn’t designed by me,” says Anderson, remarking that the consultants she worked were probably all right-handed. Soon, she’ll be opening a new, larger commercial kitchen and is looking forward to a setup that’s more suited to her needs. “I made sure I told them it needs to be set up for left-handed people.”

It sometimes feels like her own kitchen layout is working against her, but Anderson points out that it’s much tougher to be a cook going into a new, uncharted kitchen. As a leftie it requires more time to get acclimated to the space. “Sometimes when you go into a [new] kitchen and you’re left-handed, you’re kind of intimidated because you’re expected to do something at a certain pace. But it takes you time to get acclimated to that space in order to figure out, ‘Okay. How can I do this with my left hand, and still do it the right way, and produce the same thing each time?’”

For all the numerous inconveniences, Duplechan believes his left-handedness can be a superpower in the kitchen. “In a place that you’re working with your hands all day, every day,” he says of being forced to occasionally use both hands, “you can do one or two extra things that maybe other people can’t do.”

This spring, Duplechan and Maher plan to open a new lounge inside the Arrive East Austin hotel. He plans to call it Leftie’s Brick Bar, joining a long tradition of business owners celebrating their dominant hand. “I’ve always wanted to own a place called Leftie’s,” he says. “I wear it as a badge of honor.”

Brenna Houck is the editor of Eater Detroit and an Eater.com reporter. Samantha Mash is an illustrator and educator currently living in Portland, Oregon.