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An Instagram account is all but a professional obligation for a chef in 2022, every photo intended to spur a reservation or a Caviar order. But there’s something different about what Ricky Bella is doing with his Twitter account: @rickybellspdx.
Several nights a month, he posts videos of the line cooks working the grill at Hawaiian plate-lunch restaurant Ate-Oh-Ate. Other tweets feel like locker-room pep talks: “Chef Alani just fucking crushed it beyond belief. 10/10. No notes.” It’s all very Friday Night Lights, with an egg on top.
That’s no accident. Bella, 32, has worked in Portland kitchens for more than a decade, starting at Paley’s Place. “I have a distaste for celebrity chef culture—chef worship shit,” he says. “All you ever see [on social media] is the head chef. You never see the line cook. You never see the dishwasher. You never see the prep cook who gets up at 6 in the morning.”
No industry in Oregon is seeing its personnel flee to higher-paying, lower-stress jobs like the hospitality sector. Bella says he nearly left, too—until he visited the kitchen at Austin restaurant Suerte and watched the cooks cheering the happy-hour rush of orders like they were at a pep rally. “I felt like I was high on acid,” he recalls. “Did someone dose me with mushrooms? How is everybody so happy to be here?”
Bella wanted that atmosphere for Ate-Oh-Ate. That required paying a competitive wage: $18 an hour for a dishwasher. But he also figured public displays of appreciation couldn’t hurt. The result is a social media account hyping the contributions of his co-workers—plus a lot of mac-salad scoops. It’s one of the few happy spaces on Twitter (and, on more than one occasion, it caused this reporter to order a delivery plate).
“If I’m going to prioritize my own happiness,” Bella says, “it’d be kind of a prick move not to prioritize my team’s happiness. That’s more important to me than selling teriyaki chicken.”
