when you want, where you want.
Does This Chef Owe You Money?
Photo: Yvonne Tnt/BFA.com
Vinny Milburn runs the seafood wholesaler Greenpoint Fish and Lobster, and he’s used to restaurant owners who don’t pay for their fish on time: “I joke that I am not a seafood provider — I’m a source of capital who offers a zero percent interest loan.” This is because chefs don’t buy ingredients like most people. Restaurants run on credit lines. Established owners are typically offered payment terms — 14 days, 30 days — and rarely does any debt lead to the involvement of a collection agency or a lawsuit, since so many people miss payments. “Part of the job is paying as little and as late as possible,” one restaurant worker says. “As much as you can get away with it, that’s the game.”
When I heard recently that Delicious Hospitality Group — the company behind restaurants such as Charlie Bird and Pasquale Jones — had become notably tardy with its own payments, I first called Milburn to see if he was owed anything. My timing was fortuitous: “I just filed suit against them,” he said. “They stiffed me for an extraordinary amount of money.” Before the pandemic, the group had been “excellent payers,” but the situation had changed. Milburn claims that when he recently contacted a member of the company’s finance team, he was told payments were coming, but the best Delicious could do was pay back $1,000 at a time. Milburn says that never happened, and that on March 6, his contact at Delicious blocked his number outright. On March 19, he filed a claim against Delicious Hospitality seeking payment for $33,617.78 worth of unpaid invoices.
In an industry where not paying bills is part of doing business, it isn’t uncommon for any restaurant group to owe a similar amount of money. But something about the situation at Delicious struck Milburn as unusual. “I think they owe too much old money and aren’t able to take in enough new revenue,” he says. Court records back this up. Last summer, Delicious Hospitality’s co-founder, chef, and owner, Ryan Hardy, abruptly shuttered Bar Pasquale, a Sicilian spot he’d opened on Kenmare Street. In September, the LLC associated with that restaurant filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, listing $4.6 million in debt. Delicious is facing multiple lawsuits, as well, though Hardy says the debt with Greenpoint has since been settled.
“I am somebody that pays my bills,” he told me flatly when I spoke to him last week, while disputing a number of details in this story. But multiple legal filings and conversations with chefs and vendors, along with a number of legal and real-estate experts, tell a different story. Delicious Hospitality’s financial obligations have extended to dozens of partners that are necessary for any restaurant to operate, and the company’s creditors want their money. Beyond the existential threat they could pose to Hardy’s once-booming group, they also demonstrate, in detail, how complicated any restaurant’s financial web can become, and just how quickly things can unravel.
Hardy opened the restaurant Charlie Bird with partner Robert Bohr and sommelier Grant Reynolds on the northwest border of Soho in 2013. Its investors included Jay-Z and Goldman Sachs CEO and part-time DJ David Solomon. The food was Italian-ish, and the soundtrack was the kind of hip-hop (Wu-Tang, Notorious B.I.G.) that white kids in the suburbs grew up loving, while the deep wine selection made the restaurant a destination for whales (industry speak for big spenders). Beyoncé was in attendance at the 2014 Halloween party; the restaurant was as buzzy as possible, and former employees say it could be a great place to work. “Every restaurant group says ‘Oh we’re family, oh we’re family’ and only twice in my life — I’m 46 — have I felt like I was working among family,” says Charlie Reyes, who was a server on the opening team. “Charlie Bird really felt that way. The intention, the way they took care of people, was there.”
In 2016, the three partners expanded to Kenmare Street with Pasquale Jones, specializing in wood-fired pizza and another impressive wine list. “And just like Charlie Bird, rap music is definitely part of the equation,” Eater NY wrote in one of five stories that it published ahead of the debut. Adam Platt, New York’s critic at the time, loved the restaurant’s $48 pork shank, “which is braised to an almost fruity tenderness and finished with lardo and fennel pollen.”
With two hits under their belt, the team’s next project, in 2018, would be their most ambitious yet: a two-story midtown operation called Legacy Records. Opened in partnership with the developer of the building, between Tenth and 11th Avenues and a few blocks north of Hudson Yards, it also included Easy Victor Cafe and a cocktail bar, Ada’s Place. In every way, it was a significant step up from the downtown establishments. Times critic Pete Wells noted back then that the restaurant was “unusually good and very popular.”
But one former employee called the setting — just south of the Lincoln Tunnel entrance, a short walk from the Javits Center, and near a stable for Central Park horses — a nightmare, and another characterized the restaurant as a bad decision motivated by dollars and hubris. “It was too much — way too much, way too fucking soon,” says Reyes, who ran the bar. “It was such a huge space, and the fact that we were near Hudson Yards did not fucking help.”
Peter Anderer, who was the general manager and a partner in the restaurant, thinks it was a mistake to try and make it a “neighborhood spot.” The far-off location didn’t help: “Legacy should have made a lot more money in their first year than they did,” Anderer says. That happened during the second year, when they shifted their focus to events: “The type of buyouts that we threw were awesome — huge, huge productions.”
After the death of a friend, Bohr stepped away from the company in 2019, which former employees say began to cause problems. “Up until that point, Robert really was the glue, when it came to the owners,” Reyes says. Anderer recalls Hardy’s relationship with the other partners became contentious around this time, too, and Reynolds, who was a partner himself by that point, left in 2020: “I disagreed with the direction of the business, and I determined that my values did not align with my partner,” he says.
