This is the third in a three-part series exploring the owner of Boston Market and his long, complex track record of legal filings and unpaid bills.
Monday: Inside the chaotic world of the owner of Boston Market.
Tuesday: Corner Bakery employees thought they had a savior. They got something else.
Today: For Boston Market, another ugly chapter in a long and infamous history.
Laura Huynh was nervous about her Boston Market catering order. So, the day before her daughter’s graduation party in June, she called the catering department just in case. She was assured the order was fine.
Her daughter loves Boston Market, and Huynh placed an order for 50 people, using gift cards she bought to pay for the bill. The order was supposed to arrive by 2 p.m. When it hadn’t shown up 30 minutes later, she called catering. The store, she was told, refused the order. When Huynh called the store, the assistant manager blamed the problem on the catering department.
Aunts and uncles bought pizza and chicken so there was something for guests to eat while Huynh spent her time on the phone, mostly on hold. The entire episode left her daughter in tears. “She cried the whole day,” Huynh said. “There wasn’t anything I could do.”
Over the past three years, since Boston Market was sold to franchisee Jay Pandya, the brand has alienated a long list of vendors, landlords and employees. But as its decline devolved into a downward spiral this year, customers like Huynh have been alienated, too, citing numerous issues from catering problems to food quality.
Many of the same issues seen with Pandya’s franchised restaurants and then with Corner Bakery are clear with Boston Market. More than 130 lawsuits have been filed against the chain under its current ownership, mostly over broken contracts and unpaid bills, from everyone from a social media influencer who wasn’t paid her $8,500 bill to US Foods, which claims to be behind $11 million in payment. That doesn’t include countless numbers of landlords who didn’t get their rent.
Employees say they had to negotiate steep discounts before the company would consider paying a bill. Operators in the store say they were required to hit cost targets many felt impossible or would hurt service at the chain.
Restaurants appear to be closing regularly, with at least two dozen locations closed this year and others closing all the time. Complaints about pay run rampant, featured in a trio of lawsuits as well as two dozen complaints to state regulators in California. New York regulators are also investigating the company. New Jersey last week allowed stores there to reopen after Boston Market paid workers $600,000 in back wages.
But while each of Pandya’s previous holdings had an end game—either the sale of the restaurants, termination by the franchisor or a forced bankruptcy by a lender—this one seemingly has no end in sight.
Many longtime industry observers wonder if this is the final act in the chain’s long and infamous history. “Their operations and lack of money, lack of intent or money to pay bills, has just imploded the brand’s operation and reputation,” said John Gordon, a restaurant consultant out of San Diego.
This story, and this series, was compiled with numerous interviews with employees, lawyers and others. We also combed through social media reviews and legal filings, and reviewed hundreds of pages of legal documents from dozens of lawsuits and other legal filings. We have also conducted multiple interviews with Pandya himself.
The fire sale
Boston Market’s history is pockmarked with bankruptcy, restructuring, mass closures and general decline. It was founded in a Boston suburb in the 1980s and exploded in the ‘90s as its executives bet that Americans would choose its combination of rotisserie chicken and homestyle sides over their home-cooked dinners.
They bet wrong. The brand, which grew to 1,200 units, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and closed 300 restaurants. It was sold to McDonald’s, which was more interested in the chain’s real estate and converted as many as 30% of the chain’s locations before selling the brand to Sun Capital in 2007.
The private equity firm simply kept it operating over the next 13 years as it slowly declined. By 2019, the chain avoided a second bankruptcy with an out-of-court restructuring that included the closure of 45 restaurants. And that was before the pandemic.
All of which is to say that Jay Pandya took over a troubled chain when he bought it for what sources say was a “fire sale” price in April of 2020, a month after widespread shutdowns hammered the restaurant business. Employees knew the brand had problems. “We knew it was a struggle,” one said.
Under Pandya, however, the chain drastically cut costs. Store managers were required to slash the cost of goods sold, including food and labor, to 52% to 54% of what was forecasted, targets many found difficult to achieve at best, according to multiple sources. And it caused problems when the store received unexpected orders.
