Julian Hagood, Harry’s Fine Foods Suzi Pratt
Within the restaurant industry, kitchen culture is notorious for being a cesspool of toxic masculinity. Chefs rib each other incessantly about, as Anthony Bourdain famously put it in Kitchen Confidential, “who takes it in the ass.” The dick-swinging aspects of kitchen work are starting to fade, especially here in progressive Seattle, but it’s still a pretty aggressively heteronormative work environment.
For the Queer Issue, we caught up with a few local LGBTQ chefs for a quick chat about what it was like coming up (and coming out) in that environment, what’s different now, and their hopes for kitchen culture moving forward.