Ryan Hardy in 2019.
Picture: Yvonne Tnt/BFA.com
Vinny Milburn runs the seafood wholesaler Greenpoint Fish and Lobster, and he’s used to restaurant homeowners who don’t pay for his or her fish on time: “I joke that I’m not a seafood supplier — I’m a supply of capital who affords a zero p.c curiosity mortgage.” It is because cooks don’t purchase components like most individuals. Eating places run on credit score traces. Established homeowners are usually supplied cost phrases — 14 days, 30 days — and barely does any debt result in the involvement of a set company or a lawsuit, since so many individuals miss funds. “A part of the job is paying as little and as late as doable,” one restaurant employee says. “As a lot as you may get away with it, that’s the sport.”
After I heard not too long ago that Scrumptious Hospitality Group — the corporate behind eating places comparable to Charlie Chook and Pasquale Jones — had turn out to be notably tardy with its personal funds, I first known as Milburn to see if he was owed something. My timing was fortuitous: “I simply filed swimsuit towards them,” he stated. “They stiffed me for a unprecedented sum of money.” Earlier than the pandemic, the group had been “glorious payers,” however the scenario had modified. Milburn claims that when he not too long ago contacted a member of the corporate’s finance crew, he was instructed funds had been coming, however the very best Scrumptious may do was pay again $1,000 at a time. Milburn says that by no means occurred, and that on March 6, his contact at Scrumptious blocked his quantity outright. On March 19, he filed a declare towards Scrumptious Hospitality looking for cost for $33,617.78 price of unpaid invoices.
In an trade the place not paying payments is a part of doing enterprise, it isn’t unusual for any restaurant group to owe the same sum of money. However one thing concerning the scenario at Scrumptious struck Milburn as uncommon. “I believe they owe an excessive amount of previous cash and aren’t in a position to soak up sufficient new income,” he says. Courtroom data again this up. Final summer season, Scrumptious Hospitality’s co-founder, chef, and proprietor, Ryan Hardy, abruptly shuttered Bar Pasquale, a Sicilian spot he’d opened on Kenmare Road. In September, the LLC related to that restaurant filed for Chapter 7 chapter, itemizing $4.6 million in debt. Scrumptious is dealing with a number of lawsuits, as properly, although Hardy says the debt with Greenpoint has since been settled.
“I’m any person that pays my payments,” he instructed me flatly once I spoke to him final week, whereas disputing a lot of particulars on this story. However a number of authorized filings and conversations with cooks and distributors, together with a lot of authorized and real-estate consultants, inform a unique story. Scrumptious Hospitality’s monetary obligations have prolonged to dozens of companions which might be mandatory for any restaurant to function, and the corporate’s collectors need their cash. Past the existential risk they may pose to Hardy’s once-booming group, additionally they show, intimately, how difficult any restaurant’s monetary net can turn out to be, and simply how rapidly issues can unravel.
Hardy opened the restaurant Charlie Chook with associate Robert Bohr and sommelier Grant Reynolds on the northwest border of Soho in 2013. Its buyers included Jay-Z and Goldman Sachs CEO and part-time DJ David Solomon. The meals was Italian-ish, and the soundtrack was the form of hip-hop (Wu-Tang, Infamous B.I.G.) that white youngsters within the suburbs grew up loving, whereas the deep wine choice made the restaurant a vacation spot for whales (trade converse for large spenders). Beyoncé was in attendance on the 2014 Halloween get together; the restaurant was as buzzy as doable, and former workers say it might be an amazing place to work. “Each restaurant group says ‘Oh we’re household, oh we’re household’ and solely twice in my life — I’m 46 — have I felt like I used to be working amongst household,” says Charlie Reyes, who was a server on the opening crew. “Charlie Chook actually felt that means. The intention, the best way they took care of individuals, was there.”
In 2016, the three companions expanded to Kenmare Road with Pasquale Jones, specializing in wood-fired pizza and one other spectacular wine record. “And similar to Charlie Chook, rap music is unquestionably a part of the equation,” Eater NY wrote in considered one of 5 tales that it revealed forward of the debut. Adam Platt, New York’s critic on the time, liked the restaurant’s $48 pork shank, “which is braised to an virtually fruity tenderness and completed with lardo and fennel pollen.”
