Boston restaurateur Tiffani Faison is the target of a lawsuit filed by an investor last week who charged the celebrity chef with financial mismanagement.
First reported by The Boston Globe, the lawsuit filed in Suffolk County Superior Court on Friday represents Boston real estate developer Robert Weintraub, who alleges that Faison breached her fiduciary duty to investors, misused Covid-era relief funds, and failed to provide financial information to stakeholders.
Faison denied the accusations in a statement to the Globe, describing the charges as misogynistic bully tactics designed to damage her character and career, but saying she would not be scared into submission and silence.
“I look forward to the truth of my dealings with Mr. Weintraub and the details of my relationships with my business partners, both past and present, coming to light through this litigation,” Faison told the Globe. Officials with the restaurant group did not respond to press requests.
Faison and her Boston-based restaurant group Big Heart Hospitality has won national attention for concepts like Sweet Cheeks Q, a barbecue concept that opened in 2011. She also operated Tiger Mama, which closed in 2021. Her three-year-old Italian restaurant Orfano closed last year.
In addition to Sweet Cheeks and a Fenway location of the pizza concept Tenderoni’s, Faison last year opened three outlets in the High Street Place food hall in downtown Boston, including another location of Tenderoni’s, a raw bar called Dive Bar and a champagne bar called Bubble Bath.
The chef is also an alum of the cooking competition shows “Top Chef” and “Chopped,” and she has been nominated four times for James Beard Foundation awards at both Tiger Mama and Orfano.
Weintraub was an investor in both Sweet Cheeks and Orfano. The lawsuit alleges that Faison misused funding from both the Paycheck Protection Program and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund at both venues. According to the court filings, Sweet Cheeks received $1.4 million in PPP loans, most of which was forgiven, and $2.2 million in RRF grants. Orfano received $945,680 in PPP funding (in two loans) and nearly $2 million in RRF grants.
According to the lawsuit, Faison did not tell investors how the money was used, and Weintraub suggests she and friends and family members benefited, cutting into profits that should have been distributed to investors, like Weintraub, or that could have prevented Orfano from closing.
The lawsuit, however, does not include evidence that the funds had been misused but based those allegations “on information and belief.”
The lawsuit is also critical of a move in 2017, when the company took out a loan to buy out Faison’s former partner in Sweet Cheeks for $1.5 million. Though the loan was paid off using income and operating capital from the restaurant—as well some of the PPP and RRF funding, the lawsuit claims—Faison personally took the former partner’s ownership stake rather than reapportion its value to investors like Weintraub.
In the lawsuit, Weintraub also alleges that Faison failed to provide accounting information about the restaurants. The lawsuit seeks a trial to determine damages, including awarding Weintraub a proportional share of interest in Sweet Cheeks and the now-defunct Orfano.
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