Article/Archive
Elena Kadvany
June 8, 2023
It was hailed as a culturally momentous, radically inclusive restaurant run by a young Black queer woman determined to upend the norms of fine dining. When Parker Kim heard about Hi Felicia in Oakland, they knew they wanted to work there.
A young transgender cook of color, Kim said Hi Felicia, which opened at 326 23rd St. last April, was the first restaurant where they didn’t feel tokenized or othered. They saw their own dreams in Hi Felicia’s 26-year-old owner, Imana, who uses just her first name. The staff, almost entirely people of color and many queer-identifying, wore crop tops and blasted music while serving a $195 tasting menu to diners clamoring to experience Imana’s much-celebrated vision of “vulgar” fine dining.
The Michelin Guide said the “bold and brash” restaurant had “created a fine dining experience unlike anything the world has seen before,” though it stopped short of awarding it a star.
“That was one of the first times I was in a place where I could look around and say that I felt seen,” Kim said. “I really wanted to be that person that made a monumental change in the industry.”
But that dream quickly died. After just three months, Kim left Hi Felicia drained and disillusioned, feeling that the restaurant — and its owner — had failed them.
Fourteen former Hi Felicia employees, including managers, servers, cooks, wine directors and a dishwasher, told The Chronicle they experienced a toxic work environment rife with some of the very problems the restaurant had set out to correct.
Two former employees said Imana touched their butts multiple times and made inappropriate comments at work, including about the genitalia of an employee who had gender-affirming surgery.
Bounced paychecks and reductions in pay caused financial stress, several employees said. Health insurance promised in an employee handbook never materialized, multiple employees said.
Former workers have filed three wage claims against Hi Felicia with the California Department of Industrial Relations, including two from former chef de cuisine Selasie Dotse, according to documents provided to The Chronicle under the California Public Records Act. Imana paid former employee Marcos De La Fuente $829 to settle the third claim in November, records show. The Oakland Department of Workplace and Employment Standards is currently investigating a complaint filed against the restaurant alleging violations of the city’s Minimum Wage Ordinance but declined to disclose details about an active investigation.
“For a lot of us, our life’s passions were harmed or at least dimmed by this experience,” Kim said. “I feel like I lost a part of me there.”
In a series of conversations by phone and text, Imana acknowledged that she created an “unprofessional” workplace at Hi Felicia, one that allowed inappropriate behavior to flourish. She said she hired her friends and kissed employees, and they drank and used drugs together. But she denied sexually harassing anyone, and believes her employees were “collectively” complicit in an atmosphere that blurred lines between employer and employee from the start.
Now, Hi Felicia is closed, abruptly shut down after a break-in last month. Imana announced on Instagram that she would open a “sleek and sexy” wine bar in its place. Within days of the break-in, painters were covering the neon-green exterior with paint to prepare for the new business.
Imana has become a very public — and somewhat polarizing — figure in the Bay Area dining industry, known for sharing vulnerable Instagram posts about her mental health next to videos of scantily clad pole dancers performing at Sluts, her San Francisco wine bar. She drew attention last year when she left a San Francisco restaurant without paying her bill, later saying it was an accident. Seven Bay Area restaurants and bars have decided to ban her, owners and employees confirmed to The Chronicle. When asked about false rumors circulating that she had staged the burglary of Hi Felicia herself, she told The Chronicle: “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t just do a break-in. I would have actually committed arson.”
Imana said she had started thinking about closing Hi Felicia before the break-in, as internal conflict mounted with staff. She said she felt “traumatized” and “emotionally unsafe” after trying to instill new rules to address employees’ performance issues.
“Every single person who worked there, myself included, was inappropriate,” she said.
A ‘super sexual’ work environment
Dawn, a young Black cook, said they left the restaurant industry for good after working at Hi Felicia. The Chronicle agreed not to use Dawn’s last name to protect their privacy as an alleged victim of sexual harassment, in accordance with its anonymous sourcing policy.
