(Don't) Kiss the Cook

A pair of gloved hands pours flour into a metal bowl in a kitchen.

By. Amie Geistman

Content Warning: Rape Culture

As a woman occupying a space where I’m surrounded almost entirely by men, and in some circumstances even considered to be “one of the guys,” I am privy to the conversations they hav4e when not in mixed company:

“Dude, have you seen the new girl up front?”

“Which one? What’s her name?”

“I don’t know. She’s the one with the high and tight ass!”

“Oh yeah, man. She’s nice!” This comment punctuated with a double-handed squeeze of the air. “She’s like sixteen though… What a shame.”

I heard a variation of this same conversation night after night, appalled that they would openly objectify the front-of-house girls like this, especially in front of another woman, but not at all surprised by it. It made me wonder what they said about my body when I wasn’t around to listen.

I’ve worked with men who insist on referring to women only as “females” and men who look at me like my vagina somehow makes me incapable of keeping up with them, which feels like a truly illogical conclusion because I’m not the one with a dick between my legs that has the possibility to hinder my movement, but I digress. And at a certain point, I stopped giving a fuck about these things; I know that I’m capable of my work despite their disapproving glances. What bothers me is coming to work and feeling like I’ve been reduced to a caricature of a woman—nothing more than a pair of breasts and an ass that’s begging to be grabbed.

When I started working at Schlittz, I immediately fell into a comfortable place in the group of men who worked behind-the-scenes with me. To the kitchen veterans, I was just another one of the guys; our relationships were no-nonsense and based, for the most part, on mutual respect for each other. Problems usually arose when a new guy was hired to work the line and he didn’t yet understand that I was not some little girl who was going to sit back and put up with his shit.

We hired this guy, I think his name was Anthony, and he seemed like someone who just couldn’t handle his own and didn’t belong in the kitchen. After his week of training, he still couldn’t properly top a pie, he couldn’t remember the ingredients for any of the sandwiches or wraps, he couldn’t keep up. But we were understaffed, so our general manager, Matt, kept him on. He didn’t interact much with any of the staff, but he was always just there: looming a few feet away while I smoked a cigarette with one of my coworkers, sitting at the bar after his shift ended, standing across the street from the restaurant during the late night rush watching, but he never really talked.

He didn’t bother me as much as he unnerved me, and this was enough to make him feel like a threat in my mind.

My lizard brain instincts told me something was off about him, and I have come to trust my instincts as a woman.

After a few weeks of him struggling to keep up, getting in everyone’s way, and never really finding a rhythm with the rest of the crew, I assumed he was on his way out. And maybe he was; the specific timeline of these events has gone blurry with years and the fact that he never felt like part of the crew anyway. I do, however, distinctly remember the last night I can recall his being on shift with me.

It was a normal weekend night, the hustle and bustle of the restaurant pumping adrenaline through my veins. As always, we were running out of something behind the line because morning shift hadn’t been able to carry their own weight with the prep, so I made my way out of the kitchen and to the messy supply closet at the far end of the bar’s table seating.

In the small, dark space, I pulled the door almost closed behind me and allowed myself a minute to close my eyes and breathe, taking a step out of the chaos of the night to reconfigure myself. After a few moments, I got the sense that I was no longer alone in my mini sanctuary. I think that women have been unconsciously trained to have this sort of hyperawareness of their surroundings. I turned around, facing back towards the door and the rest of the restaurant, and was taken aback at the proximity of Anthony’s body to mine in the three by three space left between the overcrowded shelves.

“Oh shit. You scared me!” I said, hand rising to my chest as I let out a sigh. I told him I was taking care of whatever crisis was going on as I lifted my foot to take a step forward, anticipating him to answer with Heard or at least to step out of the doorway and allow me to pass. As usual, he said nothing, did nothing.

I started to get pissed.

“Alright, you need to move?” Though the inflection of my voice raised at the end of the sentence, it wasn’t so much a question as a demand.

He took a step closer to me.

At this moment, I began to panic. There was no real danger; we were only a few feet away from the open kitchen and the guests at table eleven, and everyone in the restaurant would have heard me if I felt the need to scream for help. But I didn’t like that he made me feel trapped, that he was using his body to keep me trapped in this space.

