Real-life hamburglar George Calombaris has *lip quiver* opened up about *bites lip* how hard it was for him *gulp* when he was underpaying his staff millions of dollars.
The former celebrity chef and founding member of the since-collapsed Made Establishment restaurant group went on the You Cannot Be Serious podcast to bare the void where his soul should be to two absolute fuckwit white dudes in their 70s.
“It was brutal and I cried a lot,” the dancing toilet plunger said.
“I probably should have opened up more. I was trying to fix it all behind a closed door and I was literally fist-punching myself internally and emotionally.”
He also told the hosts was an “emotional wreck” and drank a lot.
To refresh everyone’s memory, George first Calembarrassed himself in 2015 when the Fair Work Ombudsman warned Made Establishment that an employee at its fanciest Melbourne restaurant, the Press Club, had reported being underpaid. The group then self-reported and paid $2.6 million back to ripped-off employees. But wouldn’t you know, that wasn’t the full story.
The FWO investigated the group’s Press Club, Gazi and three Hellenic Republic restaurants after the $2.6 million payment, and in 2017 ordered Made Establishment to pay back 515 current or former employees $7.8 fucking million. It was also fined $200,000.
The hollow profiterole then spent a couple of years trying to rebrand all of his restaurants. The group went from hanging chips on tiny washing lines to overpriced schnitties. Eventually they all lost so much money that the group collapsed. He also lost his job as TV’s third nipple when the Masterchef judges couldn’t reach a commercial agreement.
On the podcast he said that wage theft is rife within the hospitality, which it is, and that his name was simply the one everyone ran with.
“I became this poster boy as the wage thief. It punched us right in the face,” he said. Not a fist-punch this time?
What about those 515 people who couldn’t make the financial decisions they were entitled to at the time they were entitled to make them?
Wage theft is absolutely rife in the industry. People are exploited every day and that needs to change. But maybe if you’re one of the country’s highest profile chefs you should set a fucking example. Pretty sure if you caught one of your servers pinching cash from the till they’d lose their job, hey.
