Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, the iconic three-Michelin-star tasting restaurant helmed by chef César Ramirez, quietly ceased operations in July. The closing, which hasn’t been previously reported, comes amid an ugly legal battle between Ramirez and Brooklyn Fare’s owner, Moneer “Moe” Issa, that has stranded diners and cost the restaurant hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare is one of New York’s most hallowed culinary institutions. Guests book reservations months in advance and travel from around the world to experience Ramirez’s decadent menu, including Hokkaido uni with Australian black truffle, Norwegian langoustine, and ramp custard with foie gras. A corporate lawyer who lives in Los Angeles told Insider he had been ecstatic to snag a spot at the $430-a-head restaurant in July. “I had wanted to go to Chef’s Table for years,” he said. “I’d heard it’s the best dining experience in New York.”
But when the lawyer showed up for his reservation, he was shocked to learn that the restaurant was closed. Worse, nobody had bothered to inform him — or any of the other perplexed couples standing around that evening. All the flustered front-of-house staff could say was that the kitchen was “unsafe” to operate.
Over the past 14 years, Ramirez and Issa turned a tiny 18-seat counter restaurant in the back of a grocery store into one of the world’s most sought-after dining experiences. Originally located in the high-end Brooklyn Fare supermarket near downtown Brooklyn, the restaurant relocated in 2016 to the supermarket’s Hell’s Kitchen outpost. Ramirez, like so many chefs of his caliber, ran his kitchen with military-grade discipline. “He was quite frankly a culinary genius,” a former hospitality employee of the restaurant said. “But with his kind of perfectionism comes this complex of needing to have control.” Photographs were forbidden at the original venue and Ramirez inventoried silverware each night to ensure staff wasn’t stealing from the restaurant. Ramirez often joked that if employees wanted to “screw around,” then “they should go work at Per Se.” In 2022, Issa made Ramirez a partner in the restaurant.
With his kind of perfectionism comes this complex of needing to have control.A former employee at Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare
But beneath the restaurant’s pristine stainless-steel surface, chaos was brewing. Even in an industry known for hotheaded chefs, Ramirez had a reputation for being particularly tyrannical. Usually, his ire was directed at employees who bothered him with questions or spent too long lingering by customers after a course had been served. This past year, however, his partner, Issa, became the chef’s chief antagonist.
On July 24, Ramirez filed a complaint against Issa and the restaurant’s holding company, Manhattan Fare Corp, in which they were coowners, claiming damages in the tens of millions for breach of contract, unpaid wages, defamation, and more. According to the complaint, Ramirez says he was “arbitrarily terminated” on July 1 and locked out of the restaurant without warning. He claimed Issa abruptly shuttered the restaurant a mere hours before service, which meant canceling all reservations for that night and the coming weeks. Ramirez also accused Issa of having “withdrawn, diverted and misappropriated” $400,000 from the company. Ramirez’s lawyer wrote that in closing the restaurant, Issa had engaged in “chicanery” and “extensive misconduct.” Ramirez called for an injunction to allow him to reopen the restaurant and return as chef, which the court granted on August 16. As of publication, Ramirez had not responded to Insider’s request for comment.
Issa tells a different story. In an affidavit in response to Ramirez’s complaint, Issa states that he didn’t embezzle the $400,000, but rather “safeguarded the Company funds by removing them from the Company’s operating account.” According to a legal letter to Ramirez’s attorneys dated July 17, Issa discovered Ramirez had been taking bottles of the rare Burgundy wine Domaine de la Romanée-Conti — more than $30,000 worth — and loading them into a car driven by his wife under the cover of night. Along with the wine, Issa’s affidavit accuses Ramirez of spending months pilfering pots and pans, dishware, and even pieces of the oven, to the tune of more than $100,000 — though he estimates it could be up to $400,000. (Ramirez says in his July complaint that he was actually reclaiming property he had loaned the restaurant.)
The court documents, as well as interviews with more than 10 people associated with the restaurant who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional repercussions, depict a battle of egos between Issa and Ramirez. Who deserves credit for Chef’s Table’s success: the man who made the food or the man who built the restaurant? It has also reignited an all-too-common industry debate over just how much bad behavior ought to be tolerated in exchange for culinary perfection.
So far, it has been a lose-lose for everyone.
In 2009, the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-raised Issa opened his gourmet grocery store Brooklyn Fare in the borough’s Boerum Hill neighborhood. Though he had no restaurant experience — he had previously owned a Pepsi franchise — he had a vision for an in-house dining establishment that would showcase the quality of produce on offer at Brooklyn Fare. To do this, Issa recruited Ramirez, a Mexican-born, Chicago-raised, up-and-coming chef who had recently left David Bouley’s Tribeca restaurant, Bouley, to launch Bar Blanc in the West Village.
