A former employee of Cookbook Market in Larchmont Village, a market and cafe known for its fresh produce and curated home goods selection, has filed a lawsuit against Cookbook Market LLC, Cooking Through the Book LLC, and Joint Venture Restaurant Group LLC — the latter of which runs the popular Jon & Vinny’s restaurants in Los Angeles — alleging discrimination on the basis of race and sex and wrongful termination. Shatoya Allen, the former employee, alleges that a store manager sent her home early for a shift and then called the police on her for shopping in the store after she clocked out. Allen also alleges that the manager fired her for “insubordination” the next morning when she turned up for her shift.

The allegations of discrimination were first made public in January 2024, when TikTok creator Ruby Solina posted a now-deleted video about the firing of a Black employee at a popular market — she didn’t name Allen or Cookbook Market in the post, but the comments section quickly named the store. Cookbook Market LLC declined to give Eater specific comment about the lawsuit but shared a note sent to staff regarding how the company handled the incident.

In 2020, Cookbook Market was acquired by Joint Venture Restaurant Group, a hospitality group operated by Jon Shook, Vinny Dotolo, and Helen Johannesen. The group rose to popularity as the operators behind Animal, a now-closed meat-forward restaurant, and Jon & Vinny’s, a popular Italian restaurant with five locations across Los Angeles, the most recent being in Studio City. Over the years, the group also partnered with well-known restaurants including Kismet and Trois Mec, neither of which are still affiliated with Joint Venture. At the time of the acquisition, Cookbook Market had locations in Echo Park and Highland Park. Joint Venture Restaurant Group opened the Larchmont location in May 2023.

According to the lawsuit, Allen started working as a barista at Cookbook Market in October 2023. In December 2023, Cookbook Market hired a new store manager, LJ Rivas, who was Allen’s supervisor. The lawsuit alleges that Rivas treated Allen with “unwarranted hostility because she is a Black woman” and cites alleged instances of him reprimanding Allen for talking to her coworkers — something the complaint alleges her non-Black and non-female coworkers were not reprimanded for.

Cookbook Market

The lawsuit alleges that Rivas reprimanded Allen for speaking to another coworker on the morning of January 15, 2024; however, the other coworker (who happened to not be Black) was not reprimanded. It alleges that Allen continued her shift but that at 11:15, Rivas cut her shift short saying that the store wasn’t busy, even though according to the complaint, there was a holiday rush for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The lawsuit alleges that, in response, Allen told Rivas that she believed that there was too much work to do for her to leave early.

According to the complaint, Rivas escalated the issue over the phone to the Cookbook Market human resources manager, Sydney Susskind. The suit alleges that Allen requested to speak with Susskind, who informed her that if she didn’t clock out of her shift immediately, Cookbook would call the police on her. In response, Allen allegedly said to Susskind, “You’re going to call the police on a Black employee? What are you going to do when they come and shoot me?” before offering to finish her task and then clock out. The complaint alleges that after Allen clocked out, Susskind directed Rivas to call the police on her.

In the complaint, Allen alleges that while she was browsing the store after clocking out, Rivas repeatedly told her to “get out” before proceeding to call the police, as Susskind instructed, to remove her from the store. Allen left the premises before the police arrived, and, according to the complaint, the police allegedly “rebuked Mr. Rivas for calling them to the store and told him that no laws had been broken.”

The lawsuit alleges that when Allen appeared for work the next morning, the doors were locked and Rivas informed her that she was fired. Another store manager who arrived on site, Brad Watson, informed her that she was fired for “insubordination.” In contrast to Allen’s treatment, the lawsuit cites an alleged instance of a white male employee continuing to work after Rivas instructed him to clock out on January 14 — the police were not called.

The lawsuit contains eight complaints for which Allen seeks to recoup damages: race harassment and discrimination, sex harassment and discrimination, retaliation in violation of the Fair Housing Act and labor law, failure to take steps to prevent discrimination and harassment, and wrongful termination. The lawsuit alleges that as a result of the actions described in the complaint, Allen suffered “severe emotional and mental distress, anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, fright, shock, discomfort, and anxiety.”

In a memo to staff that was provided to Eater by a representative for Cookbook Market, Shook, Dotolo, and Johannesen addressed the events of January 15, 2024. In the statement, the trio wrote that there was a “situation at Cookbook Larchmont that did not reflect the values we hold as a company” where a new manager called the non-emergency line police number after “misrepresenting” the situation with Allen to human resources. After an internal investigation, Cookbook Market management found that the shift supervisor “inappropriately escalated the situation with the employee,” that the police should not have been called, and that Allen should not have been fired. “It is extremely upsetting to us that a Black person was treated like this in a way that perpetuated harmful racial stereotypes,” the memo reads. Allen was offered her job back, with back pay for missed shifts, and Rivas was terminated.

Allen’s lawsuit seeks financial recuperation from Cookbook Market, including general damages, loss of earnings, and punitive damages to “make an example of defendants to the community.”

This lawsuit comes in the wake of another filing made against Joint Venture, the hospitality group behind Cookbook Market, around a service fee previously added to the bottom of receipts at Jon & Vinny’s. In 2023, a group of servers filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the entirety of the fee was not remitted to the employees, even though it was reasonable for customers to believe it would be distributed as gratuity. The suit alleged that the restaurant was keeping a portion for itself, and that its actions violated California labor law. The Los Angeles Times reports that Jon & Vinny’s first added a note to the checks clarifying that the fee was not gratuity, before phasing in a QR code that led to a now-defunct web page explaining the nature of the service charge. The last movement on the case was a hearing for a motion to dismiss in May 2024, but in June, Jon & Vinny’s announced it would be removing the service fee entirely and switching back to a traditional tip model.