The Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries confirmed last month that due to a number of wage and hour dispute claims, there is an ongoing investigation into Yaw’s Top Notch Restaurant and its business practices.

Charlie Burr, BOLI communications director, confirmed nine people have filed 11 claims for unpaid wages against the Gateway restaurant.

So far, at least one claim has been settled, and another is pending. Former employee, Leah Epstein received $299.20 on March 15 in a minimum wage issue claim Burr said.

In addition, eighteen complaints claiming workers’ rights violations have been filed by employees with BOLI, resulting in the same number of compliance warning letters issued to Yaw’s. One complaint resulted in a compliance agreement between BOLI and Yaw’s about employees’ mandatory break times.

Asked about the BOLI complaints, in an interview Yaw said, “That’s not my job; that’s Lisa’s [Brungardt, Yaw’s bookkeeper] job. We discuss it, she does the paperwork, the hiring the firing, the employment claims. Lisa handles all that.”

Burr said, “If any Oregon worker believes that they are not being paid what they’re owed — or that their civil rights are being violated — our agency can be a resource for them. We can investigate, prosecute and help them get justice,”

He added, “Strong wage enforcement helps workers and creates a level playing field for all the other businesses that are honoring their commitments.”

Rod Barker, Executive Dean of Business and Information Systems at Mt. Hood Community College said. “I would declare nine [BOLI complaints] are a lot.”

Asked if workers generally understand their rights, he replied, “Do you know what yours are?” He added, “They don’t know what they don’t know; I would suspect people generally have no idea.”

Barker said in the modern age, with employers mandated to post notices and documents in break rooms informing employees of their rights, still, no one reads them and when they do, because of the stilted language, they are difficult to understand. “People don’t know their rights and when they read them, they don’t know what’s behind them.”

Barker said generally, employers pay their employees, or people don’t complain. “Once the complaints start going and you got BOLI’s attention, it can get real bad, real fast.” He added, “BOLI can swing a heavy hammer.”

Barker said either Yaw would update his business practices or go out of business. “You just don’t hear of that many complaints.” With more than 2,800 employees and independent contractors at Mt. Hood, Barker said he remembers two wage and hour complaints in his nine years there.

How did a business, open less than a year, engender so many wage and hour complaints?

You have to go back to the beginning …

2012 Yaw’s Top Notch

In September 2012, after more than a 30-year absence, Yaw’s Top Notch Restaurant re-opened in east Portland at 11340 N.E. Halsey St. with high hopes and great expectations. However, several ex-employees and some investors allege owner Stephen P. Yaw, Sr. fosters a hostile work environment, serially abuses his employees, levies illegal fines and deductions against workers’ paychecks, arbitrarily and illegally terminates people and discriminates against employees exercising their rights.

In January, a group of 40 people, led by 13 former employees, assembled inside Yaw’s Top Notch in the middle of the lunch hour. Not there to eat, they gathered to stage a protest centered on management’s chronic failure to pay back wages owed from work in August.

Told the owner was off-site and unavailable, the protestors’ spokesperson asked to speak to a manager. When none appeared, he read aloud the group’s demand letter to bookkeeper Lisa Brungardt, gave her a copy to give to Mr. Yaw, and then left.

With Yaw’s Top Notch owner Stephen Yaw hospitalized at the time of the protest, Steve Woolery, who said he was Yaw’s partner and vice-president of operations, said the demonstration left customers and employees stunned. He said the action disrupted the course of business, was not peaceful and unsettled the staff. “We called the police, but by the time they arrived, they’d [protestors] left,” he said.

In a video posted online, after the group’s spokesperson read the letter aloud, protestors began clapping to a chant as they left without further incident.

Woolery said that before the demonstration, they had received complaints from only three ex-employees about missing wages.

He said before installing the computerized point of sale (POS) system, employees wrote hours on time sheets and were left on the honor system. Woolery explained how one of four temporary bookkeepers hired and fired since opening in September had subsequently misfiled the time sheets.

Three days after the protest, a statement from management posted on a Yaw’s Facebook page said, “When sufficient pressure was brought upon us, we redoubled our efforts to find the missing records and have discovered them.”

The statement went on to say that management is meeting with employees individually to determine how much money Yaw’s owes, attributing the mistakes to poor bookkeeping and their own inattention to detail.

