Three former employees of Daeho Kalbijjim and Beef Soup, the acclaimed Korean restaurant chain with locations in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area, have sued the company, alleging unpaid wages and patterns of sexual and racial harassment.
Filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday, the suit claims that employees Ki Yong Choi and Gerardo Jimenez, who were hired at the San Mateo location, and Serafin Villegas, hired at the San Francisco H-Mart location, were not appropriately compensated for their hours worked.
Daeho Dining Group is headquartered in San Francisco. Founder Daeho Hwang has been running Korean restaurants in the area since he moved to San Francisco in 1990; in recent years, Daeho has gone viral for its cheese-topped kalbijjim. The group now operates eleven restaurants: six Daeho Kalbijjim and Beef Soup restaurants across California and Washington, YakiniQ, Bansang, and Jina Bakes in Japantown, and Mao and Mils in South Korea.
The suit states that the three employees worked as kitchen staff, primarily cooking, preparing and cutting ingredients, making broth, setting up kitchens, and performing other manual kitchen work, often for 12 to 15 hours at a time six to seven days a week. However, because they were hired by Daeho as salaried, exempt employees, the suit alleges that Choi, Jimenez, and Villegas were not granted overtime compensation or given the legal meal and rest periods typically granted to non-exempt employees. Such was also the case when the three workers were sent to help open new Daeho locations in Las Vegas, Concord, Bellevue, and elsewhere.
Under California law, more than half of an employee’s working time must be spent performing administrative, executive, or professional work in order to exempt them from the state’s wage and hour requirements. The suit alleges the workers’ roles were misclassified, given that it was primarily physical kitchen work.
The suit also alleges that a portion of the tips allocated for kitchen employees was taken and used to pay management, despite tips being considered a part of the kitchen workers’ annual salaries. California employers cannot count tips and gratuities as a portion of an employee’s compensation in order to satisfy a minimum wage requirement; moreover, managers and supervisors cannot take any portion of employees’ tips or join the employees’ tip pool.
In addition to wage theft, the lawsuit alleges patterns of harassment. Jimenez and Villegas claim they were repeatedly subjected to sexual and racial harassment by a manager named Ken, including unwanted kissing, hugging, and grabbing of their genital areas and buttocks; they claim the manager would become angry and hostile when they resisted him. Additionally, they claim Ken sometimes struck them when he was angry, and subjected them to derogatory treatment and physical aggression due to their Mexican heritage and lack of English proficiency. (Attempts to reach Daeho Dining Group for comment were unsuccessful.)
Adding to allegations about targeted derogatory treatment were the accommodations arranged for Jimenez, Villegas, and other Mexican kitchen employees during assigned travel to the (now shuttered) Las Vegas location. For 16 months from April 2023 to roughly October 2024, Jimenez and Villegas were temporarily transferred to the then newly-opened Las Vegas location, where they would work 15-hour days, six to seven days a week, for two weeks at a time before returning home to San Francisco for two days, after which time they would be reassigned to Vegas for another two weeks. The suit also claims that they and other kitchen workers were placed in an apartment in an undesirable area, where employees slept on the living room floor without beds, only blankets.
“Mexican rank-and-file kitchen employees performing grueling schedules were given materially inferior sleeping and living accommodations while management personnel were provided significantly superior company housing,” the suit alleges. “Considered together with the national-origin comments and treatment described below, the disparity is evidence of Defendants’ less favorable treatment of Mexican employees.”
Jimenez and Villegas both resigned in June; last week, after raising these concerns to the California Civil Rights Department (CCRD), they were each given a Notice of Right to Sue.
Choi separately raised his concerns to the CCRD and was also given a Notice of Right to Sue.
Choi, who is over the age of 40 according to the complaint, says he was terminated after nearly four years of employment, after owner Daeho Hwang told him he wanted a “new generation” of employees. The suit notes that Choi had previously objected to the company’s practice of diverting tips, and that his concerns had been communicated to senior management.
Neither Daeho Dining Group nor the workers’ lawyer, Joong Y. Im, were available to comment.