As I pushed my way past him and back into the commotion of the restaurant, I swear I heard him mutter, “I love you.”

The whole interaction felt harmless in the grand scheme of things; he hadn’t actually done anything to hurt or threaten me, but it made the hair on the back of my neck bristle with fear. I don’t recall ever working with him again after that night, but for months, almost every weekend after that, I would see him outside the restaurant, fading into the Downtown crowd and just watching.

Talking with my managers one night over this event and others, like the time a drunk man approached me during my cigarette break and told me he would wait all night for me to get off work so he could “get a slice of that pizza pussy,” I decided I needed to start carrying a knife at work. Schlittz was mostly dine-in orders at the bar and pick-ups over the phone, but when we got a rare call for delivery, it was the cook’s job to take it to the customer. Since parking downtown was scarce and we didn’t have the staff for a real delivery service, we only made deliveries on foot to hotels and office buildings within a five-block radius.

I told Matt and another one of our managers, Andrew, that I wanted to carry a knife on me when I went out with an order, but I wanted to make sure that didn’t somehow violate our company policy. They both looked at me with surprise.

“Why would you need a knife?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, if someone tries to rob you, just give them the food and the money in your book. We’re not worried about twenty bucks, Amie; you’re worth a little more than that,” Andrew said, laughing.

“Well yeah, I’m not stupid! I’m not worried about someone robbing me,” I exclaimed, frustrated that they didn’t understand where my concern was coming from.

“Then what’s the deal? Why do you need a knife?“

“Uhh… Just in case someone tries to rape me?” They both looked at me like I was insane. Apparently this thought had never even crossed their minds.

After a few minutes of back and forth, my explaining that this is an everyday fear for most women and their insisting that it couldn’t be that much of a concern, they finally told me it was no big deal if I kept a pocket knife on my person during the shift. For the first time in my life, I realized that most men probably have no idea what this world is like for a woman. This should have been obvious to me, but I assumed that men must have at least some understanding of the concern. But they don’t. This everyday fear of mine was as foreign to them as a nighttime walk without keys clutched between fingers would have been for me.

After I quit my job at Schlittz to move to New Orleans for grad school, I started my new job at Reginelli’s the next summer, and I felt anxiety about the new crew. I didn’t know these guys; they didn’t know me; I didn’t know what their particular kitchen culture was going to be like. I was surprised when I showed up on my first day and there was another woman—Maria—working the line. It was the first time I had ever had the chance to work with another lady in the back. Not only was I not going to be alone as far as gender separation goes, but it seemed like the dudes really respected her and treated her like she was just another cook. This immediately calmed any nerves I had about joining this group of men.

What did make me nervous, though, was the fact of working with another woman. I had always been the lone woman in the kitchen, and I preferred it that way. I told my manager at Schlittz that if he hired another woman to work in the back while I was working there, I would quit. This seems counter to everything that anyone who knows me—a raging feminist who would scream from rooftops about the need for equality—might think, but it was something I felt very strongly about. It wasn’t that I didn’t want other women to have the opportunity to work in a kitchen; I just didn’t want them to work with me. The only explanation I have for this animosity towards other women in my kitchen is that when you’re used to having to stand your ground as a woman in the world of men, you sometimes will try to bring other women down on your climb to the top. And for me, it was never an active work in trying to bring these women down, more so a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that I needed to plant my feet firmly in this kitchen to hold my space as a woman in this world. I had never had the experience of working in the back with another woman, so it felt, in my mind, like there could only be room for one of us. But despite this, I came to really enjoy working with Maria. It was nice to have another woman in the kitchen whom I felt like I could relate to in terms of feeling like the odd person out in the group. This fact made her leaving for school a few weeks after I started just that much more devastating.

The day was going off without a hitch. My manager Paul liked me; I was quickly picking up on the new menu, and everyone seemed nice enough. With no more than two or three hours left in my shift, I felt confident that things in this kitchen would be, more or less, like Schlittz. I felt like it would be no-nonsense again.

During the mid-afternoon lull, Paul joined me on the line and began quizzing me about the portions for menu items I had been learning. After a few rounds of questioning, he paused, exhaled through his nose, and looked over at me. “So, Amie. I have a question for you. And please don’t think I’m being inappropriate; you don’t have to answer if you’re not comfortable with it.”