As the pandemic wreaked havoc on the city’s restaurants, Delicious received over $7 million dollars in PPP and EIDL loans. Two loans in particular — worth more than $2.5 million — were set to be used primarily for payroll at Legacy Records. The restaurant didn’t reopen until 2022, and the SBA did not forgive the loans. Delicious has been working to pay those back; by the time Legacy returned, Hardy and another business partner, Alexander Perros, were already at work on a massive new endeavor.
In March 2020, Perros made an offer to buy a struggling waterfront motel, Silver Sands, on Long Island’s North Fork. A real-estate broker whose company handled the sale described it to Newsday as “the number-one commercial transaction on the North Fork,” and renovations were reportedly set to cost $4 million. Neighbors in and around the town of Greenport bemoaned the Hamptons-ization of a local landmark while Hardy and Perros undertook a makeover that included adding a nouveau diner and an outdoor bar with raw seafood and pizza. When Silver Sands reopened in 2023, former Bon Appétit editor Christine Mulhke called it the opening “North Forkers have been griping about for three summers.” The duo also opened a bakery and café on Greenport’s Main Street, called Pip’s.
Back in the city, workers at the Delicious restaurants, now under sole control of Hardy, were feeling the pinch. Food deliveries needed to be paid for upfront — Hardy denies that; workers say this indicates the restaurants hadn’t been paying their invoices — and management would apparently come up with creative ways to recoup costs, like charging customers for water that had been run through a “special filtration system.” Morale among the staff was low and several employees also say that the degree to which the company stretched management went “way beyond normal” as they were asked to work across different locations, ostensibly to save money, while some allege the company dangled promotions and opportunities that never panned out. None of the people I spoke to who worked for Delicious Hospitality during this time was surprised to learn about financial problems.
Any belt-tightening at the businesses didn’t seem to affect Hardy’s personal finances. In July 2023, an LLC associated with Hardy and his wife, Agatha Capacchione, bought a four-bedroom home in Greenport for $1.75 million. A year earlier they’d also listed their West Village co-op, asking $2.8 million, but the sale was eventually blocked by the co-op because of a dispute regarding renovations made to the unit. That conflict, too, has led to legal action: Capacchione filed suit. “This family needs to be able to sell their apartment and escape the continued barrage of abuses inflicted by Defendants,” an attorney representing Capacchione wrote in a letter last month. Selling the apartment, the letter continues, would allow the family to buy “more suitable housing.”
The $4.6 million Bar Pasquale bankruptcy filing contains eye-raising details. In addition to nearly $38,000 in unpaid sales tax — “That’s the first thing you pay,” says one operator — the names of the creditors will be familiar to anyone who has run a restaurant in the city: Con Edison, D’Artagnan, Dairyland, Natoora, Regalis, Resy, Sysco, Counter Culture, a pest-control company, and even a social-media consultant owed $9,000. Many of the individual debts are not especially notable — $1,210.26 owed to the high-end meat purveyor D’Artagnan, for example — but taken together, they are a catalogue of the companies that any New York City restaurant owner would need to rely on in order to operate. “That’s unbelievable,” said one industry source when he heard the names. “Who is there left to do business with?”
The most surprising name on the list is Baldor, a massive speciality-food supplier whose trucks are a common sight throughout the city. Baldor and its subsidiary, Pierless Fish, sued Delicious Hospitality in January 2025 for unpaid invoices totaling $137,433.15. Baldor sells to 16,000 food businesses and, between 2019 and 2024, it filed lawsuits in New York over unpaid invoices fewer than 20 times. Operators will say that Baldor wants to be seen as a friend of the industry, and one business owner describes it as “more lenient” than other companies its size, supportive to the point of potentially exposing itself. “If you’re on hold from a company like Baldor — which is kind of like the everything store for restaurants — that’s bad enough,” says the industry source, who has worked for distributors around the city. “If a broadliner that’s that big is taking it to legal, then you’re going to be so fucked.”
The bankruptcy filing and Baldor’s lawsuit aren’t the end of the problems at Delicious: In addition to Milburn’s lawsuit in March, the landlord of an office space Delicious leased on Mercer Street filed a summons for $51,628.57. (Hardy says a settlement has since been reached.) Pasquale Jones’s landlord is seeking $89,642 in payment and has sought an eviction warrant. (Hardy told me that’s not true and that the landlord would tell me as much on the record; when I got in touch, the landlord refused to discuss the matter.)
The bankruptcy in the fall may have helped Hardy’s restaurants to manage their debts, but it came at the cost of his destination properties out east. According to an affidavit filed in Nassau County in November, “Hardy concealed his financial troubles in the city and his bankruptcy” from the Silver Sands board, “which constitutes a breach of his fiduciary duty. It was only through Hardy’s vice-president of finance that we were informed of the bankruptcy filing.” The same month, Perros, apoplectic, scheduled a board meeting to offer Hardy two options: Step down or get voted out. The matter was eventually settled out of court, and the Greenport businesses are continuing on without Hardy’s involvement. (“The only thing I’ll say about Silver Sands, and where things are today, is we started something, we built something together,” Hardy offers. “I think we both realized we wanted different things.”)
The city is filled with the corpses of onetime hotspots that weren’t sustainable, but the situation at Delicious Hospitality shows another side of this situation: how many other companies, lenders, and purveyors are affected when a restaurant group’s debt becomes unmanageable. “I can’t understand why the group, as a whole, fucking fell into the hole that it did,” Reyes says. For now, all five New York City ventures do remain open, and Hardy is making additional plans: Last year, Delicious signed a 15-year lease for a space in One Madison, though it’s unclear whether anything is actually happening. The project, according to an executive at the building’s developer, is “in the construction phase.” Hardy, however, says the space has not been delivered to his company.
Related