By Tura Oliveira1
Some people build armor out of their vocation, and my former boss wore hers like an unyielding, icy second skin. And because tragedy plus time equals something closer to comedy, I feel compelled to write about her.
My clash with my boss began the moment I stepped into the restaurant for my trial shift. When you work in a kitchen, instead of coming in for an interview, you usually work with the chef for a day—a mix of production (making parts of dishes ahead of time, preparing mise) and service (plating expensive desserts and getting them into rich people’s mouths before they remember that life is finite and money is just a meaningless, intangible social construct).
The restaurant had been newly renovated, and everything shined and smelled painfully clean. The other kitchens I had worked in had been chaotic and dirty, but this one was churning out exciting, beautiful dishes. I wanted so much to be part of this gleaming, clockwork culinary machine.
When a server brought me into the kitchen to meet the executive pastry chef, I stuck out my hand to greet her and was met with stone-cold silence and a gesture toward the changing area in the back. Several hours after the mommy-doesn’t-love-me introductory incident, I was offered the job. Even though Mercury was in retrograde, and the pay was absolutely dismal, I accepted the position. The compensation was so little that I’m too embarrassed to say how much I made per hour. Just imagine it’s less than you would ever agree to take home for any job.
Our pattern of interaction continued for the rest of the trial and the duration of my time at this restaurant, with slight variations: I’d try to engage her during prep or downtime—about food, or her life—and she’d shut me down. She spoke sternly but very quietly, forcing me to ask her to repeat herself several times. She yelled at me for things I could hypothetically do wrong, speaking to me like I was a stupid child.
I had gone to art school, not pastry school. She’d known that when she hired me, and I was being paid accordingly. Still, she made biting remarks about my lack of culinary education whenever she had the chance. It occurred to me, of course, that this chef—who was a woman about a decade older than me—had to cultivate this cliché persona of casual cruelty to survive in a male-dominated field.
One day, we were testing a new recipe for the mignardise (a small sweet you get with your check at the end of a tasting menu), and she wanted to try stretching hibiscus taffy by hand. Taffy needs lots of air introduced very quickly, and the sugar crystals have to be rearranged via stretching and pulling. If you don’t have a taffy hook, the process usually requires two people and is both time-sensitive and labor-intensive.
We collapsed with laughter as we passed the giant glob of warm sugar back and forth and yanked at it fruitlessly, trying desperately to stretch the taffy between us. The taffy experiment failed, and we were left wiping tears from our eyes, tossing the rock-solid, bubble-gum-pink failure into the garbage and laughing harder at the loud thunk it made when it hit the bin.
A few days later, while we were working and chatting casually, I slipped up and asked what her favorite TV show was. She snapped that she didn’t have time to watch television, and that if I wanted to be the kind of person with time to watch TV, I was in the wrong industry. I finished mixing an ice cream base in stunned silence.
The next day, maybe sensing she’d been overly cruel, she animatedly described the formula and mechanics of the show Naked and Afraid to me, and how much she and her husband (also a chef) loved watching it together after long shifts. She continued this pattern of opening up slightly, then angrily snapping shut, then feeling sorry and opening up again.
As Mercury began to move somehow deeper into retrograde, I had several shittier-than-average days at work—including falling down the winding, handrail-less stairs to the pastry kitchen and hitting my left ass cheek on every step on the way down. I documented the enormous bruise that resulted in my bedroom mirror and sent it to friends, who described it as “the Mona Lisa of ass bruises”. I swear to God my left ass cheek is less round than my right one to this day because of that fall.
A week and a half later, I had one merciful evening without her looming over me. A very sweet coworker fresh out of culinary school showed me all the new plating and setup for the pastry station. The next two nights, I worked solo to prep and plate desserts. Everything went smoothly. I felt competent. Confident. Although being alone in a small basement kitchen for service wasn’t ideal, I was relieved to not be at the mercy of her moods.
The next day, she sent over a coworker named David—someone I hadn’t met—to help me set up. I didn’t really need the help, but he was kind and I appreciated it. Before leaving to work with her at the other kitchen, he asked if I needed to be shown again how the new desserts should be plated. While sweet, he was extremely frazzled and clearly very short on time. Not wanting to waste his, I felt confident and told him I was all set.
