Yesterday there was some drama at Upper West Side wine bar Wine and Roses. Co-owner Jennifer Klein and her husband Todd were forcibly ejected from the eatery by cops at the behest of four majority investors, who include Cindy Guyer, who's perhaps best known as the cover girl on hundreds of romance novels. "Both of us have been thrown out onto the street like trash," Klein, who for years was the model for those Jordache jeans TV commercials, tells the Post. "I'm going to fight this to my last breath."
Klein owns a 21.1 % stake in the bar, but put up just a $100 investment, and the other investors say Klein and her husband have been "lining their pockets" with the bar's profits. One investor, Miami hedge-fund operator Bruce Galloway, says, "They sit there drunk and stoned all night offending our customers." But Klein says some of the friends Guyer brought into the bar "literally asked me several times where they could buy cocaine." Guyer herself says she doesn't do coke, and tells us, "I've been told that he's quite a substance abuser himself." Reached for comment about the Post article, Guyer tells us:
It's just sad. It's all my bar. Jennifer Klein used to wine and dine the guys from The Post, and they spun this her way. This is her bitterness. I've done 20 national commercials, I'm a television producer, I have my own line of dolls, I have a purse line coming out, and I'm still working all the time. She's done one job in her whole life, the Jordache thing. They came to me and asked me to do something for her because she needed work, so I came up with this. Wine and Roses is all my idea, because I hate the wine at bars and wanted to create an this place where people could enjoy excellent wine and food.
This girl couldn't get arrested and I did her a favor, and this is how I get paid back. Her and her husband have been living high on the hog, while myself and three other people paid for this bar and were getting ripped off. Now I'm the managing member, and she's lucky that she even owns 21 percent.
Galloway, in an e-mail to investors obtained by the Post, speculated that Wine and Roses should have returned a net profit of $1.4 million over four years—not the $350,000 he said that investors received. "Nobody is stealing," Todd Klein insists. "We put our blood, sweat and tears into this business. What do they have to gain from this? Who treats somebody like this?" Guyer tells us she's hiring all new staff, and looks forward to opening up more Wine & Roses locations in NYC.