“It’s a mistake on our part,” Woolery told the Memo in January. “We’ll take full responsibility of it. We aren’t in the practice of not paying our employees. We’re the other way. We’ll overpay ‘em if that’s what it takes to settle out.”

During his interview with the Memo in March, Steve Yaw said since the restaurant’s construction was taking longer than expected, Woolery, also Yaw’s general contractor, hired people in August to work in the restaurant before it opened. “Steve [Woolery] picked out who he hired and who he wanted, and we paid the tab, but that was all Steve’s thing as to who he had here,” Yaw said.

A few days after the protestor’s deadline, Woolery said he paid 10 ex-employees seeking back wages and said they are satisfied.

In January, Woolery said, “We had problems with theft; we had problems with drugs; we had problems with [employees] not owning up to their specific duties on the floor; we had problems with [employees] being able to get along and be team players. We don’t terminate somebody for their work; maybe their work ethic, but not their work.”

He added, “We’ve narrowed it down to where we have a really good, close-knit group of people that have the business at heart. They are proud of their jobs; they are proud of what they do; they’re proud of the place they work at. Those people didn’t really give a crap.”

Woolery was almost right; there was at least one more employee to go … him.

Shortly after recovering from his heart attack, back surgery and a near-death experience, Yaw returned to full-time in February and fired Woolery.

Contacted later, Woolery said, “I was standing up for a charlatan.” We owed them the money, but as soon as Steve got back, he chewed me out for paying them.”

1926 Yaw’s Top Notch

Originally opened by Win P. Yaw, Sr., in the Hollywood neighborhood in 1926, Yaw’s Top Notch was a family restaurant for more than 60 years before it closed in the late 80’s. Serving millions of hamburgers and employing more than 300 people, at its peak in the 60’s and 70’s, Yaw’s was one of Portland’s top restaurants.

In addition to Hollywood, Yaw’s had locations in Lloyd Center, Raleigh Hills, northwest and southeast Portland, and even a Gateway location, Yaw’s Ham-Bur-Beef.

After his father Paige passed, Stephen P. Yaw, Sr., took over running the business before all Yaw’s locations eventually closed in the late 80s.

In 2007, there was a brief comeback for Yaw’s Top Notch when Yaw was invited into a venture backed by local restaurant mogul Bill Hayden, as well as Gerry Frank of the Meier & Frank family, restaurateur Kent Hartman and Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere & the Raiders fame.

The group launched a nostalgia-driven restaurant called the Mark Lindsay Rock & Roll Cafe in Hollywood.

The theme restaurant capitalized on Lindsay’s fame as front man for the ‘60s pop band, featured its own live radio program, artifacts from Lindsay’s personal collection of music memorabilia, and had the original Yaw’s recipes and brand on its food and website.

However, Yaw claimed he never finalized their partnership in the venture. He filed a lawsuit and eventually had the Yaw’s name struck from the café’s repertoire. Moreover, with Hayden trying to keep the rest of his empire alive before failing, the venture closed after 11 months.

Yaw’s Gateway opens

Despite training sessions and two soft-openings in August before opening to the public on Sept. 10, 2012, Yaw said the first paychecks, issued on Sept. 15, were for nine days. Yaw said employees were on the honor system filling out their own timecards.

Accompanying the first paychecks was a letter signed by Yaw that said, “Over the next 48 hours we will focus on all of the pre-POS timesheets in order to pay everyone for hours worked before the restaurant opening.”

Alicia Carroll, a protestor and former employee, said, “The 48 hours passed, and it never came.” She waited another week, and then began writing notes asking for the back pay, but was ignored. “They made excuses and kept saying they were changing bookkeepers,” Carroll said. “They owe money to every single person that worked there.”

A server from August until January, Carroll said generally she received her paychecks on time, but they were always short. “People are being paid for their hours, but there are mistakes and weird other violations on each check.”

Carroll asserts Yaw takes advantage of people in vulnerable situations. “They’re either younger people with kids and they don’t want to mess around, or older ladies who don’t want to say anything, ‘because they know they’ll never get hired anywhere else.” She added, “People don’t care that they’re having these low wages taken out of their checks; they’re just happy to have them.”

Yaw said besides incompetent bookkeepers misplacing records, what “fell through the cracks” were the people who didn’t turn timesheets in. “I was counting heavily on our CPA to have our bookkeeping — not the POS system — up and running.” Yaw said. “We had a helluva mess between the first and the ninth [of September]; I don’t argue that.”

