Elka Gilmore (March 17, 1960 – July 6, 2019) was an American chef and restaurateur. Her San Francisco restaurant, ''Elka'', earned national acclaim. In 1994, she was nominated for the

James Beard Foundation Award The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists in the United States. They are scheduled around James Beard's May 5 birthday. The media awar ...

for Best California Chef.

Early life

Elka Ruth Gilmore was born on March 17, 1960, in

San Antonio San Antonio ( ; Spanish for " Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the third-largest metropolitan area in Texas and the 24th-largest metropolitan area in the ...

, Texas. Her first restaurant job, as a dishwasher, was at Café Camille in

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, when she was around 12 years old. She left home at age 16 to live with her grandmother in Madison, Wisconsin. As a teenager, she worked as a prep cook at L’Étoile in Madison; when the chef quit, Gilmore was promoted to chef. At 18, she travelled to Boston, New York, and Provence (where she apprenticed at a restaurant in Cotignac), before settling in Los Angeles in 1982. There, she worked at restaurants Tumbleweed, Checkers, and Palette. She was the co-owner of Camelion's, which served French-inspired cuisine.

Career

In 1991, at the age of 31, she opened her restaurant Elka in the Miyako Hotel in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

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, serving a blend of Asian and French cuisine. The restaurant was met with national acclaim. The ''

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'' described the restaurant's dishes as "light and memorable" with "deep and husky flavors"; it called Gilmore "the enfant terrible of the modern California kitchen" and "an iconoclastic cook." In 1994, she was nominated for the James Beard Foundation's Award for Best California Chef. In 1995, she opened Liberté, a French-American restaurant, in San Francisco. It closed after a few months. She was later hired by the Omni Berkshire Place Hotel in New York to open and run Kokachin, a seafood restaurant. In 1998, she returned to San Francisco and opened Oodles, an Asian fusion restaurant; it closed shortly thereafter. Reviewing Oodles, Mark Bittman of ''The New York Times'' wrote that " spite the angular, not-especially-attractive interior, the restaurant is comfortable and inviting, and the brazen nature of the food gives a meal here a true sense of excitement." Gilmore was recognized as a champion of women chefs. She was also credited for her mentorship of fellow lesbian cooks. In 1993, she co-founded the organization Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, along with fellow San Francisco chefs Barbara Tropp and Joyce Goldstein. She died on July 6, 2019, in San Francisco, of

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due to a series of ongoing medical issues.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gilmore, Elka 1960 births 2019 deaths People from San Antonio American women chefs American women restaurateurs American restaurateurs Cuisine of the San Francisco Bay Area LGBTQ chefs LGBTQ people from the San Francisco Bay Area 21st-century American women Chefs from San Francisco