With Issa’s backing, the largely self-taught Ramirez began offering a seafood-focused tasting menu at a small counter inside the grocery store.
Their collaboration instantly attracted attention. In 2010, GQ touted it as “the most outrageously wonderful, unfathomably underpriced” — at least at the time — “virtually unattainable meal in New York.” Ramirez was hailed as a generational talent. By 2011, Chef’s Table had become one of only 138 restaurants worldwide to boast three Michelin stars. In New York today, there are only four others, all legendary temples of fine dining: Eleven Madison Park, Le Bernardin, Per Se, and Masa. This year, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare was the highest-ranked US restaurant on the 2023 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
Since it launched, Chef’s Table stood out for its simplicity. There was no overwrought decor or fancy showmanship as at Eleven Madison Park — just a counter, a chef, and his creations. “His food was so minimal, and nothing failed,” said one former employee, noting that Ramirez was a pioneer in sourcing rare ingredients like Chinese Kaluga Queen caviar long before other high-end restaurants ventured outside Russia.
He also quickly gained a reputation for being temperamental and difficult to work with. In 2010, the restaurant critic Joshua David Stein wrote a piece for New York Press accusing Ramirez of swearing and berating him for taking notes during the meal. Ramirez also accused the critic of stealing recipes. (Ramirez told Grub Street he didn’t remember the interaction, noting, “They put you on a pedestal, and then they wanna take you down.”) Then in 2014, some employees filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Ramirez made racist remarks against Asians and that he served the worst cuts of meat to Asian clients, calling them “shit people.” (Ramirez denied this to Eater at the time, saying: “How can I be racist against Asians? Eighty-five to 95% of our product comes from Asia.”) The former employees also claimed in the class-action suit that Ramirez withheld tips and refused to pay overtime; the parties reached an undisclosed settlement.
Despite all this, Issa stood by Ramirez, telling The Guardian at the time that the allegations were “by no means representative of the truth.” Ramirez had a tumultuous childhood and had cried to Issa about his past traumas, a person close to the restaurant said. In the early days, “César would brag about Mo” and how much he had done for him, calling him “his father, his brother,” one longtime employee said. Issa, himself an orphan, had “a soft spot” for Ramirez, the person close to the restaurant said. Plus, he had a hit on his hands, and he needed his star chef to stick around. After the class-action lawsuit, Ramirez “calmed down a little bit,” the person said.
But while some of the recent staff members Insider spoke with said they had mostly positive experiences with Ramirez, others said he was a nightmare to work with. A former hospitality employee said he was “a very paranoid person,” accusing people of trying to steal his recipes or spying on him for Issa. On one of the hospitality employee’s first days, she was taking notes about the menu when Ramirez walked over and angrily asked whether she was writing about him. After each service, he made staff inventory every piece of silverware in the restaurant because he was afraid employees were stealing from him. “The culture was very fearful,” the hospitality employee said. “Everyone was on edge all the time.”
Ramirez freaked out if his food wasn’t eaten the moment it hit the table, and employees knew not to linger after a course had been served. But during one service, an employee got waylaid by a customer, even though a new dish had just arrived. Out of politeness, he stayed to answer the guest’s questions. When he returned to the kitchen, Ramirez flew off the handle, screaming that the employee was trying to ruin his food, a person who witnessed the incident told Insider. “It was an open kitchen — the whole counter could see what was happening,” the person said. In front of everyone, Ramirez punched a wall.
One recent employee was making the most money he’d ever made, well over six figures, working at Chef’s Table — but even that wasn’t enough to keep him there. Multiple staffers said the turnover at Chef’s Table was among the highest they’d seen at a fine-dining restaurant. Staff meals didn’t exist, one said; they had to pay for their own food, usually at the grocery store. Another former employee, a pastry chef, said working under Ramirez for just a few months prompted her to leave fine dining altogether after 18 years in the industry. She said he regularly changed the dessert menu with just a few hours notice, leading her to rush through the grocery store to try to cobble together new ingredients from Brooklyn Fare. One day, she said, Ramirez told her he wanted her to prepare a coconut cake for dessert. She said that no coconut was available, and Ramirez flew into a rage. She listened in horror as he reamed her out in Spanish in front of her colleagues, calling her “coño” (derogatory slang for female genitalia) and “puta madre” (motherfucker). Ramirez, she said, didn’t know she understood Spanish.