Yaw said after September 10, when the POS system was installed, with a time clock, there were no issues. However, he blamed his payroll service for performance issues. “From the 10th on there wasn’t an issue, but we have an outside payroll service, and they’ve screwed up several times.”

For example, Yaw said one time they printed paychecks with no ink in the printer. “The checks didn’t get here, but here it is payday and they close at 4:30 on a Friday, and she wasn’t gonna stay and print ‘em again,” Yaw said “So I stormed over and had a battle over that; those kids were waiting.”

When contacted, Dan Barnes, Yaw’s property owner, and investor in the restaurant, and whose company, Payroll Relief, provides services to Yaw said, “For professional reasons, I can’t comment on what Mr. Yaw said.”

David Hames, a former Yaw’s general manager who, with help from We Are Oregon organized the protest, told the Memo in an interview there are people who have never been paid. “They think it’s over, but it’s really not,” he said. “It’s not a new issue. It’s been going on for months.”

Hames said he organized the protest because he hired many of the people who were shorted wages and said he feels responsible. “That money could really help them out,” he said.

On October 9, treating employees like independent contractors, Yaw’s issued checks for hours worked in August, accompanied by another letter saying the checks are “… not part of regular payroll, please check with your accountant as to how you should record it for your 2012 taxes.”

Soft firings

However, 17-year-old Michaela Tyler doesn’t have an accountant. A Reynolds High School senior who worked as a server at Yaw’s, she told the Memo, “It was my first job.”

Hired as a host, Tyler started as a carhop, and then became a server. She said she worked at Yaw’s for five months and averaged 30 to 40 hours per week. “I worked long shifts and they scheduled me a lot,” she said.

Tyler is disillusioned by her former employers, but said she really enjoyed the work. “I really loved the job itself,” she said. “I liked my co-workers; it was just the management. Everything behind closed doors was a mess.”

She said the turmoil in the back of the house showed itself in the front. “The front kitchen is only a few feet from eight tables; one time the owner came out and was yelling at the cooks and said ‘If you guys don’t (a word we cannot use in print) step it up, you’re all (a word we cannot use in print) fired’ right while there was a busy restaurant behind him. That couldn’t be good for him.”

She said some customers liked the food, but more said they would never be back. Tyler said customers frequently asked for discounts because the food was not good, or service was slow. She had more than one table of people walk out because they got no or poor service. “It depended on the day and how the kitchen was running,” she said.

Tyler said when she was hired, management asked everyone for a schedule of their availability, promising to assign hours around them. Despite having that information, they failed. “I was called during school a lot of times and getting yelled at because I wasn’t at work,” Tyler said. “I can’t just leave school to go to work. Then, I got ‘No Shows’ wrote in my file.”

Never given a reason why she was left off the schedule, Tyler surmised it was because of the missed shifts.

Scheduling

Yaw admitted problems remembering individual needs scheduling 45 people, “That still happens now,” he told the Memo. He added it was not on purpose and chalked it up to “bugs in the point of sale system.” He said if anybody is complaining, they probably do not work there anymore and are vindictive. “We bend over backwards to meet people’s needs. Ask any student that works here. I got people that are pissed off at me, they were fired.”

In both their interviews, Yaw and Woolery confirmed 75 people were initially hired — a good portion students — more than they needed. “I knew there’d be a weeding process,” Yaw said. “I knew what we needed. We over-hired, and we told them that when we were doing it.”

Soft firings part II

As soon as 21-year-old Miranda Nicholson’s pregnancy began showing, she also was shown the door, she claimed in an interview.

For two months, Nicholson bussed tables and worked in the kitchen at Yaw’s. Never told she was fired, she just was removed from the schedule. “Jackie (Hogan, Yaw’s former fiancée who, at the time, supervised the servers) said I should just find a new job. I never quit, and nobody told me I was fired. I never picked up a final check.”

Nicholson said she began her career in toiling away in the fast food part of the service industry before the job at Yaw’s and considered it a step up. A new mother, she remains unemployed.

She said Frank Clow, who sold Yaw kitchen equipment and was later hired by Hames, and also made the schedules for kitchen workers and bussers, told her Yaw told him to push her off the schedule, because they didn’t need a pregnant woman hurting herself and then have to deal with workers compensation claims.

