Former Acadia employees speak out
Claim chef fostered a sexualized culture and toxic workplace
After the last guests had left on a Sunday evening in March 2018, employees at Acadia pushed the tables and chairs aside in the restaurant’s private dining room and began unrolling sheets of plastic across the floor. A going-away party was planned for that Monday.
According to text messages shared with the Tribune, Ryan McCaskey, Acadia’s chef and owner, promised employees that the party would be an “extra naughty” affair. He said he would supply dollar bills to tip the strippers.
“He pretty much made it mandatory,” said Brendan Smith, a former Acadia cook who said he felt pressured to commute in from the suburbs on his day off to attend the party and a dinner beforehand.
That drizzly Monday night, about 15 people — Acadia staff, their friends and significant others — filed into the private dining room at one of just four Chicago restaurants to have earned at least two Michelin stars. From chairs usually occupied by customers spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an evening of food, wine and cocktails, McCaskey’s guests watched a raucous evening unfold.
The two performers quickly
became naked and encouraged onlookers to use sex toys on them, people in attendance said. McCaskey was an eager participant, some in attendance said, licking whipped cream from the genital region of one of the performers. According to attendees, McCaskey encouraged others to become involved and chided those who did not participate, including calling Smith a homophobic term for declining to take a turn.
In an interview in September with the Tribune, McCaskey acknowledged hosting the going-away party in Acadia’s private dining room — he called it “a bad judgment decision” — and hiring the strippers to perform. He also confirmed licking whipped cream fromthe performer’s body.
“It was my bad for sure that I decided to have it at the restaurant,” McCaskey said. “If I had it at my own house, no one would care.”
But multiple former Acadia employees said the going-away party typified a broader culture at one of Chicago’s most heralded restaurants, which McCaskey has operated as sole owner and executive chef since 2011.
Interviews with more than a dozen former Acadia employees, as well as photos, text messages, emails and a video of preparation for the going away party provided to the Tribune, depict a sexualized culture in which the former employees say McCaskey fostered a toxic wor kplace.
Past Acadia employees both male and female — though especially several women in their 20s, a demographic that can have a hard time breaking into high-end kitchens — described Acadia as a particularly difficult place to work. Even in an industry known to be intense and freewheeling, McCaskey operated Acadia with its own set of rules and beyond restaurant norms, the former employees said.
“There were a lot of things I saw that bothered me and I thought, ‘Well this is how the industry is and I need to get out,’” said Joanna Northage- Orr, who worked as a cook in various capacities at Acadia for nearly two years. “I worked in other kitchens and realized itwas not OK.”
Multiple women said they have long feared going public about their experiences at Acadia because of what they said were concerns McCaskey might interfere with their chances of future employment at other restaurants.
Kristi Isn’t, who is now the chef de cuisine at Michelin- starred Elizabeth Restaurant, said she stopped working at Acadia after about six weeks in 2018 because of the restaurant’s “toxic masculinity” and what she described as McCaskey’s flirtations.
Those flirtations, she said, included handing her a vegetable with a heart shape inside of it during work and asking her on a date in front of other employees during ameeting of kitchen staff — events that were confirmed by her former co-workers. Isn’t also said she felt McCaskey would stand unusually close to her as she worked.
“A lot of things he did didn’t make any sense because he’s my executive chef and the person I’m supposed to look up to and respect,” Isn’t said.
Instead, she said, she felt like “a toy, a new toy he wanted to play with.”
In a phone interview in September, McCaskey said the array of complaints of inappropriate behavior are exaggerated or untrue, calling them “cancel culture piling on.”
Among the allegations detailed to the Tribune:
■ Kyleen Atonson, who worked for two years as Acadia’s pastry chef, said McCaskey asked her for a nude photo, repeatedly showed her nude photos of women (both celebrities and women McCaskey said he was dating) and passed her a note during service that said, “I’m horny.”
In an interview, Atonson’s husband said his wife told him at the time about McCaskey sending her nude photos and the note.
Atonson said she did not tell her husband about McCaskey’s request for a nude photo of her until she stopped working at Acadia. She said she laughed off much of McCaskey’s behavior as it happened because it seemed necessary to keep her job.