Several hours later, tickets were rolling in, the kitchen was buzzing, and everyone was in a good mood. Around 8:45 p.m.—prime time for pastry—I was scattering elderflowers on a $14 crème brûlée when I heard the unmistakable sound of my boss’s Danskos clomping down the stairs.
“I want you to stop everything you’re doing.”
She slammed five plates down on my station.
“Don’t send anything else up. Plate every dessert for me. Right. Now.”
My hands started shaking. I plated them all—not my best work, but considering I’d just been ambushed and she was standing six inches behind me the entire time, they were decent.
She picked up the first plate.
“These are. Completely. Unacceptable.”
She stepped away and smashed the plate on the floor. Then she took a deep, angry breath and smashed the next four one after the other. The sound of breaking porcelain mingled with the relentless ticket machine spitting out orders behind us.
“Clean that up. And do it all again.”
So I got on my hands and knees and cleaned it up. I could hear the ticket machine buzz as more orders rolled in. Then I plated five new desserts with trembling hands and the full-body shame of a child trying not to cry.
My second batch was deemed “less unacceptable.” Instead of being shattered, they were scraped into the trash. She looked me in the eye as she used one of the knives from my roll to pry open a bottle, and a little piece of me died.
“What are you feeling right now?”
“I’m sorry. And. I’m feeling…I’ll do better next time.”
She left. I finished my shift. Then I sat in the walk-in and ate a grapefruit and cried a little. What had triggered her rage? At home, I ran a hot bath with lemon verbena bath salts my brother’s girlfriend had given me for Christmas, cracked a beer someone had left in the fridge, and rolled a skinny spliff. I balanced my MacBook on the toilet seat and watched TV until the water turned cold.
Even though my boss was a petty tyrant who enjoyed making me sweat, I thought she was an incredible chef, maybe even a genius. When she wasn’t scolding me, I loved learning from her. I felt respect for her and wanted her approval more than anything. She probably perceived this, which only sharpened the thrill of trying to make me cry or quit in front of her. I imagined she would’ve relished adding that badge of honor to her lore and mystique. I also think she took some satisfaction in how little she was paying me. Punishment, maybe, for moonlighting in her vocation.
I first drafted this piece eleven years ago, in the same rent-stabilized apartment I’m in today. Back then, this experience was still fresh and humming under my skin. Now, I’m reflecting on that time, surrounded by paint cans and moving boxes, settling back into my space after three years away. It feels good to return to the city and this story, under new astrological circumstances and with a clearer perspective.
What strikes me now is how working in kitchens is—and isn’t—that deep. My boss approached food with a kind of rigid intensity and expected everyone around her to do the same. And in some ways, I understood it. Food is an art form. It’s essential to life. Elevating it into something nuanced and beautiful is a real craft—one I genuinely admired in her.
But there’s also a culture in kitchens that demands intensity for its own sake—a kind of inherited martyrdom, where sacrifice becomes the proof of your worth. And at the end of the day, we were making fancy cookies for weird rich people who were going to shit it out the next day.
I’ve since thought about how someone had probably treated her the same way she had treated me. I pictured a man standing over her as she cleaned up shattered white porcelain streaked with black sesame gelato and tomato coulis, holding back tears.
My life has changed tremendously since I worked in her restaurant. I have a somewhat stable career as a fine artist and professor—a different but in some ways similar field, one that requires sacrifice, builds resentment, and can often foster strange and harmful imbalances of power.
Things have changed for my old boss too. She doesn’t work in restaurants anymore and has become semi-famous in the food world. I get the sense she’s much happier now—and that makes two of us.
Tura Oliveira is an interdisciplinary artist and performer based in Brooklyn. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Yale. She has received awards, residencies, and fellowships from organizations including Yaddo, BRIC, AIR Gallery, Ars Nova, and the Tides Institute. She has had solo exhibitions at spaces including Geary Contemporary, BRIC, Wave Hill, The Java Project, and Disclaimer Gallery. She was a 2019 Van Lier Fellow at Wave Hill, and a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. In 2023, she will be the Abbey Awards Fellow at the British School at Rome.
Her work uses textiles, video, installation, and performance to explore labor, science fiction, and queer futurity. Her performances use original music, handmade sets and costumes, drag, and re-performance, with text drawn from popular culture, and idiosyncratic research.
Her current work centers around intertwining sci-fi narratives in a queer, utopian future, using textiles and immersive installation to transform these narratives into an expansive and interconnected mythology for a future earth.