In an interview, Clow confirmed Yaw told him to stop giving pregnant women hours. “Yaw told me, ‘we don’t want that, no, we don’t want that, get ‘em off the schedule.’ ”

Yaw not only categorically denied he said or did this, but says that Clow never worked there. “I totally deny it; to back that up; we just had a gal that had a baby, worked all the way through. That’s simply bullshit.”

Told Hames said he hired Clow in an interview, Yaw said, “If Dave said he hired him, then we hired him, but he didn’t ever punch in or out or turn in his time sheet.”

To date, Nicholson has not filed a complaint with BOLI.

Employee fines, paycheck deductions

Hames said he saw Yaw more than once tell employees he was docking them for not putting in enough effort. “I’ve seen him do it multiple times,” Hames said. Clow said he saw Yaw fine servers for making mistakes on food tickets: “He thinks that’s ok to do. He thinks he can do whatever he wants.”

As he did at the original Yaw’s, and just as his father did, Yaw said he used a system of fines to discipline employees. “Sort of,” he admitted. “Yeah, we did, but it was never enforced.”

Yaw said he fined people out of frustration: a dollar when servers picked up orders, but not their food ticket, “It probably happened six times,” he said. It was a five dollar fine for “being out of uniform” with no nametag. “I would say ‘Come on guys, you’ve gone through five nametags in eight days.’ It adds up.”

Yaw said the fines were more of a joke, that they were not serious and that he stopped them after employees complained and told him it was illegal.

“It was only me doing it anyway, and it was probably ten bucks out of 60 employees since we opened,” he said. “I don’t believe it was incorrect, but we stopped it when someone, I don’t remember who — the bookkeeper or the CPA — told me it was illegal,” he said. “I believe it had a positive effect for quite a while. ‘Hey boss, you’re not getting me today,’ they would say.” Yaw added, “It’s a whole different ballgame than it was 30 years ago; people’s values, morals and ethics are different.”

In both interviews, Woolery and Yaw said every employee knew when they were hired, that Yaw’s, who supplied uniforms, would also launder them. Employees signed forms allowing a $1.25 per shift deduction from paychecks. “We had a battle over that; it’s lunacy, they all agreed to it. We thought we were home free, but we’re still looking into it,” Yaw said.

STEVE WOOLERY— VP of Construction and new location acquisitions— June 2012 to February 2013

Steve Woolery, a BOLI complainant and carpenter by trade, served as Yaw’s general contactor building the restaurant. He said he met Yaw through a mutual friend in May 2012.

With his construction business devastated in 2008 by the housing crisis, Woolery saw Yaw’s Top Notch an opportunity for one “last big go-round.” In hindsight, he claims Yaw took advantage of him because of his circumstance.

Yaw told him, “‘we’re short of money right now, but if you play the game with us, we’ll getcha all taken care of.’ ” He said he was taken care of all right, right out the door and into debt.

In an interview after he was terminated, Woolery told the Memo he really believed in Yaw and what he was doing and feels awful about what has transpired.

Woolery told the Memo he was putting in between 80 and 120 hours a week building the restaurant, trying to get it opened. Yaw owes him more than $67,000 in back wages, he claims. “I built it and invested the majority of the money in it.”

He said Yaw has no money invested in the restaurant. “It’s all other people’s money,” Woolery said. “Including my mom’s and mine; ninety-nine point nine percent of the more than $150,000 to open that restaurant is other people’s money.”

Woolery put $12,000 on his personal credit card for the restaurant’s carpet, Yaw refuses to pay the remaining $4,000 balance. “In my 57 years alive on earth, I’ve never ran into somebody like him.” Woolery believed in the restaurant so much, he persuaded his mother to invest $25,000.

Before he was fired, Yaw’s was averaging more than $3,000 a day in gross sales. “It’s a really good business model, but the way that it’s been run, [has] been terrible,” Woolery said. “Nobody that can is being proactive about removing Yaw.”

The end for Woolery came in February when he did not receive W-2s to file taxes and discovered his employee records were missing, “They were just gone,” he said. Despite pleading with Yaw, the answer he got was being fired.

In March, Yaw told the Memo he only recently received a bill from Woolery. “Woolery’s is the biggest joke out there,” he said. “We got his bill for hours yesterday,” He also confirmed Woolery’s mother is an investor, “She lent us $25,000; we get loans, they get promissory notes in return.”