Dawn said Imana made frequent comments about their body, genitals and her attraction to them. Imana grabbed their butt at work multiple times, Dawn said. Dawn said they would either tell Imana to stop or ignore the behavior. Quin Kirwan, Hi Felicia’s former general manager, confirmed Dawn reported the alleged behavior at the time.
Imana said Hi Felicia employees never told her that she made them feel uncomfortable, nor did she receive any complaints about alleged sexual harassment, and no complaints with government agencies are known to have been filed. She said she touched some employees, but some employees also touched her and made comments about her body. She never thought it crossed a line: “There was consent because we were all best friends.”
“Any way you slice it there was an insane amount of inappropriateness, and it was the allure to dining at Hi Felicia,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “It was vulgar fine dining.”
Dawn, for their part, wanted to believe in Hi Felicia’s mission to “disrupt the status quo” in dining.
“It didn’t, on the inside, feel like that,” Dawn said. “The only thing that was vulgar was her.”
Shareef Pratt, a former Hi Felicia cook, said Imana touched his butt twice and asked him several times if he was gay (he identifies as straight). Once, she asked him if he would let a man give him fellatio. A former sous-chef who was present confirmed his account to The Chronicle. Pratt said he asked Imana to stop making inappropriate comments to him, which she did.
Behavior that meets the definition of sexual harassment is illegal in the workplace. Hi Felicia’s employee handbook specifically prohibits “sexual jokes or comments about a person’s body,” “uninvited touching of a sexual nature” and “unwelcome sexually-related comments.”
Nine former staffers said they felt Imana created a hyper-sexual work environment. Parker Story, Hi Felicia’s former wine director, said Imana once arrived shortly before the restaurant opened and announced to staff that she had been masturbating for several hours.
The culture at Hi Felicia was “super sexual,” Imana acknowledged, without the typical separation between boss and employee. She knew about employees’ sex lives and they knew about hers, she said. She said some workers saw her naked, and vice versa. But she said she doesn’t feel solely responsible for cultivating that environment.
“How could I alone create that? The team and I built the restaurant together,” she said.
Pratt and Dawn, who are both Black, said they feared that speaking up to their boss about how her alleged conduct made them feel uncomfortable could cost them their jobs.
But after problems with multiple paychecks, Dawn said they reached a breaking point in May and decided to stop working in restaurants altogether.
“I lost my passion for food because of it,” Dawn said. “It doesn’t matter as much, the identity of someone, if they’re still taking part in the harm.”
Inside the underground pop-up
Hi Felicia was born without any rules, Imana said.
She started by delivering $150 fine-dining meal kits from her home during the pandemic, then began hosting unpermitted multicourse dinners at her apartment. As word spread of the supper club, bookable only via Instagram, reservations became a hot commodity.
Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters dined there, instantly boosting its credibility. Both employees and diners have said they felt part of something wild and special. Imana acknowledged every staff member by name during a nightly toast, a tradition she continued at Hi Felicia.
The earliest staff members were Imana’s friends or friends of friends who had little restaurant experience. They said they had no set schedule or job titles, were paid a flat daily rate and often worked 12-plus-hour days.
The line between personal and professional relationships in her pop-up was murky from the start, Imana acknowledged. Her home was her employees’ workplace. They would go out drinking together after serving rabbit mole to diners sitting at mismatched tables covered with bed sheets from Goodwill, said Kirwan, who started the supper club with Imana.
“It was very unpolished,” Kirwan said. “We’d be giving people shots. It was more like a party, and people were paying a lot to be at this party.”
At one point, the cost to dine at the apartment was $225 per person, which bought a seven-course tasting menu with dishes like cashew queso and lamb enchiladas. But the supper club regularly served basic grocery store ingredients, including precooked rotisserie chickens, tortilla chips and pre-chopped vegetables, according to Kirwan and Dawn.
Imana confirmed that all food at the pop-up was made with standard ingredients from grocery stores, including Whole Foods, but said this wasn’t the case at the permanent restaurant.