Oh God, I thought. Where is this going?

“I mean whatever. I’m an open book, so…” I shrugged.

“Well some of the guys, well one of them, was wondering…And he wanted me to ask…But are you…Well, are you a lesbian? I mean, I don’t care either way; we’re all cool here. But he wanted to know…”

I laughed. Working as a woman in a kitchen where the uniform consisted of mostly dirty t-shirts, baggy jeans, no makeup, and a backwards hat, I had gotten used to this question over the years. “I mean, not necessarily? Like, I’ve been with women, but mostly men. I don’t like to put labels on things, but I’ve only ever dated men. I don’t really know how to answer the question.”

He seemed relieved that I had reacted so calmly about it. “Alright cool! Well, okay, I guess that means I have a follow-up question. He was wondering if you had a boyfriend.”

“Umm…No. And you can let him know I’m not really looking for one either.”

This question bothered me in a way the first one hadn’t. It’s one thing to be curious about who someone has sex with—sex is just a part of normal kitchen talk—but it felt intrusive to be asking about my relationship status through someone else. It was my first day, and already, the bullshit had begun. I spent the rest of the shift wondering which one of these men I had just met was surveying the curves of my body while I tried to focus on my work.

As the weeks passed and I settled into my new role and this new group of coworkers, I was transitioned from morning shifts to weekend nights with this crew’s kitchen veterans. I knew the work was going to be harder and the shifts more intense, but I was excited that they thought I could handle it. Despite the exhaustion and the body aches that came with it, the high speed of the night shift was what I lived for—it’s an adrenaline rush like no other. I couldn’t wait to get behind the line and eliminate anyone’s thoughts that I might not be able to handle it.

When I showed up at five o’clock that first night, tickets were still only trickling in, so one of my coworkers, Mike, pulled me aside to explain how things were going to work. He told me where everyone would be stationed, what pre-closing tasks I needed to start working on when things slowed down, and what to expect once things heated up. The last part felt condescending since I had been working in a fast-paced kitchen for well over a year at that point, but I decided to let it slide since I was still relatively new and didn’t want to push too hard, too soon.

As I grabbed for something in the cooler behind the line, Mike turned back toward me, “I just wanna let you know, it’s gonna get tight with all of us on this line tonight. We’re gonna be packed in next to each other, and you’re just going to have to deal with our dicks rubbing on your ass all night.”

He said this like it should have been news to me. The last kitchen I worked in was barely a quarter of the size of the kitchen at Reginelli’s, with only about eighteen inches between the ovens and the line. I had spent a year and a half passing in front of and behind the men in that kitchen during the nightly rush without any one of them ever commenting on the bodily friction that inevitably occurred. I knew that there would be points in the night where speed would pick up, someone would be in a hurry, and I’d feel the outline of their junk as they squeezed behind me. It just seemed like something we all recognized, but never outwardly acknowledged.

“Uh, yeah. I know…” I responded, not really knowing how to react.

“Well I just wanted to let you know. We’re not trying to feel you up or anything, it just happens.”

At the time, this moment just pissed me off because it felt like a presumption that I didn’t understand what I was getting myself into and had never worked a shift where we had started drowning in the tickets and remakes and rush of the evening. Had he ever stopped a new guy who was on his first night shift to tell him that he was essentially going to be groped during the shift, but not to worry about it because it was just a part of the job? Had he ever looked at one of the other men in the kitchen and thought that their momentary brush of bodies was somehow akin to dry humping? Had he ever reduced them to nothing more than the parts of their body that society deemed sexual?

This moment stuck in my mind and reminded me that, at the end of the day, I was different from everyone else working in the back. Most of the guys never spoke to me in a way that brought this to attention, but one man had, and that was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t just another one of the cooks. I was a woman cook, and that simple adjective put me and my body on display.

I made sure to pull my body into itself, to make myself smaller, when passing in front of or behind someone in the sardine-packed kitchen; I made sure to wear baggy running shorts to not call attention to the female-ness of my body; I made sure to diminish myself so I didn’t attract unwanted advances.

