The Celebrity Chef Who Filed For Bankruptcy After Being Sued By Over 150 Former Employees

Celebrity chefs are no strangers to getting in trouble with the law. Guy Fieri was once sued by the winner of his Food Network series, "Guy's Chance of a Lifetime," over post-show compensation issues. And who can forget Martha Stewart's scandalous stint behind bars, which consequently led her to expose the terrible food served in prison? Another notable case involving a celebrity chef that intrigued many people was the one about Michelin-star restaurateur Geoffrey Zakarian, famous for his appearances on the Food Network shows "Iron Chef America" and "Chopped." Zakarian's case was deemed controversial as he was the subject of a lawsuit filed by over 150 of his former employees. Adding to the mess was his swift decision to file for bankruptcy to dodge the class-action suit.

So, the story goes that the former workers of his Manhattan restaurant Country, which shut down in 2008, banded together and filed a suit to expose issues with the establishment's operations. Apart from allegedly falsifying documents, Zakarian's business purportedly treated the staff poorly by not paying for overtime work and even charging them for nonexistent family meals. Things got worse when Zakarian's ex-business partners got involved, backed the claims in the suit, and accused him of more shady practices, such as including his wife, Margaret Anne Williams, on the restaurant's payroll and underpaying taxes, among others.

Geoffrey Zakarian, whose last Food Network show got canceled in 2025, played his cards right when he got slapped with the class-action lawsuit. To avoid expending his energy on what could have been a draggy, million-dollar court battle, he filed for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, also referred to as liquidation bankruptcy. In simple terms, this meant telling the court he could not afford to pay his debts, and so the court had to look into his assets and sell off what could be sold to pay off his debts, all while clearing his credit card and medical bills. In his filing, he only listed his assets to be around $50,000, while his liabilities were at $1 million. The 152 complainants in the class-action suit were looking to get $1 million in damages and $250,000 in penalties.

The plaintiff's attorney was eager to move forward with the case, even though the bankruptcy filing put litigation on hold. Eventually, both parties settled for $200,000 in 2011. Amid all this, Zakarian denied all of the assertions made against him. In hindsight, the filing helped him resolve the class-action lawsuit even though it didn't really make sense for him to claim that he was broke, since he had other operational restaurants and was even renting a $3 million house in Greenwich, Connecticut, at the time, according to The New York Times.