“Itwas hard to say, ‘Don’t show that to me,’” Atonson said of the nude photos. “I was afraid I was going to lose my job. You want a two-Michelin-star job on your resume.”
■ Six women who worked at Acadia, including Isn’t, said they had to stop working at the restaurant because they said McCaskey’s behavior made them uncomfortable. Three of the women said they left after just weeks due to their interactions with McCaskey. Three of them also said McCaskey asked to take them on trips to exotic locations. Several said text messages, which they found flirtatious and sometimes sexually crude, would regularly arrive fromthe chef.
“The texts just wouldn’t stop at all hours of the day and there was constant pressure to respond,” said a former hostess who worked at Acadia in her early 20s and said she had to quit because she felt uncomfortable due to McCaskey’s interest in her. Several other former Acadia employees confirmed McCaskey’s interest in thewoman.
■ A woman hired at Acadia as an entry-level cook in 2017 said she quit the restaurant after threeweeks because she felt she needed to feign interest in McCaskey to keep her job. She shared screen shots of text messages she said were from McCaskey that include him saying: “I really like you outside of work, and hope we can do everything we talked about.” Among those things, according to the text messages, was vacationing in the Caribbean.
The woman, who still works as a chef and asked not to be identified to protect her career, said she felt pressured to show interest in McCaskey “because he’s a two-Michelin-star chef and at the time it was a big deal formeto have that job.”
She called her interactions with McCaskey “embarrassing and so humiliating.”
■ Taryn Sandoval, who worked at Acadia for about six weeks in 2017, said she quit the restaurant and moved away from Chicago due to her interactions with McCaskey.
Sandoval, who now lives in California, said she had gone out to dinner with McCaskey once while working at Acadia, but thought of the meal as related to herwork. However, she said, McCaskey’s interest in her seemed to increase after the dinner, and she believed McCaskey was trying to get her to break up with her boyfriend. She said she quit Acadia as a result.
Sandoval said McCaskey sent her flowers twice in a month, as well as a box of chocolates filled with rocks. (In an interview, McCaskey said the rocks were meant to be an inside joke; Sandoval said she perceived the rocks as hostility after rejecting McCaskey’s advances.)
After receiving the box of rocks, Sandoval sought and was granted a stalking nocontact order in Cook County Circuit Court, which Sandoval said in an interview that she pursued because she was concerned McCaskey would show up at her apartment.
In an interview, Sandoval said her experience with McCaskey prompted her to move from Chicago “to avoid ever coming into contact with him.”
■ Multiple former employees said McCaskey baked desserts with drugs in them — he called them “space cakes” — for at least three staff gatherings. Ronan Morris, who worked as a service captain at Acadia from2017 until 2019, saidhe wound up in the emergency room following an Acadia New Year’s Eve party after consuming a blondie containing what he believes were drugs. Morris said he ate the dessert without knowing whatwas in it.
Morris said he never discussed the ER visit with McCaskey: “I was afraid I’d lose my job for having to go to the hospital.” Another former employee provided a text message in which McCaskey wrote of baking marijuana into fudge.
Asked about Morris’ incident, McCaskey said he did make a “small cake” with “a little THC tincture in it” for one staff party, but “everybody knew what itwas.”
Many of the complaints about McCaskey and Acadia were first posted on the Instagram account @the86dlist, which published more than 30 anonymous posts during the summer alleging toxic workplace cultures in various Chicago restaurants. (The account has been dormant since posting about Acadia on July 22.)
McCaskey consented to a phone interview in September that lasted more than one hour. He declined further comment. Presented lastweek with a description of allegations from former Acadia employees, his lawyer, Roger Malavia, issued a statement to the Tribune: “Mr. McCaskey remains firm in his stance that these allegations are hearsay, taken out of context, lies or misunderstandings. We have no further comment regarding these spurious publications.”
In the September phone interview, McCaskey said he has told some off-color stories and jokes in Acadia’s kitchen, though he believed they were consistent with broader restaurant industry culture and “never in a sexual nature and never in an inappropriate way.”
He said he has tried to be “a doting and caring person withmy staff.”
“In this day and age, that’s not a good thing,” he said.
He also said some employees were inappropriate with him. One former female employee, he said, “kept touching me, maybe trying to get me in trouble. She wasn’t there very long.”
