Thom Senzee, author of this article, is a West Coast-based freelance journalist, and a regular contributor to San Diego LGBT Weekly.
Restaurants fail every day. Each time one closes, there’s a good chance a restaurateur’s dream dies with it. But occasionally, a restaurant’s closure also means employees don’t get their final paychecks.
That’s exactly what the closure of Lil B’s Urban Eatery meant to a group of former employees who have all but given up any hope that they’ll ever get the back pay they say the former owners of the once-popular eatery in North Park that went belly-up in August still owe them.
“They only owe me about two weeks’ pay,” said former server, Jeffrey Spencer. “They owe some people more because either they had been asked not to deposit or cash previous paychecks; or their paychecks from earlier pay periods had just bounced.”
Spencer and four other former Lil B’s employees told San Diego LGBT Weekly that general manager Brian Stout and his partner, Lil B’s former owner, Tino Rodrigues knew for weeks that the business was failing and that they would not be able, or say some of the former employees, that they would be unwilling, to make payroll for those who worked during Lil B’s waning days. The allegedly unpaid workers point to the eatery’s conversion to a “cash-only” customer-payment policy that took effect at least three weeks before Lil B’s closed its doors for good Aug. 7.
Stout, a longtime San Diegan who for decades stood tall among this region’s restauranteur elite, declined to comment. One of his former employees, Christina Anderson says she is not only financially burdened by the experience of allegedly having earned wages that remain unpaid by her former employer, but that she is emotionally hurt as well.
“I haven’t heard a word from them for four months,” Anderson said. “If I saw them now, I would probably tell them that I hope they get what they deserve for how they handled the situation. I worked for them for over 16 years and that’s the thanks I get? What comes around goes around.”
Anderson says that for more than a decade-and-a-half she thought of her employers, whom she followed from and to various locations they opened though the years, less as bosses and more as “big brothers” before things changed.
“We used to be like a family,” Anderson recalls. “I know a lot of people say that about their work environments when it’s good, but we really were.”
Anderson paused during our phone interview, seeming to choke back her emotions.
“But that was a long time ago.”
She’s sympathetic to some of the personal challenges Rodrigues and Stout have faced through the years, especially Stout’s medical issues. In fact, when LGBT Weekly reached Brian Stout by phone he was beginning a four-hour dialysis session and wasn’t able to be interviewed; however, he said he would not be willing to provide comment for this article in any event, even at any time after dialysis.
Anderson believes problems other than medical issues were at the heart of Lil B’s financial failure.
“For months, none of the vendors would deliver anything without cash payment up front,” she said. “They had gotten screwed too many times.”
The problems at Lil B’s were evident during the restaurant’s last few weeks even to customers.
“Well, I thought that sign they stuck on the glass door that said, ‘cash only’ was one great big red flag,” said a former customer who spoke to LGBT Weekly on condition of anonymity who former employees confirmed was a regular at the establishment. “I thought it meant, ‘well, these guys are either hiding their money, planning to close, or they’re not going to pay their employees;’ and that’s exactly what happened.”
According to Jeffrey Spencer, unspecified problems in Stout’s and Rodrigues’ personal lives caused the restaurant to fail. Ironically, those problems began to show up just as the economy started to improve two years ago.
“There had been problems with our paychecks before during the last two years,” Jeffrey Spencer, the former server at Lil B’s, told San Diego LGBT Weekly. “The year-and-a-half to two years before then went pretty smoothly. It really was a great place to work, to eat and to meet for fun times.”
LGBT Weekly was unable to reach Tino Rodrigues for comment prior to press time.