One restaurant in Illinois received an order for 90 pot pies from a local retailer for an employee event. That order drained the restaurant of its pot pies, but the general manager wasn’t allowed to buy additional supply for regular customers.
At the corporate level, Pandya largely drove strategy. Boston Market, like Corner Bakery, wouldn’t pay bills without steep discounts, requiring deals to be negotiated down to 30% of their value before payment would be approved, according to interviews with sources.
To make these arguments, according to sources, Pandya would insist that the work was not done to standard and would refuse to pay the bill.
Corporate staff were left to find ways around company requirements, such as convincing ownership that a bill had to be paid immediately. And employees left in droves. Over time, employees did work for both chains. “Everybody started with one job, and then had more than one job,” one employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It was like a comedy of errors.”
Workers also wondered where the money was going. Employees didn’t have access to profit-and-loss statements. But, one worker said, “I knew what the sales were. They weren’t astronomical. But they weren’t horrific. And there were improvements. We wondered why we couldn’t pay all these vendors.”
Inside the restaurants, meanwhile, general managers often used cash from the restaurants to pay vendors for certain services, such as utility bills or waste oil disposal, according to employees. But unpaid bills would leave the stores without basic services. Some stores sold canned soda because the company that provided CO2 for the soda fountain stopped refilling the tanks.
Others would go without trash pickup for weeks at a time. At a location in Ohio, according to employees, a garbage company repossessed a restaurant’s trash bin. The trash instead piled up outside, attracting mice and maggots before Boston Market finally had it hauled away and got a new garbage company.
Boston Market locations, such as this one in California, have been closing all year. | Photo by Lisa Jennings
Honey Boo Boo and the lawsuits
Not paying the bills didn’t stop Boston Market from taking some initiatives. The company added a Nashville Hot Crispy Chicken Sandwich and a Nashville Hot Rotisserie Chicken Meal in 2021 and then rotisserie nuggets last year, the latter of which was largely at Pandya’s urging, and with help from those at Corner Bakery.
And Pandya himself has insisted the chain is testing rotisserie chicken wings and will debut them some time in the near future.
He also overrode objections early last year and signed a marketing deal with Alana Thompson, better known as Honey Boo Boo from the old TLC reality television program “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” In the deal, Thompson would make appearances at Boston Market locations and would promote the chain on her social channels.
Thompson greeted fans at an Atlanta Boston Market last August and had other appearances planned. She posted videos of herself trying the rotisserie nuggets. One month later, Thompson was threatening a lawsuit against the company over an unpaid, $8,500 bill. “Unfollow them and don’t support them,” she posted, “they screw kids over.”
Lawsuits against the chain have come fast and furious. Restaurant Business counted more than 130 in federal court and a selection of state courts since Pandya took ownership. While some of those lawsuits are typical of those filed against restaurant chains, including slip-and-fall suits, most of them are over breach of contract, lease issues or other situations involving unpaid bills.
The legal action comes from all kinds of companies, including a landscaper in Florida, a plumber in Pittsburgh and a construction company in Delaware. But most of the lawsuits come from landlords over unpaid leases.
One of the most notable lawsuits was filed early this year by the landlord of Boston Market’s Golden, Colo., headquarters, over $420,000 in unpaid rent. The landlord sued again in February, claiming Boston Market would not vacate the offices. In May, a judge awarded the landlord $590,000. State officials also seized the offices in May over unpaid taxes, according to the Denver Post.
The company has been sued by both McDonald’s and Burger King, for instance. In Massachusetts, McDonald’s sued Boston Market over a breach of a lease agreement on two locations on the Massachusetts Turnpike. In one, Boston Market didn’t keep a restaurant open. In another, it didn’t pay its lease.
Burger King has also sued the brand, which had subleased a location near the Miami International Airport and apparently didn’t pay its $12,500-per-month lease payments to the burger chain, according to a lawsuit.
Pandya, for his part, has said that Boston Market has worked with vendors to resolve any unpaid bills. “Our goal with any vendor, if rightfully owed, should be paid,” he said. “We just want you to work with us.”
