City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed fraud charges in Superior Court today against a SOMA cooking school that promised its mostly-Chinese immigrant students food training, but instead used them for free labor to cater events.
We wanted to know more about this bizarre case so we called the Academie de Cuisine to get some reaction and insight about these allegations. We asked for Chef Angelo Mueller Degenhardt -- the man named in the lawsuit.
And while we didn't get Mueller on the phone, we did get a half-baked response.
The man who answered the phone had very spotty English, and identified himself as Gary. He took down our number and then, without any
introduction, began reciting the following statement:
"We receive a summons
yesterday, April 5, 2011. We send the information to our firm, and our
attorney will be handling all communication on a later date. We are
certain we will be able to sort through all of this. Thank you."
After this robo-response, we then asked if he was reading a
statement, to which he said: "Yes."
"This is what we have to tell the
media," Gary told us.
He said the statement was a directive from the school's CEO, Carmen Milagro.
The lawsuit alleges that the Academie aproached long-time Chinatown nonprofit Chinese Newcomers Service Center last summer to attempt to recruit Cantonese-speaking immigrant students. You can read Milagro bragging about the launch in a blog entry here.
According to the lawsuit, the students paid $3,600 tuition for culinary
training and a guaranteed paid externship at a restaurant.
A statement from the city attorney's office details what Herrera believes was the real deal:
Problems began to surface when studentsbegan to complain about such ADC business practices as: not following
written curricula; requiring students to staff and manage ADC-sponsored
functions without pay; demanding that students sign retroactive
agreements stating that they understood they would not receive a
Certificate of Completion unless they completed a 4-to-6-week unpaid
externship and 24 hours of community service. Chef instructors
also reported problems with the school's management when Mueller
ordered instructors to fail all of the students, to prevent them from
being able to claim their entitlement to paid externships.
The suit asks for an injunction to halt the academy's operations, plus back wages for the workers, and $2,500 in fees for each labor violation.
The Chinese community doesn't seem to be the only targets of the
academy's programs. The school's Web site says it also offers a training
and externship program through the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center in the Western Addition.