Yaw said he is the guarantor. “We haven’t used a bank for anything. It’s all private lenders,” he said. Yaw said Woolery was vice-president in charge of construction and opening another place and was on salary from the day they opened to the day Yaw fired him.

Yaw said Woolery was “A good man to have around; he did a great job getting us open, he worked his heart out,” However, Yaw said that when he returned to take over after his heart attack, Woolery resented it. “He was not comfortable; because I was back a hundred percent. I think he resented it because some things he was doing I said ‘no, we’re not doing it this way.’ ”

DAVID HAMES—General Manager — July 2012 to October 15, 2013

New to Portland, Hames said he filled out a job application online, interviewed, and was hired as Yaw’s general manger in July 2012. On his first day on the job, Hames invested $2,500 to show the staff, management, and the ten main investors that, “I was around to stay and I would make my best effort to do everything good for the company.”

In hindsight, Hames, another BOLI complainant, said he feels conned by Yaw. He doesn’t want to se the restaurant fail, but Hames wants people to be paid for their work, including him. “I still want to see the restaurant succeed, It’s an issue that my people are looked after and paid; including myself.”

Hames filed a $6,800 claim with the Oregon Bureau of Labor Industries for unpaid wages.

Where it came to employees, Yaw had a different management style than Hames. If Yaw wanted someone gone, Hames was ordered to leave them off the schedule until they quit. “He did this with several people, much to my dismay,” Hames said. “Ultimately, it was the reason I left.” He added, “Steve made it very clear he wasn’t happy with my performance as general manger. As he [Yaw] put it, he said he got a ‘wine drinker,’ when what he needed was a ‘whiskey drinker’ who would shoot more from the hip than what I was comfortable doing.”

Hames witnessed Yaw’s irascible and surly nature towards employees often; sometimes he was the target. “One time, his yelling was so bad one of the vendors came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I was embarrassed for you.’ ” Hames said. “We want this to be resolved peacefully. We don’t want to destroy the man’s business,” He added,

“We just want to see these people paid for the work performed.”

Yaw said he was impressed with Hames, who applied for a bartending position, eventually hiring him as general manager based on Hames’ work at McMenamins. “That’s the only one that puzzles me,” Yaw said. “The others [Woolery, Dobson, Clow and Carroll] don’t puzzle me at all as to why they’re vindictive.”

Checking Hames’ job reference at McMenamins, Yaw said they told him they would re-hire him, but not what Hames’ job was. Yaw said Hames led him to believe his job at McMenamins was managing the whole building, not just supervising a few employees, which Yaw said he later discovered after the two soft openings when Hames confessed to being that overwhelmed and unable to handle the job. “He was thrilled to get the opportunity to be a general manager. He was a hard worker, but didn’t have a clue as to what he was doing,” Yaw said.

Yaw told the Memo Hames was awful at scheduling, did not know how to keep the kitchen clean and was unable to distribute the tip money to non-tipped employees. “It took him three or four weeks [after opening in September] to get the first set of tips out, and that’s when these kids that have been unemployed for forever really needed it; that’s when I started wondering.”

However, Yaw said he paid Hames $5,000 and said he does not owe him any more money. “That’s why I’m so stunned to see all this other stuff come back three, four months later.”

FRANK CLOW — Kitchen manager — August to November 16, 2012

Frank Clow, who has been in the Portland restaurant business for more than 50 years, said Yaw still owes him for equipment he sold him, and for unpaid wages.

Clow said he has owned restaurants, worked in restaurants, set up restaurants, operated restaurants, and bought and sold hundreds of pieces of restaurant equipment. “I sold him more than $20,000 of equipment,” Clow said. “I was supposed to be paid off in 90 days, as of the 31st of October [2012].” To date, Clow said, he’s received $6,000, but Yaw still owes more than $14,000.

BOLI has made a preliminary determination that Yaw may owe Clow $6064.30, but that the agency hasn’t made a final determination for Clow’s agreed-rate case. “It’s an unfortunate situation for the workers there; young and old. They need to be educated on what their rights are,” Clow said.

The Clows have a long history with Yaws family. Clow’s uncle worked at original Yaw’s Top Notch in Hollywood for more than 30 years. Clow’s cousin also worked there for years. Clow said he worked there a few times in the 70’s too.