Some statements and allegations on the @the86dlist Instagram account are factually incorrect, such as McCaskey being a member of the McCaskey family that owns the Chicago Bears. Others weren’t supported by Tribune reporting. And not all former female employees interviewed said they were subject to unwelcome attention, but several did confirm therewere other women whowere.
McCaskey, 46, launched Acadia in 2011 and was awarded a Michelin star within a year. In 2015 Acadia was granted a second star, a designation it has maintained every year since. The restaurant has also earned a Jean Banchet Award and multiple James Beard Award nominations as well as consistently topflight reviews from local restaurant critics, including four stars in the Tribune.
McCaskey’s personal story also became a popular theme in coverage of the restaurant; according to a 2016 profile on WTTW-TV, McCaskey was born Tam Truong Tran to a teenage mother in Vietnam. In 1975, Raymond and Judy McCaskey, of Palatine, adopted McCaskey as part of Operation Babylift, an initiative to move 3,000 Vietnamese orphans into homes in the United States. ( Raymond McCaskey was the longtime president and chief executive officer of Health Care Service, which operates Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in several states that include Illinois.)
“McCaskey’s got it all,” said Michael Ellis, international director of the Michelin Guide, when Acadia was awarded two stars in 2015. “He has great technique and produces elegant food that tastes great. For a restaurant to go from one star to two, that’s what we like to see.”
Such accolades may have allowed McCaskey a free hand to craft the restaurant’s culture, multiple former employees said. It also made Acadia a desirable place towork, especially for people new to Chicago or younger workers breaking into the industry.
“I thought, ‘ This is a Michelin-starred restaurant; this will be a great experience,’” said Jess Callahan, whoworked at Acadia as a pastry cook after moving from Rochester, New York, in 2016.
Callahan, who later filed a wage complaint against McCaskey, said she wasn’t the subject of unwelcome attention by McCaskey but during her time at Acadia witnessed McCaskey flirting with some employees and verbally abusing others.
“It’s a Michelin-starred restaurant and the pressures are high, but for someone who hadn’t lived or worked in Chicago, you think, ‘Is this a normal experience?’ It wasn’t and I didn’t need to deal with it anymore,” Callahan said.
She said she quit after nine months. She spent the next three months battling the restaurant over payment for her last day of work. Callahan, who has moved back to New York, presented the Tribune with documents filed with the Illinois Department of Labor in which she petitioned to be paid $119 for a day of work that fell out of her last pay period.
According to a spokesman for the Department of Labor, the claim was finally paid—$108.35 after taxes— in September 2017.
Callahan said she pursued the matter because her time at Acadia was so negative.
“It was the principle of the matter because he thinks he can get away with everything,” Callahan said.
Former employees said they believed McCaskey was insulated by the fact that he is the restaurant’s sole owner. Many restaurants have multiple owners, which can create checks and balances regarding operations and staff culture.
“At end of the day, there’s oneperson incharge and it’s Ryan, and he’s in charge of whether or not you have a job,” said Northage-Orr, the former Acadia cook.
Morris, who visited the emergency room after the Acadia New Year’s Eve party, said McCaskey operated Acadia with “a culture of fear.”
“When you’re a single owner you basically do whatever the hell you want and people were constantly in fear of retaliation,” Morris said.
Multiple former employees said McCaskey would advertise their jobs, which they interpreted as a threat that they could be replaced at any time. In an interview, McCaskey said he advertised jobs even when occupied to maintain a pipeline of talent in case of a sudden opening.
McCaskey’s alleged be-
“There were a lot of things I saw that bothered me and I thought, ‘Well this is how the industry is and I need to get out.’ I worked in other kitchens and realized it was not OK.” — Joanna Northage-Orr, who worked as a cook in various capacities at Acadia for nearly two years
havior and Acadia’s workplace culture eventually became one of the worst-kept secrets in Chicago fine dining, multiple former employees said. Jessica Dawson, whoworked as a pastry sous chef for several months at Acadia in 2015, said women would routinely open up to her about their own negative industry experiences after learning she worked there.
“Women have been talking about this for years and years about Acadia,” Dawson said.
Dawson said McCaskey never showed her unwanted attention, but the restaurant was a difficult place towork.
“Kitchens can be the Wild West, but thiswas just beyond,” she said.