“As we started getting press in the very beginning, it felt like imposter syndrome,” Kirwan said of the pop-up. “Then I realized it wasn’t imposter syndrome. We were just being imposters.”
Though Imana presented herself as executive chef, staff who worked at both her apartment and the restaurant said they never saw her cook. Imana often publicly cited her experience at Michelin-starred restaurants Coi and Californios, without specifying she had worked brief stints there as a server, not in the kitchens. Imana said she cooked daily at the pop-up and early on at the restaurant, but had been less present at Hi Felicia since November.
Several employees said Imana was largely absent from Hi Felicia’s day-to-day operations, often arriving shortly before service to give what started to feel like a performative toast to staff.
“She’s in the green room until it’s time for curtain call,” Story, the former wine director, said.
Behind the scenes, high-profile restaurant struggled
As soon as it opened, Hi Felicia began receiving national media attention, from Bon Appetit to the Wall Street Journal. Celebrities including Ayesha and Stephen Curry dined on bite-sized caviar-topped sopes and scanned handwritten menus signed like love notes with “I love u!” or “xx Imana.”
Former cook Garrett Schlichte felt that Hi Felicia, despite its “faults,” sparked a “conversation about the possibilities of what a fine dining space could be like.” Once, when an older couple left mid-service after complaining about the music being too loud, it felt empowering rather than disappointing, Schlichte said.
“I think everyone felt like they were under an enormous amount of stress to not let it fail,” they said.
Imana talked daily about wanting to earn a Michelin star within Hi Felicia’s first year, said Erica Castillo, a former chef de partie. In November, Hi Felicia was included with a blurb in the annual Michelin Guide, not a more prestigious star.
Amid the public hype, staffers who spoke to The Chronicle said, cracks were deepening inside Hi Felicia. They and Imana agreed that the blurred lines and scrappiness that felt fun at the supper club became problematic at the restaurant.
Emma Rasmussen, who started working at the apartment pop-up in 2021, left her job as a teacher to become an assistant general manager at the restaurant. There, she said, she and others tried to establish an understanding with Imana that, “You’re our boss and we’re your employees and we don’t always want to get drinks with you after a shift.”
She believed Imana didn’t respect this boundary, however. On one occasion Imana took a co-worker off the schedule after she wasn’t invited to a social event outside of work, Rasmussen said. Imana, however, attributed this to coincidental timing: While she was upset about not being invited to the employee’s birthday party, she said, the action was prompted by an ongoing disciplinary issue.
Imana’s relationships with her once tight-knit team started to sour just a few months after Hi Felicia opened. Imana said she tried to impose order on a disorderly workplace by requiring staff to sign contracts to rein in “unprofessionalism” and other issues, such as not clocking in or out properly, incorrect billing practices and drinking or using drugs at work. At one point, she put several employees on “final notice” for performance issues. All soon quit, Imana said.
Not everyone who worked at Hi Felicia said they had a negative experience. Nicole Gomez, who worked part-time in the kitchen and is still employed by Imana, said she did not witness any inappropriate behavior at the restaurant, and felt supported and “respected” by her boss.
“I really look up to Imana and what she’s done,” Gomez said.
During the winter, reservations started to decline, and Imana would close the restaurant on nights when she decided not enough seats were booked, she and employees said. Some salaried employees, who under California labor law are due full pay regardless of number of hours worked, said they weren’t paid for these sudden closures.
Imana said it’s “completely within my right to call off workers as needed” and that she “can’t pay everyone when we close the restaurant.”
Meanwhile, in recent months, paychecks started bouncing, several workers said. One employee said he would wait to cash his check until he’d confirmed that others’ had cleared. Staff worried a permanent closure was likely.
This spring, when one of her paychecks took more than two weeks to clear, former cook Castillo said she was unable to pay rent or afford the gas she needed to drive to Hi Felicia from her home in San Jose. She overdrew her bank account, according to a bank statement reviewed by The Chronicle. She and other workers said they felt slighted when they saw Imana post public social media photos of her dinners at expensive Michelin-starred restaurants or her overseas vacations.