Once the weather began to cool down, hiding the curves of my body beneath baggy clothes became more difficult. Sweat pants were comfortable outside in the near-freezing temperatures, but turned sticky with sweat in the heat of the kitchen, so I traded my baggy running shorts for the moisture-wicking leggings I wore on the track team in high school. They were lightweight and comfortable and expanded my range of motion tremendously. They did, however, also accentuate the curves of my thighs and my ass, which was fine by me—it’s just a body; it’s not inherently sexual in its existence. I recognize that as truth, but when you’re looked up and down like something to be devoured, it makes the confidence in that truth quiver.

I don’t remember the night in particular, what exactly was happening or who was working with me. But I remember the feeling I had when I walked past the dish pit and, out of the corner of my eye, saw Fabian pause from his washing to slowly eye his way down my body. I felt like I had done something wrong.

I stopped and looked back at him, “You need something?” I cocked an eyebrow with the question, challenging him to say something stupid like, Oh you know what I need…Instead, he made some comment about how he was just looking, it’s not a big deal, I’m sorry.

I was annoyed, but didn’t let myself get too bothered over it. The shift continued, Fabian got off early and left, and I didn’t think about his undressing me in his mind again. Since it was a weekend, a lot of employees either stayed after work to drink beer in the alley where we took our smoke breaks or left and came back as a stop in their evening of partying. People had been coming in and out of the kitchen to refill their beers as we started to pre-close, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw Fabian making his way from the server station to the back storage room that led into the alley with a bottle of liquor in his hand. He came up to me in the mop room as I waited for the bucket to fill with industrial degreasing solution and asked me for a hug.

I’ve never been a very physically affectionate person with most people, but as a woman, sometimes saying no and having to deal with a man’s insistence feels like more trouble than it’s worth, so I leaned in for a quick, one-armed hug. He kept his body pressed to mine longer than what felt necessary, and when I tried to pull away, he brushed his lips across the exposed skin of my neck. My whole body tensed up. I said something about needing to get back to the kitchen and start mopping probably, but he didn’t move out of my way.

He looked at me and said, “Where do you live?”

I paused, not wanting to answer this question, trying to find an innocuous reason why he might be asking me that in this particular moment.

“You know, it’s okay. You don’t have to tell me,” he continued on, “I could just follow you home.” With this, he ran a fingertip down the back of my ear and walked away.

I stood there for over a minute, stunned that this had even happened. I had dealt with my coworkers asking inappropriate questions and spending too much time glancing over the curves of my body and making comments that would have been better unsaid, but I had never felt like this. I had never actually been touched in a way that made me want to scrub my skin with a fresh ball of steel wool. I had never felt like any of their comments were actually threats. And maybe Fabian was joking, or maybe that’s just me making an excuse for him, but I’ll never know because I never asked. I never confronted him. I never told our management team. I didn’t even tell anyone until I was drunk and upset about something else months later and this came out like word vomit before swearing my coworkers to keep it between us.

I don’t know why I felt so ashamed about what had happened, why it felt like something I should keep to myself, why it felt like it was my fault for agreeing to hug him in the first place. Maybe it’s because he didn’t actually rape me. Because I had gotten the lighter end of the sexual harassment spectrum, a lot of women had experienced way worse than some drunken guy kissing their neck. Because I hadn’t endured real trauma. Despite whatever subconscious reasoning behind my keeping this from my managers, my body still stiffened every time Fabian and I ended up in the walk-in together when no one else was around.

After some time, my fear of Fabian subsided. I learned that the only way to get him to shut his mouth was to put him in his place, and there weren’t any issues at work with any of the other guys saying anything too far out of line. Of course there was still the usual banter, a little too much talk about tits and ass for my taste in the kitchen, but nothing that wasn’t what I had come to understand as normal—nothing that felt personally directed towards me and my womanhood. All the guys who worked in the back were long-time employees whom I had been cooking with for over a year, and the new guys who came in learned real fast from the rest of the cooks to not get on my bad side. It felt like Schlittz again, a sense of camaraderie where I wasn’t just the girl in the kitchen, but simply another one of the cooks cutting up. \

I had become close friends with several of the guys in the kitchen, even Jeremiah who, as I would find out a few weeks into the job, had been the one who asked Paul to find out if I was straight and if I had a boyfriend. After the initial few weeks of Jeremiah trying to flirt with me and me making it obvious that I didn’t want to date him, or anyone at work for that matter, we settled into a friendship that felt easy and platonic. We started playing in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign together, we got tickets to see concerts together, we hung out after every shift that we worked together; he was basically my work husband. We picked on each other, but it was always in jest, and he never pushed the line into making me uncomfortable the way some of the other men I had worked with did.

