Celebrity Chef Michael Isabella Among Defendants in Ex-Requin Employees’ Wage and Hour Lawsuit [UPDATE]

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Celebrity chef Michael Isabella and three others face a proposed collective and class action in which three former employees—a runner, pastry chef and bartender—allege they’re owed unpaid wages.

The plaintiffs allege in the 19-page lawsuit that the defendants required employees at Washington D.C.’s Requin, as well as those at other restaurant properties under the Mike Isabella Concepts umbrella, to continue working “even though [they] knew that Isabella’s restaurant empire was failing and unable to pay its legal obligations, including employees’ wages.” 

“Defendants repeatedly failed to pay employees wages they had earned,” the plaintiffs allege. “As the months wore on, Defendants’ payment of employees’ wages became increasingly episodic, until Defendants paid no wages at all.”

According to the lawsuit, the defendants shut down substantially all of their business at Requin on or around December 22, 2018. The plaintiffs allege the defendants neither paid all wages due to employees nor provided notice that they were closing Requin, which was located in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood of Washington D.C., known as “the Wharf.”

The complaint says Isabella’s “restaurant empire” began to show significant signs of financial trouble a few months after Requin opened. According to the suit, several of Isabella’s restaurants “experienced exponential declines in revenue,” which led to the closing of “more than a quarter” of Mike Isabella Concepts’ restaurants between March and September 2018. In May of that year, Mike Isabella Concepts was sued by the landlord of one of its restaurants for thousands in unpaid rent before being sued again for unpaid rent at at least two other establishments, the case says. 

In September 2018, Isabella, amid now-settled sexual harassment allegations, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for Mike Isabella Concepts “in an attempt to, in his words, ‘stop the bleeding,’” the lawsuit relays. At the time, some of Isabella’s restaurant employees reported that their paychecks had bounced in the weeks leading up to the filing, according to the suit.

The case says, however, that Isabella claimed publicly at the time of his Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing that Requin was excluded from the filing because it was “successful” and was one of two restaurants that would keep his operation afloat. Despite the defendants’ public assurances, the plaintiffs began experiencing “interruptions” in their regular receipt of wages and accompanying paystubs around November 2018, the lawsuit claims, alleging the defendants’ payment of wages to Requin employees became “sporadic and inconsistent, and ceased to conform with legal requirements.”

In November 2018, the plaintiffs did not receive their paychecks through the regular payroll company, the suit says. Instead, the defendants paid employees with personal checks or checks that lacked the name of their formal employer, according to the complaint. Some employees’ checks were drawn from the accounts of other affiliated Mike Isabella Concepts entities, such as BallKap, LLC, per the case.

According to the lawsuit, some employees began to receive checks from a debtor in possession of BallKap, LLC’s account that “did not reflect employee tax withholding, did not include any detail for hours worked and rate of pay, and did not breakout wages and tips,” violations of D.C. labor code.

“It was difficult for employees to determine whether they had received the proper amount of pay for hours worked from checks that did not reflect such detail,” the lawsuit reads. “Some of the paychecks received did not fully pay the wages and tips earned by Plaintiffs and the other Requin employees.” 

In describing the apparent sporadicity of the defendants’ pay practices, the lawsuit goes on to claim some paychecks received by the plaintiffs were returned for insufficient funds or returned marked as unauthorized. Per the suit, at least one plaintiff was offered cash in place of a bounced or never-received paycheck as compensation yet refused to accept the money, fearing tax consequences or because the cash being offered was less than the wages owed. 

In all, the lawsuit alleges the defendants were aware that Requin lacked the funds necessary to continue operating and paying employees their rightful wages and would soon follow its sister restaurants into bankruptcy. 

“Despite this knowledge, Defendants continued instructing employees to report to work and perform duties for which Defendants could not pay them,” the suit claims, stating that Requin’s landlord filed an eviction case in D.C. Superior Court against Isabella, claiming he owed more than $144,000 in rent for the period between May and December 2018. According to the lawsuit, Requin was permanently shut down on December 22, 2018, with employees receiving no prior notice of the closure.

The complaint alleges the defendants failed to pay employees for work performed before Requin’s shutdown and send out IRS Form W-2s. Though some employees received the forms, they found them to be inaccurate or incomplete, while others did not accurately reflect the wages paid to the workers via personal check by the defendants, the case claims. 

Alleged in the lawsuit are violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, D.C. Minimum Wage Act Revision Act and the D.C. Wage Payment and Collection Law.

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