Reflecting on their beginnings, Nikki and Brie Garcia, aka the Bella Twins, said that working at Hooters helped prepare them for their WWE careers.
While chatting with the New York Post, the identical twins spoke about working at the Mission Valley, San Diego, Hooters when they were 19 years old.
“Working there, you really owned your feminine energy,” Brie said. “As a waitress, you have to have confidence to go up to strangers and talk. But we had to have thick skin and not only confidence, but you had to own it.”
Nikki and Brie Garcia also said that the clientele was more in your face than most restaurants.
“You’re going up to men who are excited and want to get crazy,” Brie explained. “So we knew how to keep them in line … and we all set boundaries for ourselves … and didn’t take any crap from our customers. So it really taught me at a young age just to stand up for myself and to own it, own the room, and own a table. And I think it really helped me with pro wrestling to take that attitude into that.”
The Bella Twins then what they did to “upsell” their male clientele. “Squeezing your cleavage,” Nikki declared. “You’d be like, ‘Do you want more fries with that?’”
Brie chimed with, “Yeah, we got really creative. Like with the lingo, even just saying, ‘I hope you had a Hooter-fic time.’ You just came up with this really cheeky verbiage as waitresses there. And let’s be honest, everyone loves seeing the Hooters girls doing the YMCA and hula hoop — tips were going up.”
Nikki and Brie Garcia Went On To Become Huge Successes in the WWE
Nikki and Brie Garcia made their WWE debut in Oct. 2008. The identical twin tag team was active until 2015 before they split up. They reunited once again in 2018.
Each of the Bella Twins are former WWE Divas Champions, with Brie being the first twin in WWE to win the title. Nikki won it twice and her second reign was 301 days, which was the longest reign of the now-defunct title.
Both sisters officially retired from the professional wrestling circuit in early 2022.
The interview with the New York Post isn’t the first time the twins have spoken about their Hooters days. In mid-2022, the ladies chatted about their waitressing days during an episode of their The Bellas Podcast.
Nikki and Brie Garcia brought up Hooters while chatting about attending a wedding for one of their former co-workers.
“There’s nothing like going to your old stomping grounds,” Brie stated at the time. “Even though half the time they’re not what they were when you were in your 20s, there’s something about it when you go there, you always feel young again.”
Nikki pointed out, “You guys, we hadn’t seen some of these girls, these women, in 18 years … When we saw everyone it was like we didn’t miss a beat,” she said. “I feel like we just came out of jump start and we were ready to get on the floor and work!”
Brie went on to add, “I always thought it was gross that we always felt drenched in the wing oil of the building, but I think it was almost like the fountain of youth for us all because everyone looked the same. No one aged.”