One night Jeremiah and I were in the back storage room, shooting the shit about something that I can’t even remember anymore, and after our laughter settled down, he said, “You know Amie. I never knew that you had your nipples pierced!”

“Oh yeah…I thought that everyone knew that after the Christmas party last year.” Most of my group of friends at work had seen my breasts at that point since I have no qualms about nudity and have been known to flash a little skin whenever the drinks get flowing at a party. I know that some people will look at this admission to freely baring my own body as permission to make comments about it or to reach out and grab themselves a handful, but this penchant for flashing my friends when I’m drunk has nothing to do with my experience of sexual harassment. When I make a choice to bare my body, it is exactly that—a choice. When a man grabs my ass or whistles at me from across a darkened street, I am not making a choice; I have not invited his advances. 

“No, I never knew that! I could only tell because I noticed you’re not wearing a bra today,” he said this as if it was nothing more than casual workplace conversation, not an admission that he had been staring at my breasts.

“Well, I actually am wearing a sports bra, but thanks for noticing I guess!” I snapped, annoyed that this conversation was even happening.

I started heading back towards the kitchen, but Jeremiah stuck his arm out and used it to lean against the side of the walk-in, blocking me into the narrow walkway that led to the backdoor.

“Could you move? I need to get back to the kitchen now!” I tried to push my way past him, but with Jeremiah, standing a head above me and having about two hundred pounds on me, blocking my passage, my attempts were futile.

He got this look on his face like we were playing a game, picking on each other in the way we always did. “I’m like a hunter, Amie. I’m gonna hunt ya down, and I’m gonna cut your nipples off so I can mount them like a trophy on my wall.”

He seemed so amused with himself, like this was the funniest thing he had ever said, and to him, I guess it was just a joke. I’m sure he didn’t actually mean what he was saying, but that didn’t change how I felt about hearing it.

“Could you just move?” I asked, trying to figure out how to get past him.

Black and white photo of a person with their arms crossed behind their back.

I shoved his chest, but he just laughed. I was obviously not having fun with this game, and I was so uncomfortable, and he could tell, but all he did was laugh, which pissed me off even more. I reached for the box cutter someone had left on the shelf to the left of me and as I picked it up, said, “Jeremiah. You need to get out of my fucking way. This isn’t funny. I’m uncomfortable, and if you don’t move, then I’m going to stab you!”

His hands came up in an I’m-not-guilty motion as he stepped out of the way, and as I brushed past him, I heard him mutter something about me not being fun anymore.

I had never felt unsafe around him before that. He was just my big, goofy pal Jeremiah, but in that moment, I felt like a caged animal whose only way to survive was to attack. It didn’t really change our friendship that much, if I’m being honest; we still hung out like we always had because I knew, at its core, it was just a joke. I knew that Jeremiah loved me and would never actually hurt me, that this was just his idea of an edgy, tasteless joke that didn’t quite land for its recipient—that he wasn’t a real threat. But after that, after being ignored after making it clear again and again that I was uncomfortable in the situation, I knew he didn’t respect me the way a friend should.

I brought this up to him one night while he was driving me to a work Christmas party. He asked me, during a conversation about some other occurrence with a coworker that had gotten under my skin, if I ever felt uncomfortable around him. I didn’t know how to answer that question honestly without hurting his feelings. When I told him about that night when he had cornered me in the back and how it felt, he reiterated that it was just a joke and I should never take him too seriously.

I kept on and on about how uncomfortable I was, and it didn’t matter that it was just a joke, and I knew it was a joke the whole time; he had still used his body to overpower me, and that wasn’t okay. By the time we dropped the conversation, he still didn’t see why I had felt like I couldn’t trust him in that moment, so I just let it go because that was easier than arguing why my safety was more important than his not-funny “joke.”

