Hospitality has a wage theft problem
The restaurant chain that lost twenty-one tribunal claims – and didn’t pay a single one. Words by Emiliano Mellino and Ero Partsakoulaki
Good morning and welcome to Vittles. A quick reminder that the Food in Print Fair is just four days away - you can find all the information about the fair here. Remember, it is completely free to attend - no tickets needed!
In today’s special newsletter, we are partnering with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) on a story about the non-payment of employment tribunal judgments in London restaurants, and why this is rife in the UK hospitality sector. In particular, this newsletter covers one restaurant that had twenty-one employment tribunal decisions go against it between 2021 and 2025 and didn’t pay out on a single one.
We’re delighted to be partnering with TBIJ, which has been one of the best investigative outlets in the UK over the past fifteen years, especially on the subject of food – from delivery work to agricultural labour. In 2022 and 2023, TBIJ journalist Emiliano Mellino led a series of nationally significant investigations on seasonal and migrant workers on British farms, which uncovered exploitation, terrible living conditions, wage theft and illegal fees. This reporting led the UN special rapporteur to say he feared there was forced labour on British farms. As much as we urge you to read today’s article, we also hope you check out the back catalogue of TBIJ’s work on food and labour, which you can find at the end of this piece.
The restaurant chain that lost twenty-one tribunal claims – and didn’t pay a single one.
Tayla Lewthwaite had £1.90 in her bank account on the day in 2023 that she was evicted.
She should have had a lot more. Lewthwaite worked as a duty manager at a restaurant in Kew called Antipodea, a self-defined ‘Aussie brasserie’ that opened in 2017, capitalising on London’s obsession with brunch culture. Lewthwaite tells us that, while working at Antipodea, she endured several months when she was paid less than she’d earned. Exasperated at her treatment, she eventually quit. After she left, most of her final month’s wages never appeared.
For weeks, she chased it up with the owner, an Australian businessman called Jason Wells. At first, he told her she’d get her money ‘the next day’. Then he stopped responding altogether. With her wages not forthcoming, Tayla was kicked out of her rental property and ended up homeless; she needed the help of a charity to get back on her feet. Before she quit, Tayla, 32, had confronted Wells. ‘I very clearly said, “If you do not pay us, I’ll just take you to court,”’ she tells us. ‘He laughed in our faces and said, “Fine. Then take me to court.”’ To this day, Antipodea has not paid her the more than £2,600 it owes her.
Wells’s reaction might seem reckless, but it appears he already knew he could get away with non-payment of wages. Between 2021 and 2025, the company that ran his Antipodea restaurant chain lost twenty-one claims at the employment tribunal. We understand that the company hasn’t paid any of the sums ordered by those tribunals. This is alarmingly common in the UK: last year, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reported that more than 5,000 people who won tribunal claims have not been paid what they are owed – even after turning to the government for support. Since 2016, the government has been asked for help in recovering awards and settlements totalling more than £46 million, over three quarters of which remains unpaid.
The non-payment of tribunal awards is particularly common in the hospitality sector. ‘It’s the wild west,’ says Bryan Simpson, the hospitality lead for Unite, the UK’s largest private sector trade union. ‘It’s the lowest paid, the most precarious … of any sector by a country mile.’
Government data shows that hospitality is the sector with the highest number of breaches of minimum-wage law, and Simpson tells us that Unite has spent thousands trying to get bosses to pay what they’ve been ordered to by tribunals. TBIJ’s own reporting backs this up – most people who spoke to us as part of our investigations into the tribunal system worked in restaurants, cafes or bars. The employers we heard about included the director of Peckham Levels, who sacked a whistleblower, a restaurant-owning Reform councillor in Portsmouth who lost three tribunal claims without paying a single one, and the director of the Crussh cafe chain who openly gloated that he would not be handing over the £30,000 payout ordered by the courts. Meanwhile, in September of last year, The Londoner reported on Victor Garvey’s Michelin-starred restaurant SOLA, which did not pay out £16,000 to a former employee after a tribunal decision went against it.
All of these employers have benefitted from a failing enforcement system that allows hospitality owners to break the law repeatedly and simply ignore their punishment. ‘I was quite naive in thinking the tribunal system would work,’ Mark Leonard, the father of a former Antipodea employee, tells us. ‘Only in digging further have I discovered that the system is broken.’
In 2009, Jason Wells moved to London from Melbourne and soon after founded the Brew cafe chain, which quickly grew to several branches around South-West London. Six years later, together with Marc Shimmel, a former WeWork investor, he founded Antipodea. (Schimmel has not been an Antipodea investor since 2019.)