Imana said she never paid employees late, and that bounced or delayed paychecks were due to issues with employees’ banks. She sent advances to two employees whose paychecks were delayed: former chef de cuisine Dotse and Castillo, according to text messages and emails reviewed by The Chronicle.
Mica Annese, a Philadelphia artist who designed Hi Felicia’s Instagram logo, said they felt Imana has been subject to an unusually intense level of scrutiny given her rapid rise.
“I do think that she’s trying to do something different, be herself and highlight diversity and authentic people. In that process, my opinion is that she’s made herself vulnerable to various character attacks,” Annese said.
Many staff were excited last year when Dotse, a well-known Bay Area chef with experience at fine-dining restaurants such as Lazy Bear and Avery in San Francisco, became Hi Felicia’s chef de cuisine. Dotse stayed for nearly a year, despite what both the chef and Imana described as a challenging work relationship. Dotse said they felt saddled with more responsibility due to staff turnover. Imana said she put Dotse on final notice in February and wanted to fire them, but feared both internal and external backlash.
“I personally felt manipulated to keep hiring people of color … even if they weren’t performing well,” Imana said. “I had to beg the team to hire someone white. I would tell them all the time, ‘I feel like you guys are the ones in power.’ ”
By March, after issues with three paychecks and mounting frustration with the work environment, Dotse resigned. They said members of their kitchen team, including Pratt, had told Dotse they didn’t feel comfortable around Imana.
“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.”
Many former employees said this dichotomy was the most painful part of working at Hi Felicia. They said they felt drawn in by Imana’s charismatic, intense ambition, and lauded her for it. They said they had long felt wary of speaking out publicly for fear of jeopardizing reform in the industry.
“I want to give her some grace because this is her first time being a business owner, but … if you’re trying to change the industry and create a safe space for marginalized people, you can’t be like all the other restaurant owners,” Dotse said. “The only way for us to really change things is we have to hold everyone accountable.”
Reach Elena Kadvany: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com
Elena Kadvany
June 8, 2023
It was hailed as a culturally momentous, radically inclusive restaurant run by a young Black queer woman determined to upend the norms of fine dining. When Parker Kim heard about Hi Felicia in Oakland, they knew they wanted to work there.
A young transgender cook of color, Kim said Hi Felicia, which opened at 326 23rd St. last April, was the first restaurant where they didn’t feel tokenized or othered. They saw their own dreams in Hi Felicia’s 26-year-old owner, Imana, who uses just her first name. The staff, almost entirely people of color and many queer-identifying, wore crop tops and blasted music while serving a $195 tasting menu to diners clamoring to experience Imana’s much-celebrated vision of “vulgar” fine dining.
The Michelin Guide said the “bold and brash” restaurant had “created a fine dining experience unlike anything the world has seen before,” though it stopped short of awarding it a star.
“That was one of the first times I was in a place where I could look around and say that I felt seen,” Kim said. “I really wanted to be that person that made a monumental change in the industry.”
But that dream quickly died. After just three months, Kim left Hi Felicia drained and disillusioned, feeling that the restaurant — and its owner — had failed them.
Fourteen former Hi Felicia employees, including managers, servers, cooks, wine directors and a dishwasher, told The Chronicle they experienced a toxic work environment rife with some of the very problems the restaurant had set out to correct.
Two former employees said Imana touched their butts multiple times and made inappropriate comments at work, including about the genitalia of an employee who had gender-affirming surgery.
Bounced paychecks and reductions in pay caused financial stress, several employees said. Health insurance promised in an employee handbook never materialized, multiple employees said.
Former workers have filed three wage claims against Hi Felicia with the California Department of Industrial Relations, including two from former chef de cuisine Selasie Dotse, according to documents provided to The Chronicle under the California Public Records Act. Imana paid former employee Marcos De La Fuente $829 to settle the third claim in November, records show. The Oakland Department of Workplace and Employment Standards is currently investigating a complaint filed against the restaurant alleging violations of the city’s Minimum Wage Ordinance but declined to disclose details about an active investigation.
