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A “bold and brash” restaurant run by a queer, black chef in Oakland, California, closed amid claims of sexual harassment from its largely LGBTQ+ staff.
Hi Felicia — famed for its $195 tasting menu and “vulgar fine dining” — was created to be woke and “radically inclusive” but its owner, Imana, didn’t always promote those values according to former employees who spoke to the San Francisco Chronicle.
One employee named Dawn, a cook who identifies as non-binary, said they felt harassed after Imana allegedly made several comments about their body and genitalia, and said she was attracted to them.
Dawn claimed Imana grabbed their butt multiple times and ignored their pleas to stop the behavior.
Former employees have filed claims against the former restaurateur, including Hi Felicia’s chef de cuisine Selasie Dotse.
“Hi Felicia was not the safe space that she was trying to create. I was especially wanting it to be a space for Black people,” Dotse said. “As Black people working for a Black woman, we did not feel like we mattered.”
Fourteen people who had worked at the restaurant described it as a “toxic work environment” to The Chronicle.
Imana denied grabbing Dawn’s butt and said she never thought she was crossing a line.
She also told the Chronicle workplace lines were “often blurred” and were “unprofessional” at times because she hired a lot of her close friends.
“Any way you slice it there was an insane amount of inappropriateness, and it was the allure to dining at Hi Felicia,” she said in an email to the newspaper. “It was vulgar fine dining.”
Dawn told the paper they wanted to believe the restaurant was there to “disrupt the status quo” in dining, but added: “It didn’t, on the inside, feel like that.
“The only thing that was vulgar was her [Imana].”
Shareef Pratt, a cook who identifies as straight, also claimed Imana asked him if he would let a man give him fellatio.
A former sous-chef backed Pratt’s claim by saying he heard the inappropriate exchange.
Some employees recalled Imana arriving late to the restaurant only to announce she was tardy because she had been masturbating for hours.
Many of the workers said they endured the hyper-sexualized environment because they needed the job, but the breaking point came after their paychecks began to bounce.
“It was falling apart,” former chef Erica Castillo told the San Francisco Standard. “All of this s—t was happening, and the image out there on [Hi Felicia’s] social media shows a very different experience.
“Checks were bouncing, and people were bouncing.”
Hi Felicia abruptly shuttered its doors on May 24 after the restaurant was broken into.
Imana claims the lines between her and the staff were always blurred but admitted she kissed employees, and they drank and used drugs together.
“Every single person who worked thee, myself included, was inappropriate,” Imana told The Chronicle.
She denied sexually harassing her employees and said they were all “collectively” complicit with the unprofessional atmosphere.
“How could I alone create that? The team and I built the restaurant together,” she added.
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