Antipodea was regularly featured in the press, including Time Out, The Londonist and Eater London, while Wells appeared in magazines showing off his home in Richmond or sharing insights into where he draws inspiration from as a successful businessman. ‘I’m ... driven by my staff,’ he noted in an interview with hospitality trade publication The Caterer. ‘Being able to treat them well is very important to me.’
But interviews with several of his former staff and analysis of hundreds of pages of tribunal and company-insolvency documents tell a different story. They show that, over the years, Wells has withheld tens of thousands of pounds that he owed employees. Furthermore, he pocketed hundreds of thousands from businesses that eventually went insolvent. One chef formerly employed by Wells alleges that, after the pandemic, he worked for three months without a day off. When he eventually resigned, the company failed to pay his last month’s wages and his unused holiday allowance. This was a common practice at Wells’s company, according to a former senior manager: ‘[Wells] knew that if he didn’t pay people, [he’d get away with it]. That’s why he was so comfortable doing it. The company culture was just really toxic.’
One of the reasons for this is that even if a worker wins a tribunal claim, they have no guarantee that their bosses will pay up. Since 2023, Mark Leonard, 64, and his daughter have tried everything to get the nearly £3,000 the employment tribunal ordered Antipodea to pay her. When the company refused to pay, Mark and his daughter approached a government enforcement scheme and their local MP, Munira Wilson. Wells dodged every attempt to enforce the judgment. Mark wasn’t ready to give up, so in early 2024 he started picketing the Kew and Richmond branches of Antipodea, handing out flyers that read: ‘[Antipodea] has a history of not paying its staff … My daughter has been waiting over a year for her final month’s wages.’
Antipodea called the police on him, but what Mark was doing was completely legal. As he told the police, it was Wells, not he, who had broken the law. Mark felt that Wells had stolen money from his family. ‘I didn’t believe that was right or fair,’ he says. ‘My overriding thought was he shouldn’t get away with this.’
At one point, Mark spoke to Wells on the phone, hoping to convince him to pay his daughter. ‘He ranted for some considerable time trying to tell me that he was the injured party and everybody else was at fault: the government because of their Covid regulations, his staff who were ripping him off, banks … it was quite something,’ Mark says.
Mark and his daughter also hired high court enforcement officers (a role akin to that of a bailiff, but with greater powers), but soon discovered that the company that owned Antipodea, STR 48, held no assets that could be repossessed. A report by one officer describes how they went to a couple of Wells’s restaurants to enforce an award, only to be shown documents detailing how the leases and physical assets were owned by other entities: STR 49 and STR 50.
Michael Jackson, a veteran high court enforcement officer, tells us that strategies like these are particularly common in the hospitality sector, which has a higher proportion of smaller companies. In the vast majority of cases, it is not possible to bring a tribunal claim against a director or owner, which means that claims tend to be made against companies instead. However, there are several strategies that companies use to avoid paying.
One strategy is known as phoenixing, which describes the process by which a company is either liquidated or dissolved and then reopened under a different name. In many instances, phoenixing is completely legal, but it can be used as a way for owners and directors to evade accountability. TBIJ spoke to a woman who won a 2025 tribunal claim for nearly £700 in unpaid wages against Flows, a cafe in Llandeilo, Wales. Three weeks after the ruling, the company was dissolved, leaving the woman with no way to claim the money. But the cafe had continued to operate: the woman discovered that the owner had registered a new company less than a month after she had started legal proceedings. This company had the same directors and owners as the previous one, and the cafe kept the same name throughout. Although it’s unclear whether this company was started because of the legal proceedings, it means that, since the cafe is on paper now run by a different company, high court enforcement officers couldn’t repossess any assets.
Another legal way of working around tribunal decisions is to employ workers through companies separate from the ones that hold assets or cash. This is what Antipodea did. Government records show that Wells held a web of companies, with names ranging from STR 44 to STR 54. Most of these companies filed dormant accounts, so their purpose is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that from 2018, Wells’s companies racked up more than £10 million in debt as well as a string of insolvencies and tribunal claims. In total, businesses owned by Wells have lost twenty-four employment cases. Company representatives did not turn up to any of the hearings to defend themselves against the claims. We could only confirm one instance where the company sent a written response to a tribunal on time.
