Casa Bonita workers: Checks have bounced; pay is missing
Before the coronavirus, Casa Bonita was a strange household name and a dream-like destination for kids of any age in Colorado. But three weeks into the shutdown, employees say the beloved “eater-tainment” restaurant has left them and their loved ones in a nightmare of sorts.
Many of their mid-March paychecks bounced days after they were deposited, according to multiple employees. Then their general manager told them via a Facebook group post that they wouldn’t be receiving their final paychecks this week, either. Some employees said they were even charged by their banks for those last deposits, which were returned for lack of sufficient funds.
As many as 150 workers were recently on the books at Casa Bonita, according to floor manager Felicity Akers. It’s unclear how many of them have yet to receive as much as three weeks’ pay.
“(T)he company will be issuing a statement in the next few days concerning this issue,” general manager Mike Mason on Sunday posted in the Casa Bonita Employees Facebook group. By Wednesday, Mason had updated the group, saying that Casa Bonita’s owner, Star Buffet, “is working on an SBA loan to fund the payroll account.”
The Denver Post has reached out to Star Buffet’s CEO, Robert Wheaton, and the corporate office multiple times over phone and email for comment but has not heard back.
Akers, 24, has worked at Casa Bonita for eight years; before that, her mother worked there too. She said any effort now from Star Buffet will likely be too little to count.
“At this point, I don’t see myself returning” to work at Casa Bonita, she said. “It’s hard to go back to a place that doesn’t respect you enough to pay you for the work that you’ve done.”
After eight years, Akers was making $12 per hour as a floor manager.
“A lot of people in my family were questioning why I stayed,” she said. Last fall, Akers started a full-time position as the vice president of a plumbing company, but she continued to work at Casa Bonita one night a week. “We’re really just a big (restaurant) family, and all of us are such close friends. I stuck around so I could see all of them.”
Omesha Smith, 31, is studying for her bachelor’s degree in business administration and human resources management. She realized when she didn’t receive her last two Casa Bonita paychecks, for around $500 altogether, that she and her husband would be “struggling to maintain” their household in Montbello on one income, while raising three daughters.
“This is a terrible situation,” Smith said. “We’re now actually trying to keep the house stable.”
For her part, Akers said she worries most for co-workers who are family, those for whom the restaurant provides an entire household’s income.
“There’s one family in particular, their parents live in Mexico, and they’re here supporting themselves,” she said. “They literally just graduated last year from high school and moved here.”
As they await news — and back pay — from the restaurant, the women are aware of what they’re up against. In 2011, Star Buffet filed for bankruptcy, which it emerged from in early 2013.
Other businesses in the “eater-tainment” category have struggled alongside Casa Bonita to adapt their live-action business models as well in the wake of the coronavirus shutdown. Denver-based Punch Bowl Social last month closed all of its 19 Colorado and national locations in response to the shutdown and laid off “substantially all restaurant and corporate employees,” according to an SEC filing from the business’ majority owner, Cracker Barrel Country Store Inc.
All the closings and mass layoffs could affect workers beyond their immediate financial needs, employees say, as they reenter the job market along with nearly 10 million others across the country, and as they try to make some sense out of what has just happened.