“Stephen Yaw was a very good businessman in those days. The way operations were run, he was extremely successful at that time,” Clow said. He added, “His failure came in the sense of the past that nobody else knew everything about what he knew about this business, so nobody could operate it for him. He didn’t know how to handle all that income and how to adjust to solving all the problems; he didn’t know how to get the help he needed to do it.”

Yaw acknowledged their families have a history. “His uncle, Chuck Clow worked for us for thirty years. He taught me how to drive,” Yaw said. “They’re a wonderful family, but Frank I have my doubts about.”

Yaw characterized Frank Clow as an annoying salesperson who was on premises so often that Yaw had to get a trespass order to prevent Clow from coming on the property. ” ‘You gotta have this, or you gotta have that,’ Clow was saying all the time, ‘Frank I want you to quit coming in,’ I told him,” Yaw said. “I finally had to trespass him to keep him from coming in.”

Yaw says that, not only does he not owe Clow money, he overpaid for the equipment he bought. Yaw told the Memo, “We were buying equipment from a lot of people … Frank was just a small part of the equipment we purchased.”

Initially, Yaw denied Clow ever worked there. “He didn’t work here, but he was here all the time,” Yaw said.

MIKE DOBSON — Line Cook Trainer, line cook from July to November 2012

Mike Dobson first met the boss’s son in 1972 after he was hired as a dishwasher at the original Yaw’s when he was a 17-year-old senior at Franklin High School. Rising to line cook, Dobson said he worked for Yaw’s Top Notch and its satellite locations until 1988, when they all closed.

He made good money and enjoyed the work and the people at the original Top Notch. Dobson said he holds the record for firings and rehiring, clocking 12 years in a 16-year span. “Back then I had a very bad temper,” he admitted. “I used to tell people where to stick it.” An admitted alcoholic who has been sober for 21 years, Dobson said, “It [Gateway Yaw’s] is a mirror image of what was going on just before the old Yaw’s closed; checks were messed up, he tried to blame it on this and that, purveyors wanting cash; a mirror image of what happened at Yaw’s in the late eighties.”

Dobson said Yaw routinely and regularly shouts, curses and excoriates his employees, and did not care how many customers heard him. “It’s not Top Notch the way it was,” Dobson said.

Yaw killed Yaw’s thirty years ago, not light rail construction, Dobson said. “That’s all a crock, Steve killed it.”

Dobson asserts Steve Yaw throttled the family business with bad decisions, poor personnel management and an amateurish expansion plan. When his father died and Steve took over, things started going downhill. According to Dobson, the beginning of end was Yaw’s insistence — despite longtime customers’ objections — on adding a bar at the original location. Then, Yaw started using less expensive ingredients, and adding too many satellite locations too quickly. “He started overextending, using cheaper products, and eventually, that was it; it was called Top Notch, but with the product changes it wasn’t. Our customers weren’t dumb.”

Yaw’s paychecks were golden until the end the late 80s. “You could cash ‘em anywhere,” Dobson said. “Fred Meyer’s, any bank. But, at the end, if you weren’t one of the first people at the bank on payday, you were out of luck.” He added, “I used to have to go to Vancouver to get ‘em cashed.” Near the very end, Dobson said stalked and then physically threatened a manager at the Yaw’s Northwest 23rd and Burnside location, where he was working at the time, to be paid.

Yaw said he now regrets bringing Dobson in to train his new cooks. He admitted they were having an awful time training cooks because he expected his daughter to join him in the business. However, she did not, choosing to be a stay-at-home mom instead.

“Back then, there was drugs and all this free love and all that, and he [Dobson] was one of those and one of the worst,” Yaw said. He thought it would be great for both of them and saw Dobson as his go-to person to train new cooks and train the staff in the Yaw’s way. “He had been a great cook for us for years,” Yaw said. “We were hoping he’d be a leader. Instead of doing it right, he’d take shortcuts, like in the old days.” Yaw said. “I’m a nitpicker. I have that battle often with cooks coming from different places.”

Yaw said he fired Dobson because the other cooks refused to work with him and this is the last time Dobson will ever work for him. “He’s an idiot; you can put that in print.” He added, “Mike is an elevator that doesn’t go all the way up. And I’ll just leave it at that.”

JACKIE HOGAN — Server Supervisor, general manager — June 2012 to April 2013

On Thursday, April 4, Stephen Yaw was arrested in connection with an alleged assault on his employee and live-in girlfriend Jackie Hogan. She met Steve Yaw in June 2012 when she was looking for a job after being out of work for two years.

