Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
The line cook on the morning prep shift at the Cracker Barrel on West Lawrence Avenue in Springfield, Illinois heard the meow before he saw the cat.
His name is Damaris Olufemi. He has worked the morning prep shift at this Cracker Barrel for eleven years. He has, in those eleven years, opened the back-door grease trap twice a week, every week, for the routine grease-cooperative pickup that comes out of Decatur.
This time, when he lifted the steel lid, there was a cat in the trap.
She was, by his estimate, maybe four months old. Black-and-white. About two pounds wet. Soaked to the skin in cool, congealed kitchen grease. Her eyes — bright copper, slightly cloudy from grease in the lashes — were open and tracking. She was sitting on a piece of floating cardboard in about eight inches of greasy water.
Damaris yelled for the manager.
The manager, a forty-six-year-old woman named Wendy Tatum, who has been a Cracker Barrel general manager since 2008 and has seen more things behind a restaurant kitchen than most veterinarians, ran out the back door with a stack of cotton kitchen towels and a clean five-gallon stockpot.
The extraction took eight minutes and involved three line cooks forming a kneeling chain on the asphalt. Damaris went in to the elbow. The kitten — already lifting her front paws toward the sound of human voices — let him close his hand around her chest.
She came out of the trap making a sound somewhere between a meow and a furious complaint about her own situation.
The morning prep team named her Iris on the asphalt, while Damaris was pouring lukewarm dish-soap water over her in the stockpot and Wendy was on the phone with her own veterinarian.
The vet — a woman named Dr. Phoebe Yates at Sangamon Valley Cat Hospital — met them at the clinic at 7:14 a.m., before the clinic technically opened. She did a complete bath, an enzyme degreaser treatment, an eye flush, a chest x-ray (clean), and a full intake panel.
Iris had no aspirated grease. She had no chemical burns. She was three pounds and four ounces. She was, by best estimate, sixteen weeks old.
She was, by Wendy Tatum’s estimate, the new restaurant cat.
The Cracker Barrel on West Lawrence Avenue does not, technically, allow cats inside the building. Wendy did not consult the regional office. She built Iris a heated bed in the small windowless office where she does payroll. She put a litter box next to the filing cabinet. She bought a small ceramic food bowl from the Old Country Store at the front of the restaurant — the one that says “MAMA’S KITCHEN” on the side — and placed it on the floor under her desk.
Iris sleeps in the heated bed during the breakfast rush. She rides on Damaris’s shoulder during prep. She has been on the schedule, in pencil, since the second week of May.
The regional manager from St. Louis came through on Tuesday for a routine quarterly visit.
Iris was, at the time, asleep on the corner of his clipboard.
The regional manager looked at her, looked at Wendy, and said, after a long careful moment, “I am not going to ask any questions.”
Iris is now sixteen weeks old and three days. Her fur came back in soft and oily-clean. Her copper eyes have cleared. She is, by every measure that matters, a Cracker Barrel kitten.
The grease-trap lid has a new latch on it.
Wendy installed it herself. 🐾