Former employees of Bulle, Fresno’s newest high-end restaurant, disputed recent claims by the restaurant’s owners, telling Fresnoland that bounced paychecks and unpaid vendors have been a much larger problem than Bulle co-owner Tom Miller acknowledges.
Since Fresnoland first broke the news that the city’s newest and seemingly swankiest restaurant was cutting ties with its founding chef while also bouncing paychecks, tensions at Fresno’s fledgling fine dining restaurant have grown increasingly public.
Now more employees are speaking out, disputing Miller’s claims and characterizations of the restaurant’s financial health and ability to regularly pay employees on time.
In a statement last week to Fresnoland, Miller, who owns the restaurant along with his wife, Davita, said, in part, “Out of roughly 120 team members, five payroll checks bounced.”
Now multiple former Bulle employees are disputing Miller’s statement, with at least four alleging that bounced paychecks were an ongoing issue at the five-month old restaurant. They depicted an atmosphere of uncertainty, in which staff couldn’t count on their paychecks going through, and pushing back on some other claims Miller made regarding the departure of Bulle’s former executive chef, Max Wasco McCarthy.
“I can tell you that from myself alone and even other employees that have reached out to me, it was probably double that,” said Christian Billman, a former sous chef at Bulle.
For his part, Miller has not yet responded to a list of detailed questions regarding the emerging claims, though earlier this week, in an interview with The Fresno Bee, Miller described at least some of his now-former employees as “losers.”
Billman also disputed some of Miller’s characterizations of how bounced checks were handled at the restaurant. Miller had previously told Fresnoland, “We immediately issued cashier’s checks, and in some cases I personally hand-delivered them or deposited the funds for the employee. […] …for the full amount plus any associated fees so the employee is made whole without delay.”
Billman described a slightly more complicated process.
“An example would be, the first time my check bounced, I went in, he wrote me another check that morning. I went to go cash it straight from his bank – because when you go to a person’s bank and you cash it, they tell you right then and there – and that check was already unable to be cashed as well. They told me there were no funds.”
Eventually, Billman said, Miller paid him in cash, partly at Billman’s urging. “As you can imagine, I was a very frustrated individual.”
Billman says this incident was in June, though he wouldn’t leave the restaurant until the beginning of August, when Wasco McCarthy also left. According to The Fresno Bee, Bulle’s departures at that time included another sous chef, the pastry chef, a chef de partie, and a grill cook.
Billman acknowledged he had filed a complaint with the California Labor Commission. Last week, the commission confirmed they were reviewing at least three such wage complaints filed against Bulle. A timeline for the review process remains unclear.
Eventually the management clashes and money troubles just became too much, Billman says. Though even leaving turned out to be a less-than-straightforward matter.
“The second time a check bounced was after I quit,” Billman says. “I had picked up my last check at around three o’clock. I went to go cash it, and they told me the same thing as before — ‘We can’t cash this. There’s no funds.’ That was on a Friday, and I didn’t receive a check or cash until the following Monday.”
In his initial statement, Miller acknowledged the “the normal cash-flow pressures that come with a business of this scale,” but Billman, having worked at other fine-dining restaurants before, notes that “this is the first situation that I’ve ever been a part of with all this as far as wages and paychecks bouncing.”
He also described the complications that can arise from a bounced paycheck going beyond just having to wait a day or a few days to receive the funds.
“There were people I spoke to that their whole bank account got put on hold because of the check being considered fraud because it bounced,” Billman said.
As Bulle chef Ryan Tomb told The Bee, “Because Bulle had been flagged in the system for writing bad checks … any check that was being written would be a five- to seven-day hold,” he said.
Regarding his former chef’s departure, Miller described Wasco McCarthy’s menu to Fresnoland as “brilliant but restrictive,” saying that it “needed broader appeal to sustain the business.”
Speaking to The Bee, Miller went further: “[Those chefs leaving] is the best thing that happened to me. They were losers — and I say that sweetly.”
Billman describes a more complicated situation, where Miller would push McCarthy to lower labor costs, and McCarthy would suggest less labor-intensive versions of dishes, but with the two eventually failing to come to a compromise.
Meanwhile, at the same time as payroll checks were bouncing, Billman depicts discontent among the Bulle staff over ways in which the Millers were choosing to spend money.
“At one point, he put six TVs above the urinals in the men’s bathroom,” Billman says. “And I remember this was a big thing, because around the time he was putting these in, a couple staff members’ checks were bouncing. So it was like, where’s the planning?”
Billman also said Miller’s vision of a more formal restaurant sometimes clashed with their actual customers.
“We had negative reviews about it early on, about kids being turned away because of the dress code,” Billman says. “I remember very specifically, a day where we were just trying to fill the doors at this time, Tom turned away a 12-top party because they just weren’t dressed how he wanted. It’s ironic to me from a management perspective, because it’s like, we need money right now, and you just turned away a 12-top because they’re dressed a certain way.”
Meanwhile, both Billman and Wasco McCarthy described an atmosphere of declining food quality as a result of Bulle not paying its vendors on time.
“We were having to do cash on delivery situations, where vendors wouldn’t take his checks because his checks to the vendors would bounce as well,” Billman says.
“We were going from Ora King salmon in the dry agers, dry aging fish — which no one in the Central Valley was doing that — which is some of the best quality salmon you can get in the country, and now we’re serving farm-raised salmon from Canada coming in a bag that’s already fileted. Before we were breaking down whole fish. You’re going from very high quality to I could just go buy this at Save Mart. And that’s not what I signed on for, I’m not learning anything at that point.”
Miller, in his initial statement to Fresnoland last week, had promised a new menu, saying, “We have since brought in an experienced consultant group. Including a Michelin chef and a very well known chef from Fresno with over 40 years of running one of the most successful restaurant groups in Fresno history.”
Bulle’s new chef, per the report in The Fresno Bee, turned out to be Valentino Lee, the former proprietor of the TNT Cheesesteaks pop-up, with experience at Pismo’s, The Lime Lite, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and the former Slates. But Lee’s tenure turned out to be even more short-lived than Wasco McCarthy’s, with the Bee noting in an update to their initial story, “After this story published, Lee reached out to The Bee and said he was stepping down from his position with Bulle.”
The new menu the restaurant posted over the weekend looks similar to Bulle’s menu from July in many respects. Though notably gone are some of the more expensive products – a beef tartare instead of an Ora salmon tartare on the cold appetizers side, and the “truffle uni rice” in the hot apps replaced with pappardelle pasta, served with beurre blanc and chives.
The entrées section had undergone the biggest revamp, with no more Ora King Salmon, dry-aged local duck, pork tomahawk, Ibérico pork secreto (which I raved about in our own review), wagyu beef coulotte, or cote de boeuf prime ribeye. In their place were grilled tiger shrimp, Australian wagyu ribeye, grilled salmon, and grilled chicken (served with cherry tomatoes, swiss chard, and baby carrots), among a few other new items.
“How can you call yourself ‘farm-to-table’ or ‘sustainable’ when you’re using fish from Alaska and beef from the Midwest?” Wasco McCarthy told Fresnoland in an email August 24th. “There’s great fish and meat right here in California. I was getting it when I was there, but due to the vendors not wanting to work with us or accounts being on hold due to lack of payments, they had to source cheap easy products.”
As of press time, Bulle was still accepting reservations.
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