Charlie Hallowell, the chef-owner of three popular and celebrated Oakland restaurants, is stepping away from day-to-day operations at his businesses in the face of numerous allegations of sexual harassment and verbal abuse of employees.

Hallowell’s restaurant group — which includes Pizzaiolo, Boot & Shoe Service and Penrose — has retained an outside human resources consultant to perform a full investigation into the company, Hallowell said in an email to The Chronicle Wednesday.

Hallowell’s action comes after 17 former employees accused him in interviews with The Chronicle of sexual harassment and pervasive verbal abuse. The workers, from all three of Hallowell’s restaurants, described a demoralizing work environment where his indecent propositions and abuse of his power were the norm, along with a near-constant stream of sexually explicit language.

“It was just this constant need to talk about sex or anything sexual,” said former Boot & Shoe bartender Jessica Moncada, 31.

Hallowell acknowledged in the email Wednesday that his behavior as a business owner was “unfiltered and often completely inappropriate” and that he was “deeply ashamed and saddened.”

“I can see very clearly that I have participated in and allowed an uncomfortable workplace for women. For this I am deeply ashamed and so very sorry,” Hallowell said in the email. “We have come to a reckoning point in the history of male bosses behaving badly, and I believe in this reckoning and I stand behind it.

“I understand that I cannot right the past wrongs, and at the same time, I take full responsibility for all of my actions,” he added.

After The Chronicle began speaking with former staffers about their allegations, Hallowell’s business partner Richard Weinstein sent an email to both current and former employees, inviting them to a company meeting Thursday. His email indicated that the company had begun “retaining the services of an HR specialist to conduct an independent investigation.”

According to Hallowell, the company will decide what steps it may take after the investigation is complete.

Hallowell, 44, has been a star in Bay Area restaurants since he began his cooking career at Chez Panisse in the late 1990s, where he was mentored by Alice Waters and former chef Cal Peternell. When he left to open Pizzaiolo on Telegraph Avenue in 2005 — a pizzeria with a trendy vibe and cocktails named for poets — he brought new excitement to the East Bay dining scene, creating a paragon of modern California cuisine. He followed with the similarly themed Boot & Shoe Service in 2009 and Penrose in 2013.

The restaurants’ critical acclaim and popularity created lucrative jobs for servers and bartenders, and many said Hallowell could be a generous boss and supportive to community causes. But despite his charismatic and often charming persona, some employees said, Hallowell’s behavior created an emotionally damaging work environment from which they have yet to recover.

“There were times he would shine all this light on you and others. Other times he would take you down,” said Journey Meadows, 39, who was bar manager at Pizzaiolo for five years. “It felt like an abusive relationship.”

One former employee described her experience as having to endure Hallowell’s “sexual Tourette’s disorder.”

Another employee, Molly Surbridge, said she was in the middle of a meeting with Hallowell on the first day of June 2015 to discuss a possible promotion to wine buyer at Penrose, the Oakland bar and grill where she had been a head server for almost two years. As she began presenting her detailed proposal for a wine program to Hallowell, she said, he cut her off mid-sentence.

“He told me that he really wanted to have sex with me,” said Surbridge, 38. “And that he just wanted to make sure I knew that.”

Surbridge said she ignored his advances and never got the promotion to wine buyer, while he regularly praised her appearance in front of co-workers. Other employees told The Chronicle that Hallowell had long promised her the post.

Surbridge said she stayed at the company until March 2017, despite Hallowell’s treatment, with the hope of advancement. Hallowell said that she was offered other promotions but turned them down.

Many of the former employees who spoke with The Chronicle said Hallowell’s treatment of Surbridge was one of many situations that created an insidious culture for many women.

They said that Hallowell expressed an obsession with female bodies, particularly pregnant ones, detailing romantic partners’ bodily functions and sexual acts. He also routinely made vivid comparisons between food and sex or female anatomy, former employees said.

Moncada recalled him saying, “If a pizza dough is formed properly, it should feel like a fat girl’s tit.” Meadows and several other women recalled how Hallowell effused about spaghetti puttanesca, the traditional Italian dish named for prostitutes: “I love it. Have you ever smelled a bowl full of p—?”

During the time she worked at Pizzaiolo, Celeste Cooper had a young daughter and became pregnant with her son, prompting Hallowell to call her a “hot mom,” she said. Like four others interviewed for this story, she said he also spoke about having sex with pregnant women.

Explosive stories about sexual harassment in restaurants have recently made headlines across the country, such as those surrounding celebrity chef Mario Batali in New York and John Besh in New Orleans, highlighting just how a busy restaurant can become a sexually charged — and abusive — atmosphere for workers.

In the Bay Area, Ken Friedman, a co-owner of San Francisco’s Tosca Cafe, was accused by 10 female employees of unwanted advances, groping and blacklisting, according to a Dec. 12 story in the New York Times; Friedman issued an apology. Michael Chiarello, who owns Coqueta in San Francisco and Bottega in Yountville, has been sued twice in recent years for sexual harassment. The suits have been settled.

Industry members said the environment described at Hallowell’s restaurants are representative of a common situation, where there is a lack of systems to report harassment and staff members may fear being blacklisted within the insular restaurant community if they speak up.

Hallowell’s restaurants have never had a human resources department or a system for confidentially reporting harassment.

Several female managers at Hallowell’s restaurants were so frustrated by his behavior that they left the company.

Cate Smith, 43, who worked at Hallowell’s restaurants as a bar manager for over six years, said she tried to talk to him about the inappropriateness of his behavior to employees on a daily basis. “There’s this thing about his personality, where he just thought I was being sensitive or over-reactionary,” she said.

Some former employees said Hallowell’s inappropriate comments were so frequent that they became no longer remarkable.

“It’s kind of this big question mark of why he’s able to say the types of things he says,” said Surbridge. “Everybody knows it’s unacceptable. And the excuse is, ‘That’s just how he’s always been,’ and, ‘That’s just how he is.’”

Because they happened so often, former workers said, the sexual propositions sometimes seemed harmlessly flirty, such as when Hallowell said, “Are you going to take a bubble bath with me?” at the end of a shift, to at least two women.

Others, they said, were more pointed and traumatizing.

Multiple women described getting the exact same unsolicited relationship advice, on different occasions. “Charlie would tell me constantly, ‘You just look so unhappy. If you just gave your husband more blow jobs, he would be more happy,’” said Cooper, the former Pizzaiolo barista, now 46.

Cooper said he repeated the comments more times than she could count, and always in front of co-workers. “It was humiliating,” she said.

On a busy night, a bartender, now 30, said he came behind the bar, put his arms around her and leaned in to whisper a few words that are burned into her memory: “When was the last time you let someone come inside you?”

In shock, she pushed Hallowell away and returned to her customers, she said. (Hallowell said he has no memory of this particular incident.)

Without a human resources department or similar system in place for reporting abuse at Hallowell’s restaurants, Cooper never complained about the abusive language to her manager.

“I didn’t think anyone would listen,” she said. “I didn’t think that it would be taken seriously, because he did that to everyone.”