Complaint accuses chef of sexual harassment
Worker alleges inappropriate comments made
Chef Sai Sakham Chou of Burma Taste, a Burmese restaurant in Sunnyvale, has been accused of sexual harassment by a female employee “half his age,” according to a lawsuit.
In a complaint filed with the Santa Clara County Superior Court on Friday, the plaintiff, a server and student from Myanmar identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, worked for Burma Taste for one year before resigning because of repeated verbal and physical sexual harassment, according to her attorney, Navruz Avloni, from the San Francisco firm Avloni Law.
Owners Win Min Thant and Khin Sandi Thu, whose company operates Burma Taste under the name Golden State Foods LLC, also are named in the suit, which alleges that the owners and chef created a hostile work environment and that the owners failed to prevent her sexual harassment by their chef, retaliated when Doe complained and threatened other
Burma Taste employees with termination if they assisted Doe in filing the suit.
Neither the chef nor owners responded to requests for comment. Their attorney, Tyler M. Paetkau of the Oakland law firm Husch Blackwell, said only, “We try our cases in the courtroom, not in the media.”
According to the filing, Doe was 19 when she was hired by the restaurant, located at 124 S. Murphy Ave., on Jan. 27, 2022. Over a period of 10 months, Doe allegedly was subjected to repeated verbal and sexual harassment by Chou. The chef allegedly regularly made inappropriate comments to Doe, touched her hands, shoulders and thighs and pressed his body against hers at work without consent, whispered in her ear and blew kisses across the restaurant, the filing said.
After Doe's repeated complaints to management were ignored, she eventually took matters into her own hands and shouted loudly at Chou to stay away from her, whereupon, she says, she was reprimanded for shouting at a superior. The suit alleges that after Doe eventually resigned, Burma Taste employees were “threatened with termination” if they assisted her in pursuing her case.
Doe originally came to the U.S. on her own in 2019 as a 16-year-old student, the first in her family to do so. She took classes at San Jose City College for one year and briefly worked for a catering company on campus before the pandemic hit, and she moved back to Myanmar to be with her family.
Upon returning for inperson classes in 2021, she interviewed for the server position at Burma Taste and was hired on the spot. At first, the job was great, she said. Doe knew the cuisine,
made friends easily and met her boyfriend, who worked at Burma Choice, a Burmese restaurant in San Jose run by the same owners. The harassment started a few months into her employment, in the spring of 2022, Doe said in an interview with the Bay Area News Group.
“(Chou) is more than twice my age, so at first I thought he was treating me like a daughter,” said Doe, who alleges that Chou said “I love you” and called her “My girl” in Shan, which they both speak. “But then
it started getting really uncomfortable.”
Once, when Doe was having lunch in the communal eating area, Chou sat very close to her and touched her thigh in front of co-workers, she said. Chou asked Doe multiple times to go out, spend time alone with him after work and if he could give her a ride home. When she replied that she could not and that she had a boyfriend, Chou replied that “a boyfriend is just a boyfriend, not a husband.” She tried to protect herself, threatening to tell Chou's wife about the harassment.
“I felt so embarrassed and degraded,” she said.
On two different occasions, Doe told her employers about what was happening and was met with a laugh and a smile, she said. The last straw was when she was blamed for yelling at Chou to stay away from her. She was scolded and told to respect Chou because he was older and the head chef.
“They weren't offended by what he was doing; they were offended by my tone,” she said. “It was so shocking. I felt so sad and so depressed. I have not once received an `I'm sorry you went through this.' They have daughters of their own. How would they respond if this happened to them?”
Now in her junior year at San Jose State University, where she is studying accounting, Doe says she plans to stay in the U.S. and pursue a career in audit accounting. She is hoping her mom's visa is approved soon, so she can visit. Doe says she could use the support.
“In my culture, it is very, very uncommon for people to speak up like this, especially girls my age and especially alone in a new country,” she says. “I didn't even know I could talk to a lawyer until someone told me.”