Hired as a greeter before the restaurant opened, Hogan said she worked at the Elmer’s restaurant in Gresham for more than a decade and then at Red Robin restaurants previously. “I was almost homeless when I met him,” she told the Memo. “That first day he gave me $40 because I told him I needed to buy toilet paper.” When the restaurant opened, she supervised the servers, becoming Yaw’s general manger after Woolery’s February firing. In December, she moved into a room in Yaw’s apartment.

Inside the operation, Hogan said she is appalled at how Yaw treats people. “I had to listen to all the horrible stuff Steve did to these people and keep my mouth shut,” she said.

Hogan said Yaw punched her in the face when their argument escalated after Yaw threatened to fire her and kick her out of the apartment and she replied, ” ‘I have nowhere to go; you can’t legally get me out of this apartment.’ ” Hogan said since her name is not on the lease, she moved out of the apartment they were sharing after the alleged assault and is receiving support and counseling from Human Solutions, the east Portland social service agency.

Asked for comment on the arrest, Yaw said in an email, “You’ve asked me for comments on your pending story regarding the assault charges and I have more than a few. Unfortunately, I’m somewhat limited in what I can say because of the ongoing legal circus. However, I can comment as follows: First, I of course deny all wrongdoing and I’m confident I will be vindicated through the legal process. I did not hurt Jackie and I have evidence to will [sic] prove it. My lawyers tell me the Mid-County Memo [sic] is not the appropriate forum to present that evidence, but after the charges are dropped, I’ll be able to speak more freely. Since you seem to think my personal struggle is newsworthy, I expect you will give as much time, attention, and space to the conclusion of the story when the assault charges are dropped. If you don’t, I’ll take that as an indication your interest in my struggle was purely malicious, as I suspect. These are all the comments my lawyers will let me make at this point. Once the charges are dropped you’ll be hearing a lot more from me.”

Yaw’s intellectual property

In December 2010, Barby and Gary Radmacher executed a purchase and sale agreement to buy Yaw’s intellectual property rights — including the original recipes — for $150,000 from Steve Yaw. Not able to make the requested large down payment, they began making monthly payments of a $1,000, all parties, according to the Radmachers, agreeing to defer the down payment until later, when there was a profit from marketing Yaw’s merchandise.

Contacted by telephone for comment, the Radmachers said Yaw told them recently their agreement is “null and void” and that he (Yaw) is taking back all rights to the name.

A Yaw’s employee in the 70’s, Barby created and administered the Facebook page while Gary worked with Yaw to develop the website and other marketing tools and strategies. Radmacher said she lost track of her old boss for forty years until three years ago when she and a former Yaw’s co-worker had lunch with Yaw, rekindling their relationship. It grew into a friendship, then a business relationship.

Since a falling out with Yaw in February, the Facebook page is inactive, but rife with negative comments from diners about the food, the service, and everything in general. The website Gary built, www.yawstopnotch.com is offline, but redirects to Yaw’s new site, www.yaws-topnotch.com.

“Right now, we feel taken by him. We feel our kindness and generosity were taken advantage of,” Barby said. However, the Radmachers have not given up on Yaw or Yaw’s Top Notch. “We’re not interested in smearing Steve Yaw.” She added, “It is sad, just really sad.”

Yaw said that from the beginning, the Yaw’s Facebook page had no connection to management, “We don’t have anything to do with it,” he said. He never looks at the page, but is sure the comments say, ” ‘Service was terrible, food was iffy all the time.’ ” Yaw added, “And what I thought would be a two-week learning curve turned into four or five months; we thought we were ready.”

About the Radmachers Yaw said, “They’re not real fond of me now, we’re kind of in a situation now, but they’re wonderful people,” Yaw said. “But neither she, nor her husband, know anything about the restaurant business.”

Publisher’s note: When this article was being composed, owner Stephen P. Yaw, Sr. was hospitalized, and unavailable for comment. To get his side of the story, he was interviewed in March after recovering. Told the article would not be flattering, Yaw hired an attorney — Sia Rezvani, of the east Portland law firm of Warren Allen — who sent the Memo a letter threatening a defamation of character lawsuit against the paper upon publication of libelous material. Despite the threat, we decided the story is important and our neighbors should know how people do business in their neighborhood.