“For a lot of us, our life’s passions were harmed or at least dimmed by this experience,” Kim said. “I feel like I lost a part of me there.”
In a series of conversations by phone and text, Imana acknowledged that she created an “unprofessional” workplace at Hi Felicia, one that allowed inappropriate behavior to flourish. She said she hired her friends and kissed employees, and they drank and used drugs together. But she denied sexually harassing anyone, and believes her employees were “collectively” complicit in an atmosphere that blurred lines between employer and employee from the start.
Now, Hi Felicia is closed, abruptly shut down after a break-in last month. Imana announced on Instagram that she would open a “sleek and sexy” wine bar in its place. Within days of the break-in, painters were covering the neon-green exterior with paint to prepare for the new business.
Imana has become a very public — and somewhat polarizing — figure in the Bay Area dining industry, known for sharing vulnerable Instagram posts about her mental health next to videos of scantily clad pole dancers performing at Sluts, her San Francisco wine bar. She drew attention last year when she left a San Francisco restaurant without paying her bill, later saying it was an accident. Seven Bay Area restaurants and bars have decided to ban her, owners and employees confirmed to The Chronicle. When asked about false rumors circulating that she had staged the burglary of Hi Felicia herself, she told The Chronicle: “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t just do a break-in. I would have actually committed arson.”
Imana said she had started thinking about closing Hi Felicia before the break-in, as internal conflict mounted with staff. She said she felt “traumatized” and “emotionally unsafe” after trying to instill new rules to address employees’ performance issues.
“Every single person who worked there, myself included, was inappropriate,” she said.
A ‘super sexual’ work environment
Dawn, a young Black cook, said they left the restaurant industry for good after working at Hi Felicia. The Chronicle agreed not to use Dawn’s last name to protect their privacy as an alleged victim of sexual harassment, in accordance with its anonymous sourcing policy.
Dawn said Imana made frequent comments about their body, genitals and her attraction to them. Imana grabbed their butt at work multiple times, Dawn said. Dawn said they would either tell Imana to stop or ignore the behavior. Quin Kirwan, Hi Felicia’s former general manager, confirmed Dawn reported the alleged behavior at the time.
Imana said Hi Felicia employees never told her that she made them feel uncomfortable, nor did she receive any complaints about alleged sexual harassment, and no complaints with government agencies are known to have been filed. She said she touched some employees, but some employees also touched her and made comments about her body. She never thought it crossed a line: “There was consent because we were all best friends.”
“Any way you slice it there was an insane amount of inappropriateness, and it was the allure to dining at Hi Felicia,” she wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “It was vulgar fine dining.”
Dawn, for their part, wanted to believe in Hi Felicia’s mission to “disrupt the status quo” in dining.
“It didn’t, on the inside, feel like that,” Dawn said. “The only thing that was vulgar was her.”
Shareef Pratt, a former Hi Felicia cook, said Imana touched his butt twice and asked him several times if he was gay (he identifies as straight). Once, she asked him if he would let a man give him fellatio. A former sous-chef who was present confirmed his account to The Chronicle. Pratt said he asked Imana to stop making inappropriate comments to him, which she did.
Behavior that meets the definition of sexual harassment is illegal in the workplace. Hi Felicia’s employee handbook specifically prohibits “sexual jokes or comments about a person’s body,” “uninvited touching of a sexual nature” and “unwelcome sexually-related comments.”
Nine former staffers said they felt Imana created a hyper-sexual work environment. Parker Story, Hi Felicia’s former wine director, said Imana once arrived shortly before the restaurant opened and announced to staff that she had been masturbating for several hours.
The culture at Hi Felicia was “super sexual,” Imana acknowledged, without the typical separation between boss and employee. She knew about employees’ sex lives and they knew about hers, she said. She said some workers saw her naked, and vice versa. But she said she doesn’t feel solely responsible for cultivating that environment.
“How could I alone create that? The team and I built the restaurant together,” she said.