With two hits beneath their belt, the crew’s subsequent venture, in 2018, can be their most formidable but: a two-story midtown operation known as Legacy Information. Opened in partnership with the developer of the constructing, between Tenth and eleventh Avenues and some blocks north of Hudson Yards, it additionally included Simple Victor Cafe and a cocktail bar, Ada’s Place. In each means, it was a big step up from the downtown institutions. Occasions critic Pete Wells famous again then that the restaurant was “unusually good and extremely popular.”
However one former worker known as the setting — simply south of the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, a brief stroll from the Javits Heart, and close to a secure for Central Park horses — a nightmare, and one other characterised the restaurant as a nasty choice motivated by {dollars} and hubris. “It was an excessive amount of — means an excessive amount of, means too fucking quickly,” says Reyes, who ran the bar. “It was such an enormous area, and the truth that we had been close to Hudson Yards didn’t fucking assist.”
Peter Anderer, who was the overall supervisor and a associate within the restaurant, thinks it was a mistake to attempt to make it a “neighborhood spot.” The far-off location didn’t assist: “Legacy ought to have made much more cash of their first yr than they did,” Anderer says. That occurred in the course of the second yr, once they shifted their focus to occasions: “The kind of buyouts that we threw had been superior — large, large productions.”
After the dying of a pal, Bohr stepped away from the corporate in 2019, which former workers say started to trigger issues. “Up till that time, Robert actually was the glue, when it got here to the homeowners,” Reyes says. Anderer remembers Hardy’s relationship with the opposite companions grew to become contentious round this time, too, and Reynolds, who was a associate himself by that time, left in 2020: “I disagreed with the route of the enterprise, and I decided that my values didn’t align with my associate,” he says.
Because the pandemic wreaked havoc on town’s eating places, Scrumptious obtained over $7 million {dollars} in PPP and EIDL loans. Two loans specifically — price greater than $2.5 million — had been set for use primarily for payroll at Legacy Information. The restaurant didn’t reopen till 2022, and the SBA didn’t forgive the loans. Scrumptious has been working to pay these again; by the point Legacy returned, Hardy and one other enterprise associate, Alexander Perros, had been already at work on an enormous new endeavor.
In March 2020, Perros made a suggestion to purchase a struggling waterfront motel, Silver Sands, on Lengthy Island’s North Fork. An actual-estate dealer whose firm dealt with the sale described it to Newsday as “the number-one industrial transaction on the North Fork,” and renovations had been reportedly set to value $4 million. Neighbors in and across the city of Greenport bemoaned the Hamptons-ization of a neighborhood landmark whereas Hardy and Perros undertook a makeover that included including a nouveau diner and an out of doors bar with uncooked seafood and pizza. When Silver Sands reopened in 2023, former Bon Appétit editor Christine Mulhke known as it the opening “North Forkers have been griping about for 3 summers.” The duo additionally opened a bakery and café on Greenport’s Primary Road, known as Pip’s.
Again within the metropolis, employees on the Scrumptious eating places, now beneath sole management of Hardy, had been feeling the pinch. Meals deliveries wanted to be paid for upfront — Hardy denies that; employees say this means the eating places hadn’t been paying their invoices — and administration would apparently give you inventive methods to recoup prices, like charging clients for water that had been run by means of a “particular filtration system.” Morale among the many employees was low and several other workers additionally say that the diploma to which the corporate stretched administration went “means past regular” as they had been requested to work throughout totally different places, ostensibly to economize, whereas some allege the corporate dangled promotions and alternatives that by no means panned out. Not one of the individuals I spoke to who labored for Scrumptious Hospitality throughout this time was stunned to find out about monetary issues.