Atonson, who was Acadia’s pastry chef from 2017 until 2019, said she went on two work trips with McCaskey. One was to California with other Acadia employees, and nothing unusual happened, she said.
The professionalism of that trip led her to take a second work trip with McCaskey, to Vermont, where the chef was cooking for a private function. When they arrived, Atonson said, she discovered that McCaskey had booked a small cottage for the two of them where the only place to sleep was two beds next to each other in a single room.
Atonson said the setup made her uneasy but she said she had nowhere else to go. She sent a photo of the sleeping arrangement to her husband, who confirmed to the Tribune that he received it.
During that trip, Atonson said, they visited a spa with male and female soaking tubs. Neither person had a bathing suit so Atonson went into the women’s pool in her underwear and sports bra, she said. McCaskey called her over to a common area, and to Atonson’s surprise, she said, McCaskey was naked. She asked why; he said he hadn’t worn underwear, Atonson said.
Several former Acadia employees interviewed by
the Tribune routinely described McCaskey as a talented chef. They said he could be generous with staff and a helpful mentor. Atonson called him “genuinely a nice person.”
But Atonson said McCaskey has “expressed to me before he doesn’t have a lot of friends.”
“I felt like if I wasn’t his friend my job would be extremely replaceable,” she said.
Atonson said she witnessed McCaskey yell at staff and berate them — including, she said, regularly calling them “retarded” — though harsh rhetoric wasn’t unusual for the restaurant industry.
However, she said, being shown nude photos and being asked for a nude photo by her boss was unprecedented.
Some men also said they, too, have had negative experiences working at Acadia. Smith, who attended the party in the private dining room during the six months he worked at Acadia in 2018, said McCaskey would show him photos ofwomen McCaskey said he had had sex with.
Another former employee of the restaurant, Cody Nason, who worked as an Acadia service captain for six months in 2019, was granted a stalking no-contact order against Mc
Caskey in September after alleging in a court petition that the chef created a now-defunct website, codynason.com, multiple email addresses and fake online reviews to harass him.
Nason has said in an interview with the Tribune that he contributed to the @ the 86d list Instagram posts criticizing McCaskey, and believes the website, emails and reviews were revenge. The no contact order, which forbids McCaskey from contacting Nason, will remain in effect until at least Jan. 15, when the next hearing is scheduled.
McCaskey has denied responsibility for the website or online harassment. On Nov. 20, he filed suit against Nason and Nason’s attorney, Daliah Saper, accusing them of attempting to extort McCaskey with the claims of cyberstalking and harassment.
In the suit, McCaskey alleges that Nason was angry that he was fired for “poor performance and abusing alcohol on the job” and claims Nason and Saper made “false allegations” and then sought coverage of those allegations in the Chicago Tribune and Eater Chicago to extract money from McCaskey.
In a statement to the Tribune, Saper said the allegation that she and Nason are attempting to extort McCaskey is untrue. Nason, she said, “filed his petition in good faith and only after sending a cease and desist letter to Ryan McCaskey which went unanswered and was immediately followed by escalated harassment.”
In the September interview, McCaskey said most of the complaints against him and about how he has operated Acadia are untrue or taken out of context. He said the frustrations of his former employees have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread loss of work in the industry. Acadia has been closed since August because of the pandemic.
“Once you remove a couple of these layers, that’s not really how it happened,” McCaskey said. “It’s people trying to direct a narrative because they have nothing to lose. They’re pissed. They don’t have work right now.”
McCaskey didn’t say whether he would reopen Acadia, but added that it wouldn’t happen before 2021. The restaurant pivoted to a successful to-go operation early in the pandemic, but sales dropped when patios opened during summer, he said. (Several former employees said Acadia has been selling furniture and equipment. McCaskey confirmed as much, though he said selling the items is unrelated to the restaurant’s future.)
During the summer, McCaskey moved to Stonington, Maine, where he maintains a residence, and opened a more casual restaurant, Acadia House Provisions, in 2019. That restaurant closed this summer amid the pandemic, but has reopened.
McCaskey said he envisions eventually leaving Chicago to live full time in Maine.
“I’m getting to be old. I want to settle down a little bit. I want to have kids. I want to live a much, much more normal life,” McCaskey said. “I just want to have a house and be a normal adult.”