Workers at Boston-Area Tokyo Japanese Steak Houses Owed Unpaid Overtime, Lawsuit Alleges

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The operators of four Boston-area Japanese-style steak houses have been hit with a proposed class and collective action in which a former chef claims he and other workers were not paid proper wages.

The plaintiff, who worked at Tokyo Japanese Steak House restaurants in Saugus and Braintree, Massachusetts, claims to have put in roughly 70 hours of work each week without receiving time-and-a-half overtime wages. Moreover, the defendants allegedly applied an unlawful tip credit to the chef’s wages without informing him that they had done so.

The lawsuit alleges the defendants, who also operate a Tokyo Japanese Steak House restaurant in Newton and a Bisuteki Tokyo Japanese Steak House in Cambridge, have “knowingly, willfully, and maliciously” failed to pay workers in accordance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Massachusetts state law.

Per the case, the plaintiff was paid a flat rate of $3,200 per month while working roughly 70-hour workweeks as a master teriyaki chef. The suit alleges the defendants failed to pay the plaintiff at the statutory time-and-a-half overtime rate for all weekly hours he worked in excess of 40, and failed to keep accurate records of his hours in order to “mitigate liability for their wage violations.”

Moreover, the restaurant operators never provided the plaintiff any notice of their use of a tip credit or a time-of-hire notice reflecting his true rate of pay, the lawsuit alleges. The case further claims the plaintiff was not provided with paystubs in his native language of Chinese that included his name; employer’s name, address and phone number; rate of pay; any deductions made from his wages; any allowances claimed as part of the minimum wage; and gross and net wages.

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