Buddakan

Former Buddakan Employees Report ‘Toxic’ Workplace at the NYC Restaurant | Eater NY

"At the Meatpacking District location, I learned that Buddakan — Stephen Starr’s 2006 outpost of a concept that began in Philadelphia in 1988 and earned an early two-star New York Times review — presents a glossy, clubby dining experience but, according to multiple former servers, harbors a toxic culture of favoritism and racial insensitivity. Three Black former servers allege they were disproportionately assigned to lower-paying sections despite their tenure, a practice former employees say was enabled by Buddakan’s section-based tip system (roughly 20 sections) that can leave some servers hundreds of dollars behind others; two non-Black former servers corroborated those claims. Managers purported to assign sections by seniority, but employees described decisions being driven by “who the managers have to like,” and said that speaking up often resulted in worse assignments; several servers pointed to Brandon Wergeles as a central figure in scheduling and as someone who fostered a “culture of fear,” though he denies making day-to-day section assignments. Incidents of explicit insensitivity reached a tipping point in 2019: on August 25 a manager distributed a staff flyer pairing a photo of a Black person with the line “Did someone say watermelon?” promoting a watermelon “sake-rita,” and later that year another manager reportedly called the restaurant’s Black clientele the “pineapple and Ciroc crowd”; both managers were later terminated, but former employees say the incidents were not addressed broadly with staff and felt like sweeping problems under the restaurant’s polished veneer. Starr Restaurants denies the characterization of systemic discrimination, points to an anonymous tipline and HR procedures, and says swift action was taken in the two specific incidents, yet former servers say any temporary improvements after those actions were insufficient and that the pattern of inequity persisted through the lead-up to the pandemic." - Luke Fortney