The biggest lawsuit is from US Foods, which sued the company in July over $11 million in unpaid bills. The big distributor stopped deliveries of food to Boston Market restaurants, which forced general managers to grocery shop to keep stores open.
Pandya in multiple interviews said that the distributor planned to restart those deliveries. But as of press time, Boston Market has yet to respond to that lawsuit. US Foods refused comment for this story and refused to confirm or deny whether it had restarted deliveries, citing its lawsuit against the chain.
One Boston Market employee did say that some trucks come from US Foods to deliver a limited selection of certain items, including chicken and sweet potatoes. But the trucks do not come often enough to keep restaurants open all the time. And, sources said, Boston Market has to pay for the food in advance before companies will ship the food.
“We’re only getting whatever they can that can help them keep the restaurant open.” —Edgwardo Williams, former Boston Market employee
Unpaid workers and no food
For Edgwardo Williams, the first sign of trouble at Boston Market came on Thanksgiving 2021. Williams had worked for the fast-casual chain for 13 years, and was an assistant general manager at its Pembroke Pines, Fla., location. He liked the job, liked the company. But that Thanksgiving, he knew it was not the same.
“We take pre-orders before Thanksgiving,” Williams said. “And we usually have an allotted number of orders. That year we didn’t. People were still ordering, even during Thanksgiving. They were still ordering food we don’t have. That was terrible.”
“You’ve got people ordering $600, $700, $800 worth of food. Thousands. And you don’t have it for them,” he said.
The Boston Market Thanksgiving incident angered customers from California to Florida, who ordered meals for the holiday that stores couldn’t fulfill because the company neglected to turn off orders after they reached their limit. Working there in the year and a half since has been increasingly difficult, Williams said, as the company forced cost cuts at the store level.
This spring, his restaurants stopped getting consistent food deliveries. The restaurant would get chickens delivered, and workers would marinate them on-site. But general managers would source almost everything else themselves. They’d leave in the morning, taking cash from the register to shop at Walmart for enough food to open the doors.
Several sources say, for instance, that the brand used cheap, instant mashed potatoes. When the store ran out of products, it typically just stopped selling them. If they ran out of too much product, they closed the doors.
“We’re only getting whatever they can that can help them keep the restaurant open,” Williams said. Pandya himself has acknowledged that restaurants might be getting some food from Costco. But he largely blamed it on general managers working to keep costs low.
Many workers, meanwhile, either were let go or stopped coming in after paychecks stopped arriving, typically leaving restaurants with one or two workers on hand to serve customers.
Williams’ last payday was slated to be July 21. That day came and went, and he received no paycheck, with the next payday set for Aug. 25. He said his complaints to the company went unanswered.
So, Williams stopped coming in. “I haven’t been there,” he said. “I stopped going because they haven’t paid me.”
Jeremy Dukeshire started working with Boston Market in Toledo, Ohio, in May and ran the store for a time. His first paycheck bounced. Many later paychecks showed up late. When he left the company last month, he said, Boston Market didn’t give him his last paycheck. He estimates he is owed $2,500 between that and the bounced check. “He has caused a lot of financial burdens on me and my family,” Dukeshire said.
Employee anger grew so much in the spring that workers openly questioned Pandya over a corporate email chain before it was ultimately shut down, according to several sources.
For a time, the company was even paying some workers cash or with the mobile payment app Zelle, according to multiple sources. Meanwhile, Boston Market is advertising job openings for positions such as assistant general manager or delivery driver. But in each case the jobappnetwork.com link doesn’t work, giving users a “404 not found” page.
Complaints about unpaid wages at Boston Market locations have been filed in several states. More than two dozen wage complaints have been filed with California’s Department of Industrial Relations just this year, according to a search of that agency’s website. Complaints have also been filed in Massachusetts and Texas, according to records in those states. And the New York Department of Labor is investigating complaints in that state.
There are at least three lawsuits filed over unpaid wages, one in a state court in California and two in federal court, in Arizona and Massachusetts. They all allege that pay for many workers stopped in May, with pay either delayed or not provided at all.
