Results tagged “owner”

More than two dozen Park Slope restaurants and cafes owe at least $910,000 in unpaid wages to more than 200 workers, the State Labor Department announced yesterday. Inspections during the spring revealed that some workers made as little as $2.75 an hour; the minimum wage for food service workers is $4.65 per hour. (Today the Daily News revealed that the restaurants include Aunt Suzie’s, Baluchi's, Sotto Voce, Olive Vine Café, and Sweet Melissa Patisserie.) Getting chiseled out of already laughably low wages is rough, but at least they didn't have the misfortune to be employed by Paradou owner Vadim Ponorovsky, who's earned some notoriety today for an incredibly nasty email he sent to staffers at his Meatpacking district restaurant. His gloriously profane and hateful missive, which makes Hunter S. Thompson's letters seem like Get Well Soon cards, is published below in its entirety:

After a bullet grazed a young woman's head near Greenpoint club The Production Lounge early in the morning of February 14th, there's been considerable outcry from local residents who say the gunfire was just the climax of months of cacophony erupting from the bar since it opened. At a community meeting with the 94th Precinct last week, neighbors gave police an earful, and this past weekend there was a giant police spotlight parked outside. Owner Joe Ariola spoke with us at length today; he explained that the lights are NYPD "protocol after a shooting," and told us that "based on the description police have of the shooter, this individual was not in our establishment the night of this incident." He continued:

Just to clarify, we have never had a fight in this place. We've never had to throw anyone out. We don't even have bouncers!... Police have told me that the girl left our place and was walking down the street when she was shot. It did not happen directly outside our place. But because we had an African-American social event that night and the shooter description is African-American, people have tied this to us. We probably do one or two events a week that have a very mixed culture crowd, mainly because we do a lot of events for up-and-coming artists, and a lot of those people happen to be either black or Spanish.