“It was psychologically exhausting,” said a kitchen employee who lasted just six weeks. She said Ramirez constantly threatened to fire her if any small detail wasn’t to his liking. On one occasion, the chef was using a thermometer to cook vegetables for green oil, and she asked him what temperature he was trying to reach. He told her never to ask him questions again, she said. “He made me feel like I was trying to steal something.” Another ex-employee said Ramirez once screamed at him, inches from his face, spittle flying into the employee’s eyes and mouth, because he thought the employee had made noise during service. “He said he’d fuck me up if I continued to do this or threatened his livelihood,” he said.
Still, even after the class-action suit, Chef’s Table maintained its sterling reputation. In 2016, Eater raved that the newly relocated Chef’s table was “your four-star Per Se replacement.” The Opinionated About Dining organization voted Chef’s Table the No. 1 restaurant in the country in 2022 and 2023, and in 2023 The New York Times critic Pete Wells still had it ranked No. 6 on his list of New York City’s best restaurants. It remained profitable enough to overlook a lot of the hubbub, partly because of the low overhead costs. There were about 24 people working at the restaurant, including kitchen, wine, and front-of-house staff. Meanwhile, an Eleven Madison Park employee said that their restaurant employs 100 people or more. According to legal documents, Ramirez estimates that Chef’s Table earned profits of more than $5 million a year.
At the start of 2022, Issa decided to make Ramirez his partner. According to two people with knowledge, Ramirez was threatening to leave the restaurant if Issa didn’t give him an ownership stake. The chef had Issa “up against the wall,” one of these people said. At the same time, Issa knew they had a special thing going, and he didn’t want to lose Ramirez. “When you reach a certain success, the last thing you want is to disturb it and have it fall apart,” the person close to the restaurant said.
Issa took a 50% ownership stake in the company, named Manhattan Fare Corp, for himself. He split the remaining 50% equally between Ramirez and Ramirez’s wife, Adriana. Issa’s wife, Heidi, also became an employee of the company, with both Adriana and Heidi drawing salaries of $2,000 a week. “César’s wife was not working in the restaurant,” but Ramirez “wanted the cut for his wife as part of the partner agreement,” a person close to Issa said. As part of their ownership negotiations, Ramirez agreed to provide kitchenware and equipment to the restaurant as his capital contribution to the company, according to Issa’s affidavit.
But after Issa made Ramirez a partner, their relationship started to fall apart, the person close to the restaurant said. Ramirez became “insane to deal with,” the person said.
The chef was obsessed with making money, one long-term employee said. “Money is God to him,” the employee said. “He got very greedy. He got in over his head.”
The person close to the restaurant said Issa got into repeated verbal altercations with Ramirez because he thought the chef was undermining his authority. Issa felt Chef’s Table had been his vision, supported by his capital, and that Ramirez owed him for his career. After one fight in 2022, they didn’t speak for more than six months. The standoff took a toll on Ramirez’s morale — and his treatment of the staff.
Eventually, Ramirez had had enough, according to the complaint filed by the chef this July in Kings County Supreme Court. In January 2023, Ramirez told Issa he would be ending his employment at the end of the year to go out on his own, according to the complaint. At this point, the complaint says, Issa became “angry” and said he would close the restaurant once Ramirez left. The person close to the restaurant said Ramirez often threatened to quit and had never given Issa a definitive exit plan; regardless, Issa began looking for a new head chef.
Money is God to him. He got very greedy. He got in over his head.A long-term employee of Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare
Meanwhile, around March, Issa realized that kitchenware from the restaurant was missing, the person close to the restaurant said. He confronted Ramirez, who argued that the items belonged to him and were on loan to the company. Issa responded that they belonged to the company. “We never discussed this as a loan,” Issa claimed in his affidavit, nor was there documentation about a loan. Ramirez told Issa he would stop and bring everything back, the person close to the restaurant said.
Issa was close to a boiling point, but his attorney encouraged him to “take the emotion out of it,” the person said, and wait until he had found a replacement for Ramirez.
But things kept going missing. In the legal filings, Issa said that by July 1 he had obtained nearly 30 video recordings from security cameras, beginning in March, showing Ramirez “furtively” removing supplies including ovens and oven parts, pots, pans, and flatware, and “sneaking” small batches at night and loading them into a car driven by his wife. “You start watching the videos, and you start seeing him stuffing the bag with plastic cups and tomatoes,” the person close to the restaurant said. “Then he started to take parts of the oven, the handles off the grill, the frames.” Issa started interviewing staff about the missing items, according to a legal filing, including one staffer who claimed Ramirez had been responsible for the disappearance of $30,000 worth of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wine that had vanished the year before. To add insult to injury, Issa was told Ramirez had been bragging about it to the staff, a person close to the restaurant said.