New Jersey then forced 27 restaurants to be closed temporarily over unpaid wages. The state fined the company $2.6 million, including $600,000 in unpaid wages. The state ended its stop-work order last week, however, and restaurants have been reopening in recent days.
Pandya said that employees are getting paid. “Every employee has been paid,” he said. “No employee has not been paid.” He said he was working with state officials in New Jersey on the issue in that state.
Pandya said that Boston Market licensed all its locations and is not responsible for paying workers, though he would not provide the name of the New Jersey licensee. Boston Market has been a mostly company-operated brand. The state of New Jersey specifically mentions Pandya, saying that findings of the investigation were sent to the company’s headquarters in Colorado.
He also said he hadn’t seen lawsuits in Arizona or California. And he said that the complaints about unpaid workers could be due to closed locations.
Multiple employees in New Jersey confirmed they’ve now been paid. “Finally,” one said. And situations do appear to have changed in recent days. We spoke with another worker in the Midwest who said that the company plans to issue pay through direct deposit for the first time in weeks.
“There might be a few pockets where the Boston Market brand is stronger, but it’s not going to be but a shadow of even its former declined self.” —Restaurant consultant John Gordon
The last stand of Boston Market?
It’s difficult for customers not to notice all this. Complaints about the chain run rampant on social media and other sites. Stories appear in local newspapers and on local television.
The Better Business Bureau lists 186 complaints against the company over the last three years, including nearly four dozen this year alone. By comparison, the most among a selection of similarly sized chains was Krystal, at 114 complaints. The other chains we analyzed had between zero and 37 BBB complaints.
Many of these complaints are over a change in food, as well as issues of weak refunds on mobile or catering problems.
That’s in addition to the frequency of ugly reviews on Yelp, Facebook and other sites. We looked at the Yelp scores for 57 Boston Market locations in the Northeast. All but seven of them had one-star reviews, almost all of which listed differences in food quality or a lack of food items. There are numerous Yelp reviews featuring posts of closed restaurants, with health department or eviction notices on the front door. The top two Facebook posts feature dozens of customer complaints.
For a brand that has struggled for as long as Boston Market has, such brutal reviews and customer problems can be a deep hole that can be difficult to get out of.
New management might be able to work hard to fix things, but changing consumer perception can be difficult. This is particularly true for a chain like Boston Market that’s been on such a long, downward trajectory. “There might be a few pockets where the Boston Market brand is stronger, but it’s not going to be but a shadow of even its former declined self,” restaurant consultant John Gordon said.
Landlords might be willing to lease to Boston Market under new management, said Barry Wolfe, a senior director with real estate investment firm Marcus & Millichap. “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible,” he said. “Landlords are like Americans, and they tend to have short memories. If you treat people right, show you’re serious and turn things around, it’s certainly possible.” But he said it would likely take new management and ownership. And some of the more desirable sites will likely be gone.
As for what happens now, that remains unclear. Boston Market has a lot of lawsuits, many of which it hasn’t responded to. There are liens on Pandya’s properties, according to property records. The US Foods lawsuit, filed more than a month ago, does not even list an attorney for the company or for Pandya, though he promised that the response would answer every question in that case and many others.
Pandya has argued that US Foods overcharged Boston Market. But he had yet to file a response as of Wednesday morning.
One former restaurant restructuring specialist suggested that a trio of the chain’s unsecured creditors could force a bankruptcy filing. Pandya said he has no intention of taking that step himself.
He said Boston Market has fallen on some “tough times.” But he insists the brand will come back. “The food is great and will always stay wonderful and great,” he said. “We need transactions. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of negativity around. We’ve got to get all this negativity out of here.”
In the meantime, stores keep closing. Two of the three stores closest to Laura Huynh, in Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach, Calif., have closed this year. She still has all those gift cards that she bought to get the catering order. She doesn’t know whether the company charged them. Even if they didn’t, Huynh doesn’t know whether she will even use them.
It’s too bad, she said. “There are a lot of people that love them,” Huynh said. “My kids love their food.”