Pratt and Dawn, who are both Black, said they feared that speaking up to their boss about how her alleged conduct made them feel uncomfortable could cost them their jobs.
But after problems with multiple paychecks, Dawn said they reached a breaking point in May and decided to stop working in restaurants altogether.
“I lost my passion for food because of it,” Dawn said. “It doesn’t matter as much, the identity of someone, if they’re still taking part in the harm.”
Inside the underground pop-up
Hi Felicia was born without any rules, Imana said.
She started by delivering $150 fine-dining meal kits from her home during the pandemic, then began hosting unpermitted multicourse dinners at her apartment. As word spread of the supper club, bookable only via Instagram, reservations became a hot commodity.
Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters dined there, instantly boosting its credibility. Both employees and diners have said they felt part of something wild and special. Imana acknowledged every staff member by name during a nightly toast, a tradition she continued at Hi Felicia.
The earliest staff members were Imana’s friends or friends of friends who had little restaurant experience. They said they had no set schedule or job titles, were paid a flat daily rate and often worked 12-plus-hour days.
The line between personal and professional relationships in her pop-up was murky from the start, Imana acknowledged. Her home was her employees’ workplace. They would go out drinking together after serving rabbit mole to diners sitting at mismatched tables covered with bed sheets from Goodwill, said Kirwan, who started the supper club with Imana.
“It was very unpolished,” Kirwan said. “We’d be giving people shots. It was more like a party, and people were paying a lot to be at this party.”
At one point, the cost to dine at the apartment was $225 per person, which bought a seven-course tasting menu with dishes like cashew queso and lamb enchiladas. But the supper club regularly served basic grocery store ingredients, including precooked rotisserie chickens, tortilla chips and pre-chopped vegetables, according to Kirwan and Dawn.
Imana confirmed that all food at the pop-up was made with standard ingredients from grocery stores, including Whole Foods, but said this wasn’t the case at the permanent restaurant.
“As we started getting press in the very beginning, it felt like imposter syndrome,” Kirwan said of the pop-up. “Then I realized it wasn’t imposter syndrome. We were just being imposters.”
Though Imana presented herself as executive chef, staff who worked at both her apartment and the restaurant said they never saw her cook. Imana often publicly cited her experience at Michelin-starred restaurants Coi and Californios, without specifying she had worked brief stints there as a server, not in the kitchens. Imana said she cooked daily at the pop-up and early on at the restaurant, but had been less present at Hi Felicia since November.
Several employees said Imana was largely absent from Hi Felicia’s day-to-day operations, often arriving shortly before service to give what started to feel like a performative toast to staff.
“She’s in the green room until it’s time for curtain call,” Story, the former wine director, said.
Behind the scenes, high-profile restaurant struggled
As soon as it opened, Hi Felicia began receiving national media attention, from Bon Appetit to the Wall Street Journal. Celebrities including Ayesha and Stephen Curry dined on bite-sized caviar-topped sopes and scanned handwritten menus signed like love notes with “I love u!” or “xx Imana.”
Former cook Garrett Schlichte felt that Hi Felicia, despite its “faults,” sparked a “conversation about the possibilities of what a fine dining space could be like.” Once, when an older couple left mid-service after complaining about the music being too loud, it felt empowering rather than disappointing, Schlichte said.
“I think everyone felt like they were under an enormous amount of stress to not let it fail,” they said.
Imana talked daily about wanting to earn a Michelin star within Hi Felicia’s first year, said Erica Castillo, a former chef de partie. In November, Hi Felicia was included with a blurb in the annual Michelin Guide, not a more prestigious star.
Amid the public hype, staffers who spoke to The Chronicle said, cracks were deepening inside Hi Felicia. They and Imana agreed that the blurred lines and scrappiness that felt fun at the supper club became problematic at the restaurant.
Emma Rasmussen, who started working at the apartment pop-up in 2021, left her job as a teacher to become an assistant general manager at the restaurant. There, she said, she and others tried to establish an understanding with Imana that, “You’re our boss and we’re your employees and we don’t always want to get drinks with you after a shift.”