When his Brew chain went insolvent, the administrators discovered that Wells had personally borrowed nearly £600,000 from the company that he hadn’t paid back. Liquidators working on the ongoing insolvency process of STR 48 – the second time the Antipodea chain has gone through administration (the chain had previously been owned by Antipodea Operations Ltd, which went insolvent in 2019) – have also said they suspect there could be ‘an overdrawn director’s loan account’ and ‘potential misuse of government-backed support schemes’, although no findings have been made and the liquidators’ investigation continues.
Those insolvency proceedings, which kicked off in June 2024, brought some good news for workers who had brought tribunal claims against Wells’s companies: the government’s redundancy service paid some, though not all, of the money they’d been awarded (there are caps on the wages or holiday pay they cover, while compensation isn’t covered at all). In some cases, this pay out came years after employees had won their original tribunal claims, but to date, only twelve former Antipodea employees, who won cases as far back as 2021, have claimed money this way.
The liquidation of STR 48 seems to be the end of the road for Wells, even though his wife continued to briefly operate one of the Antipodea branches under a different company. Fittingly, she also faced a tribunal claim in September of last year for unpaid wages – and lost. All branches of Antipodea have now closed. In July 2024, Wells was banned by the government from being a company director for his conduct in relation to a construction company he owned, Ironbark Design and Construct. This was followed by a bankruptcy order in February 2025. Wells is now listed by the government as a tax defaulter to the sum of £150,000, a fraction of the total debts his companies have racked up.
But the question remains as to why the system allowed Wells to spend years running businesses that persistently underpaid staff and ignored court judgments. A government spokesperson told us in a statement that they have already allocated ‘£25 million in funding to tackle the misuse of phoenix companies’. The money will be given over the next five years and will fund a fifty-person taskforce in the Insolvency Service to investigate directors who liquidate companies to evade debts. But it’s worth emphasising that this approach will not ensure that workers, such as those at Antipodea, are paid when the company is solvent but holds assets elsewhere.
A group of MPs led by Labour’s Andy McDonald and also including representatives from the Green Party and Your Party has recognised these gaps in enforcement and are now calling for changes, including giving the government the power to pursue company directors whose companies ignore tribunal judgments.
For Bryan Simpson from Unite, the problem within hospitality runs deeper. The government, like society more broadly, treats the sector’s workers with neglect – even Unite has only started organising hospitality workers in the last decade. But it is starting to see results, he says, winning millions of pounds for workers through campaigns and strikes, and helping to strengthen laws around tipping.
‘I have absolutely no faith in the legal system to achieve what is needed to win even individual rights for hospitality workers,’ he says. ‘But there is a major enforcement mechanism which wins – and it’s called unionisation.’
What Next?
In March, more than thirty MPs signed an early day motion calling for ‘a more proactive and transparent [tribunal] enforcement regime’. If your MP has not signed the motion, you can get in touch and ask them to add their name to it.
Today, the government launches a new labour-enforcement body called the Fair Work Agency. Among other things, it will have the responsibility for enforcing tribunal awards. However, questions remain around its funding and powers.
If you won a tribunal claim against Antipodea and are still owed money, you can contact the Redundancy Payments Service.
If you have any more information on restaurants avoiding tribunal payments, please get in touch with Vittles (vittlespitches@gmail.com) and TBIJ (emilianomellino@tbij.com)
Further Reading
Thousands of Rogue Bosses Have Failed to Pay Tribunal Awards: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-10-02/revealed-thousands-of-rogue-bosses-have-failed-to-pay-tribunal-awards
How British Farms Run On Exploitation: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-03-27/they-treat-you-like-an-animal-how-british-farms-run-on-exploitation
Migrant Fruit Pickers Charged Thousands of Illegal Fees to Work on UK Farms: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-05-27/migrant-fruit-pickers-charged-thousands-in-illegal-fees-to-work-on-uk-farms
This is How People Picking Your Vegetables Have to Live: https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-04-13/its-almost-the-same-as-living-on-the-street-this-is-how-people-picking-your-vegetables-have-to-live
Credits
Emiliano Mellino is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in migrant and worker rights. His investigations have uncovered widespread exploitation of gig economy, care and seasonal agricultural workers, as well as the failure of the state to enforce employment rights.
Ero Partsakoulaki is a reporter and fact checker. Her work has appeared in outlets across the USA, the UK and Greece.
Such important work, such important publishing. Vittles just gets better and better. Respect.
This exact situation has happened to me twice. Once the owner fled the country with everybody's money and unpaid business rates. The other, the owner was a spivvy little conman who played shell game with the company owning the restaurant. I'm still out of pocket £800 from that one (which isn't ideal, given my husband just lost THEIR job and I work minimum wage). So others weren't paid over a thousand.