Any belt-tightening on the companies didn’t appear to have an effect on Hardy’s private funds. In July 2023, an LLC related to Hardy and his spouse, Agatha Capacchione, purchased a four-bedroom house in Greenport for $1.75 million. A yr earlier they’d additionally listed their West Village co-op, asking $2.8 million, however the sale was finally blocked by the co-op due to a dispute concerning renovations made to the unit. That battle, too, has led to authorized motion: Capacchione filed swimsuit. “This household wants to have the ability to promote their condominium and escape the continued barrage of abuses inflicted by Defendants,” an lawyer representing Capacchione wrote in a letter final month. Promoting the condominium, the letter continues, would permit the household to purchase “extra appropriate housing.”
The $4.6 million Bar Pasquale chapter submitting incorporates eye-raising particulars. Along with almost $38,000 in unpaid gross sales tax — “That’s the first factor you pay,” says one operator — the names of the collectors will probably be acquainted to anybody who has run a restaurant within the metropolis: Con Edison, D’Artagnan, Dairyland, Natoora, Regalis, Resy, Sysco, Counter Tradition, a pest-control firm, and even a social-media marketing consultant owed $9,000. Lots of the particular person money owed usually are not particularly notable — $1,210.26 owed to the high-end meat purveyor D’Artagnan, for instance — however taken collectively, they’re a listing of the businesses that any New York Metropolis restaurant proprietor would want to depend on so as to function. “That’s unbelievable,” stated one trade supply when he heard the names. “Who’s there left to do enterprise with?”
Essentially the most stunning identify on the record is Baldor, an enormous speciality-food provider whose vehicles are a typical sight all through town. Baldor and its subsidiary, Pierless Fish, sued Scrumptious Hospitality in January 2025 for unpaid invoices totaling $137,433.15. Baldor sells to 16,000 meals companies and, between 2019 and 2024, it filed lawsuits in New York over unpaid invoices fewer than 20 occasions. Operators will say that Baldor needs to be seen as a pal of the trade, and one enterprise proprietor describes it as “extra lenient” than different firms its dimension, supportive to the purpose of probably exposing itself. “When you’re on maintain from an organization like Baldor — which is form of just like the every little thing retailer for eating places — that’s unhealthy sufficient,” says the trade supply, who has labored for distributors across the metropolis. “If a broadliner that’s that huge is taking it to authorized, you then’re going to be so fucked.”
The chapter submitting and Baldor’s lawsuit aren’t the tip of the issues at Scrumptious: Along with Milburn’s lawsuit in March, the owner of an workplace area Scrumptious leased on Mercer Road filed a summons for $51,628.57. (Hardy says a settlement has since been reached.) Pasquale Jones’s landlord is looking for $89,642 in cost and has sought an eviction warrant. (Hardy instructed me that’s not true and that the owner would inform me as a lot on the report; once I acquired in contact, the owner refused to debate the matter.)
The chapter within the fall could have helped Hardy’s eating places to handle their money owed, however it got here at the price of his vacation spot properties out east. In accordance with an affidavit filed in Nassau County in November, “Hardy hid his monetary troubles within the metropolis and his chapter” from the Silver Sands board, “which constitutes a breach of his fiduciary obligation. It was solely by means of Hardy’s vice-president of finance that we had been knowledgeable of the chapter submitting.” The identical month, Perros, apoplectic, scheduled a board assembly to supply Hardy two choices: Step down or get voted out. The matter was finally settled out of court docket, and the Greenport companies are persevering with on with out Hardy’s involvement. (“The one factor I’ll say about Silver Sands, and the place issues are in the present day, is we began one thing, we constructed one thing collectively,” Hardy affords. “I believe we each realized we needed various things.”)
Town is stuffed with the corpses of onetime hotspots that weren’t sustainable, however the scenario at Scrumptious Hospitality reveals one other facet of this case: what number of different firms, lenders, and purveyors are affected when a restaurant group’s debt turns into unmanageable. “I can’t perceive why the group, as an entire, fucking fell into the opening that it did,” Reyes says. For now, all 5 New York Metropolis ventures do stay open, and Hardy is making further plans: Final yr, Scrumptious signed a 15-year lease for an area in One Madison, although it’s unclear whether or not something is definitely occurring. The venture, in response to an government on the constructing’s developer, is “within the building part.” Hardy, nevertheless, says the area has not been delivered to his firm.