She believed Imana didn’t respect this boundary, however. On one occasion Imana took a co-worker off the schedule after she wasn’t invited to a social event outside of work, Rasmussen said. Imana, however, attributed this to coincidental timing: While she was upset about not being invited to the employee’s birthday party, she said, the action was prompted by an ongoing disciplinary issue.
Imana’s relationships with her once tight-knit team started to sour just a few months after Hi Felicia opened. Imana said she tried to impose order on a disorderly workplace by requiring staff to sign contracts to rein in “unprofessionalism” and other issues, such as not clocking in or out properly, incorrect billing practices and drinking or using drugs at work. At one point, she put several employees on “final notice” for performance issues. All soon quit, Imana said.
Not everyone who worked at Hi Felicia said they had a negative experience. Nicole Gomez, who worked part-time in the kitchen and is still employed by Imana, said she did not witness any inappropriate behavior at the restaurant, and felt supported and “respected” by her boss.
“I really look up to Imana and what she’s done,” Gomez said.
During the winter, reservations started to decline, and Imana would close the restaurant on nights when she decided not enough seats were booked, she and employees said. Some salaried employees, who under California labor law are due full pay regardless of number of hours worked, said they weren’t paid for these sudden closures.
Imana said it’s “completely within my right to call off workers as needed” and that she “can’t pay everyone when we close the restaurant.”
Meanwhile, in recent months, paychecks started bouncing, several workers said. One employee said he would wait to cash his check until he’d confirmed that others’ had cleared. Staff worried a permanent closure was likely.
This spring, when one of her paychecks took more than two weeks to clear, former cook Castillo said she was unable to pay rent or afford the gas she needed to drive to Hi Felicia from her home in San Jose. She overdrew her bank account, according to a bank statement reviewed by The Chronicle. She and other workers said they felt slighted when they saw Imana post public social media photos of her dinners at expensive Michelin-starred restaurants or her overseas vacations.
Imana said she never paid employees late, and that bounced or delayed paychecks were due to issues with employees’ banks. She sent advances to two employees whose paychecks were delayed: former chef de cuisine Dotse and Castillo, according to text messages and emails reviewed by The Chronicle.
Mica Annese, a Philadelphia artist who designed Hi Felicia’s Instagram logo, said they felt Imana has been subject to an unusually intense level of scrutiny given her rapid rise.
“I do think that she’s trying to do something different, be herself and highlight diversity and authentic people. In that process, my opinion is that she’s made herself vulnerable to various character attacks,” Annese said.
Many staff were excited last year when Dotse, a well-known Bay Area chef with experience at fine-dining restaurants such as Lazy Bear and Avery in San Francisco, became Hi Felicia’s chef de cuisine. Dotse stayed for nearly a year, despite what both the chef and Imana described as a challenging work relationship. Dotse said they felt saddled with more responsibility due to staff turnover. Imana said she put Dotse on final notice in February and wanted to fire them, but feared both internal and external backlash.
“I personally felt manipulated to keep hiring people of color … even if they weren’t performing well,” Imana said. “I had to beg the team to hire someone white. I would tell them all the time, ‘I feel like you guys are the ones in power.’ ”
By March, after issues with three paychecks and mounting frustration with the work environment, Dotse resigned. They said members of their kitchen team, including Pratt, had told Dotse they didn’t feel comfortable around Imana.
“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.”
Many former employees said this dichotomy was the most painful part of working at Hi Felicia. They said they felt drawn in by Imana’s charismatic, intense ambition, and lauded her for it. They said they had long felt wary of speaking out publicly for fear of jeopardizing reform in the industry.
“I want to give her some grace because this is her first time being a business owner, but … if you’re trying to change the industry and create a safe space for marginalized people, you can’t be like all the other restaurant owners,” Dotse said. “The only way for us to really change things is we have to hold everyone accountable.”
Reach Elena Kadvany: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com