A few months later, Jeremiah was fired, and Mike—the cook who told me I would just have to deal with basically being felt up on the line when the kitchen got busy—was let go a few weeks after him. Jeremiah was fired for holding up a baggie of coke in a photo taken at a company party, and Mike was fired, as far as I know, for making a questionable judgment call in firing someone. Neither of them was let go for reasons that had to do with the sexual harassment complaints that other girls in the restaurant had lodged against them.

There were finally no more guys working in the back who had a history of being sleazy towards the servers and me. Since we had lost one of our longest standing cooks, we started hiring at rapid speed to find a replacement that could fill the void in the team that Mike left. One of the new cooks we hired was a guy named John. John was a career line cook kind of guy. The kind who takes food seriously, dresses the part, but will likely never advance to being a great chef, no matter how much he wants the title, because he just isn’t that disciplined when it comes to work.

The first day I began training him, I knew it was going to take a lot of work on my part to prove to him that I wasn’t just some little girl who couldn’t do anything without the help of some big, strong man but a force to be reckoned with, someone who wasn’t going to stand around and put up with his shit. He seemed uninterested in everything I had to say; told sexist jokes, which were so uninspired that I can’t even remember a single punch line; and made inappropriate, unsolicited comments about my appearance, most of which were as uninspired as his jokes. John was the epitome of everything I hated about hyper-masculine kitchen culture, all rolled into one mediocre man who thought that he was God’s gift to Reginelli’s Pizzeria.

One morning I was standing by the prep list trying to prioritize what needed to be done that shift, and John walked up behind me, looking over my shoulder, and said, “I see you walk around here in those itty bitty shorts acting like you don’t know what you’re doing.”

I could feel my body temperature starting to rise. “Umm… Excuse me?”

“I mean it’s cool, don’t worry about it. I’m not going to bite. I mean, unless you want me to…” He chuckled like that line had ever worked in the history of picking up girls. At that point I was trying to focus all of my energy on not turning around and socking him in the face.

I took a breath and kept my back to him, “I don’t know what you think is okay, but if you try and say something like that to me again, I’m going to take that ten-inch knife on the wall over there and slit your fucking throat.”

I heard nothing but stunned silence from behind me, so I turned around to face him.

“Are we clear?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. 

I wasn’t even that mad at John in the moment; I had heard comments like that before and let them slide. It had just gotten so exhausting. It was exhausting to be talked to in a way that none of the other cooks were talked to, exhausting to put up with again and again. After that sadly necessary outburst, John finally began to respect me as his superior—the person assigned to training him, the person who had two years’ worth of experience on him in this kitchen—switching out his normal Sweetheart for Chef when addressing me, which felt like a success despite the fact that I had to threaten murder to make it to happen.

I think he knew that I meant business by putting him in his place through such a show of aggression since he had worked in the kind of kitchens that adhere to the classical hierarchical structure where what Chef says goes, and if you forget that for a moment, you’re going to get your ass handed to you. And the aggression definitely felt good to let out, like I was finally pushing back against all the men at work who thought the simple fact of my being a woman gave them permission to have some sort of dominion over my body and my space.

But it didn’t change the fact that any of it had happened in the first place. It didn’t change the fact that women working in restaurants have come to expect that they’ll deal with being sexually harassed by their male coworkers and have to put up with it with a smile on their face or deal with being called a bitch or a prude. It didn’t change the fact that high-profile chefs have been getting away with this sort of behavior, and worse, for years. But it felt good to finally get angry and take a stand; it feels good to air this dirty laundry now and to not be ashamed that I might have done something to elicit these behaviors; it feels good to be calling out this culture of machismo.

I just wish there wasn’t anything to call out in the first place.     

Amie is pictured wearing a black shirt, necklace, and short curly blonde hair, pulled half up. She is looking towards the right.

Amie M. Geistman holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Orleans. She's spent time working in the trenches of Louisiana restaurant kitchens and Texas hair salons and is currently writing about the surprising crossovers between these two worlds. Her background degree is in Sociology from Louisiana State University, and she aims to incorporate that background into her poetry and prose. Amie's work can be found online at ViaNolaVie.com and The Daily Drunk. She is from Houston, Texas.