A New York City law firm known for filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of chain restaurant workers is going after Dinosaur Bar-B-Que for what it says is the systemic underpayment of tipped workers like servers and bartenders.

The law firm of Fitapelli & Schaffer said it has filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York involving all six New York state Dinosaur Bar-B-Que locations, including the one opened in Troy in 2010.

Dinosaur has made tipped workers spend at least 20 percent of their time doing non-tippable work — like rolling silverware or refilling condiments — while still paying them the reduced hourly minimum wage that tipped employees typically receive, the law firm alleges in its suit. Fitapelli & Schaffer put out a statement detailing the contents of the lawsuit.

The law firm filed a similar class action lawsuit on behalf of TGI Friday's workers, and is representing apprentices and assistant managers of Chipotle in another case.

Also, the lawsuit claims Dinosaur did not pay time-and-a-half for employees working past 40 hours a week, forced tipped workers to pay a $10 fee to managers when receiving gratuities from pre-booked parties, and did not provide required extra pay to employees who worked more than 10 hours in a day, which "unlawfully burden the collective rights of their employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law," according to the law firm.

No one from Dinosaur's corporate office could be reached for comment Sunday.

The lawsuit is filed against Dinosaur Restaurants, LLC, JLN-Store, Inc. f/k/a Dino-Store, Inc., Soros Strategic Partners LP, and founder John Stage, and targets workers at the Brooklyn, Buffalo, Harlem, Rochester, Syracuse and Troy locations. Dinosaur, which started as a food cart at a motorcycle rally in Duanesburg in 1983, was founded as a restaurant in 1988 in Syracuse and has expanded to Newark, N.J., and Stamford, Conn. — with restaurants soon opening in Chicago and Baltimore.

A Times Union story in September detailed how the Troy Dinosaur has created half of the 80 jobs it promised when it received a 20-year payment in lieu of taxes agreement from the Troy Industrial Development Agency in 2009. But the company said the data was faulty because the company reported only the number of workers they had during a slow Christmas week, and that full-time equivalent hours added together would total 89 workers in 2013.

lstanforth@timesunion.com • 518-454-5697