On July 1, before Ramirez was set to take a vacation, he began asking employees to help load copper pans into boxes to take home with him, the longtime employee said. Issa found out what was happening, phoned Ramirez, and fired him on the spot, the person close to the restaurant said. Issa said “there’s only so much I’m going to take — I’m going to shut it down,” the person said. “The money wasn’t worth it.” Issa felt as if he had “no choice.”
Issa felt as though Ramirez had disrespected him, the person said. In 2019, Issa sold the chef an apartment in a building he owned in Clinton Hill, supposedly valued at $2.25 million, for a discounted price of $1.5 million, which the person close to the restaurant said Issa viewed as a solidification of their long-term commitment to each other. “Once he became a partner and started seeing the big money he became a totally different person,” the person close to the restaurant said. “It really is very hurtful when you treat someone so well.”
The sudden closing left the restaurant in the lurch. At the time, it had over a thousand $200 reservation deposits on file — $237,000 that needed to be returned immediately. Some diners weren’t informed their reservations had been canceled and traveled long distances only to be turned away. “Everybody was kind of off-balance,” the person close to the restaurant said. One guest who had flown in from Taiwan in July for his reservation arrived in New York only to be told, over text message, that his dinner the following week had been canceled because of “equipment issues.”
“They get away because they think that celebrity chefs are above the law and everyone must kiss up to them,” the man wrote in an angry comment on the restaurant’s Facebook page, which continues to erroneously list the restaurant as open. “Shame on them!”
For a few weeks, Issa and Ramirez tried to make things work by negotiating terms for Ramirez to return, the person close to the restaurant said, but when that failed, things got even uglier. On July 17, Issa sent a legal letter to Ramirez alleging theft of company property and accusing the chef of trying to poach current staff for Ramirez’s forthcoming solo venture. “He also has exposed the Company to potential liability for having kitchen staff work overtime without compensation along with consistently abusive behavior to restaurant staff and customers,” the letter said.
Ramirez responded by hitting Issa with a $25 million defamation claim as part of his July 24 complaint. Ramirez’s complaint notes that Issa’s letter containing “false and malicious statements” was shared with employees, friends, and acquaintances. “Your client threatened the life of Cesar, Adriana and his children. He told Cesar that he has him and Adriana followed,” Ramirez’s lawyer wrote to Issa’s lawyer on July 3, imploring them to make Issa “back off.”
“Moe never threatened César’s life, or his wife and children. Moe did threaten César with legal action and say he was going to call the police,” the person close to Issa said.
Issa filed a police report against Ramirez that Ramirez’s lawyers called an act of retaliation. The chef was arrested at his home on August 3 on suspicion of larceny, and his home was searched; he was released later that day.
Ramirez also alleged that Issa and his company Manhattan Fare Corp refused to pay him 17 months of wages — $12,757.00 a week — from February 2022 onward, in violation of New York labor law, in an amount totaling almost $900,000. Issa’s affidavit denied this, pointing out that Ramirez actually received significantly more than he would have been paid in the form of wages and profit distributions. In the first half of 2023, Issa’s affidavit claims, Ramirez was paid $52,000 in salary and more than $1.3 million in profit distributions.
Ramirez claims Issa has caused him severe monetary damage by unnecessarily shuttering the restaurant, in which Ramirez and his wife remain 50% shareholders. He noted that being closed means the restaurant loses at least $45,000 to $55,000 a night, and in his complaint, he called for Issa to immediately reopen the restaurant and reinstate him as chef. “Once these customers are lost, they can never be retrieved,” Ramirez said in his affidavit, calling it imperative that Issa instantly grant him access to the restaurant and “not interfere” with its operation.
“Ramirez’ application for a court order to reopen the Company’s restaurant is unworkable for many reasons,” Issa’s lawyers responded. The restaurant “has no supplies and no cooks, waitstaff or other necessary employees. They have no cash to finance the reopening and not enough kitchenware to replace the items taken.” The court appeared to disagree; the judge sided with Ramirez, granting his motion on August 16.
For now, the restaurant remains closed, though there’s nothing on the website announcing it. Ramirez took over the Chef’s Table Instagram account, altered the passwords so Issa wouldn’t have access, and changed the handle to @Cesar_atelierNY. For now, both Issa and Ramirez are trying to move on. Issa plans to reopen the restaurant with a new chef in October, the person close to the restaurant said. They’re “not going to drop one bit,” they said, adding that the rest of the previous staff was staying and that they would be “just as successful as before but with less drama, less headache.”
Ramirez, meanwhile, has signed a 15-year lease for a new space at 333 Hudson Street. Right now, the first photo on his newly renamed Instagram is a piece of succulent uni glistening atop a perfect toast circle. “So sad you are closed next week. Was hoping to celebrate our anniversary with you,” one commenter wrote. “Will catch you next time we are in NYC.”
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