Court says former Old Town restaurant owner must pay back workers for wage violations
A former Wichita restaurant owner must pay back employees for minimum wage and overtime violations, a court ordered this week.
Dozens of restaurant workers at Fredo’s Wine and Tapas in Old Town said in a federal lawsuit last fall that they weren’t paid proper minimum wage and overtime for more than a year. The U.S. Department of Labor asked the court to default in employees’ favor after owner Alfred Abdelmaseh didn’t respond to a court complaint and summons.
The court agreed to the default judgment this week, ordering Abdelmaseh to pay more than $21,000 to the federal labor department, which disburses the money to former workers. Abdelmaseh must pay more than $10,000 in unpaid wages and another $10,000 plus in damages.
More than 25 former employees were impacted by the wage violations between July 2018 and October 2019, according to court records.
Fredo’s, a cocktail bar and restaurant, opened in summer 2018 but closed at the end of last year. At the time, Abdelmaseh told The Eagle he couldn’t come to an agreement with his landlord to renew the lease on the space at 301 N. Washington in Old Town.
He also told The Eagle he hoped to find a new, larger building to move the restaurant to this year. He previously said the lawsuit didn’t have anything to do with Fredo’s closure.
When reached by an Eagle reporter Thursday afternoon, Abdelmaseh hung up the phone.
The U.S. labor department accused Abdelmaseh of violating portions of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the right to a minimum wage and “time-and-a-half” overtime pay when employees work more than 40 hours per week, among other things.
The federal and Kansas minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. A tipped worker in Kansas can be paid a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour, but if the employee’s tips combined with that wage do not add up to $7.25 an hour, the employer must make up the difference.
The Fredo’s lawsuit wasn’t the first time Abdelmaseh was accused of not paying workers. The U.S. Department of Labor filed a lawsuit against him in November 2019 accusing the same FLSA offenses at his former business Shesha Lounge in Wichita.
That restaurant has also since closed. In April 2020, the court ordered Abdelmaseh to pay $183,876 in back wages and damages to former Shesha Lounge employees. As of Thursday, no certificate of payment had been filed in court to show that Abdelmaseh paid the back wages.
This story was originally published April 8, 2021 at 2:37 PM.
