Jane Long-Haggerty has been cleaning up the mess left behind at Tranquility Cafe when its operator, David Taylor, skipped town owing her and many others lots of money. She plans to sell off some inventory to pay former employees that Taylor didn’t pay. (Richard McGuire photo)
Restaurant operator David Taylor has skipped town leaving unpaid workers, unpaid bills and feelings of betrayed trust.
The Tranquility Café abruptly closed its doors in the former Regal Ridge building at the end of September.
This came just days after Taylor cancelled a contract to provide lunches to Osoyoos Elementary School students at the last minute – forcing staff and parents to scramble to find food for hungry youngsters.
Taylor was supposed to prepare lunch for the children on Sept. 26, but he emailed the school around 7:20 a.m. to say he couldn’t honour the contract. A number of students came to school that day without lunches.
“We actually made them some hotdogs and gave them apples that morning,” said Principal Dave Foster, adding that he is grateful to the many people in the community who stepped up when the school was left without a lunch contract for Mondays and Tuesdays.
While Taylor may have been a capable chef, those left to clean up his mess report unsanitary conditions, accumulated garbage and abuse of equipment that was not his.
The Osoyoos Times attempted to contact Taylor for his side of the story. Repeated calls to his phone resulted in a telephone company message: “The client you are trying to reach is temporarily out of service or not equipped for incoming calls.”
Emails to Taylor were not answered.
Taylor started the Tranquility Café in June when he took over the Waterfall Café from Jane Long-Haggerty and her husband Brian Haggerty.
At the time, he abruptly quit his position as head chef at the Walnut Beach Resort, a position he only held for about six weeks. This was the start of peak tourist season.
Long-Haggerty said Taylor was supposed to pay monthly rent, but he only managed to pay a couple of months before the payments stopped.
She and her husband were willing to be flexible until Taylor stopped talking to them.
Last week she said she and her husband were out about $27,000, but much of that is in equipment that she hoped to recover and sell, leaving the size of the debt considerably lower, but still substantial.
Nonetheless, she pledged to sell off some of the supplies and inventory to raise money for Taylor’s unpaid staff.
“Once I gain access to the equipment, supplies and inventory that belong to me, we will host a sale by donation of some of the inventory and supplies,” Long-Haggerty posted on the In the Loop Facebook page. “These donations will go to those employees to make up for lost wages. Anything remaining will go towards the cleanup costs for the mess he left behind here and at the hockey arena.”
Long-Haggerty said in an interview that she wasn’t exactly sure how many employees went without pay, but she said there were at least four, and possibly more, and that amounts owing ranged from about $60 to several hundred dollars.
“There was a lot of mouldy food and flies going around,” she said of the mess left behind at Tranquility Café.
Randy Bedard, owner of the Osoyoos Coyotes hockey team, tells a similar story about the mess and unpaid bills Taylor left behind from his short operation of the concession at the Sun Bowl Arena.
“I think he knew he was going to be going because he left the concession in an absolute atrocious mess,” said Bedard. “We’ve been cleaning ever since. Nothing was clean. The grill was a mess. The deep fryer was like sludge. The floor was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. It was a pigsty. And I’m sure his restaurant was the same.”
Taylor took on the concession in August and ran it for three exhibition games and two regular season games, said Bedard. He also ran it during minor hockey events.
Bedard had told Taylor he didn’t need to pay for the first month until the end of the month to give him a chance to get started.
In the end though, Taylor used the concession, supplies and inventory and never paid Bedard a cent.
Bedard estimates he is out about $5,000.
He admits he was probably too trusting and says he’s hurt that Taylor abused his generosity and good nature.
“It’s not going to change my approach toward humanity,” said Bedard. “I guess I have to do due diligence a little bit better and maybe investigate and get some character references a little bit more. It’s unfortunate. You think you can trust people. I’d help somebody out again, but I would probably be a little more cautious next time.”
Curtis Armstrong is one of the Tranquility Café’s former employees who Taylor never paid.
He worked for Taylor for about a week at the end of August before quitting – disturbed by Taylor’s erratic personality, unsanitary conditions and the unpaid bills.
“It was horrible,” said Armstrong. “It was messy. It was really disorganized. There were tons of flies.”
Armstrong said Taylor once asked him to clean out a fridge, but when he started throwing away food that had gone bad, Taylor got upset.
“He was getting mad that I was throwing out stuff that was visibly rotten,” said Armstrong. “That’s when I decided I wouldn’t go back.”
The fly situation was also raised by a customer on the comments board of Yelp.ca who wrote: “From the time you walk in to the time you leave, you are inundated with flies.”
Taylor acknowledged the problem in a reply he posted to the comment on Sept. 25, just days before the café closed.
“As for the fly situation, all of us here fight with this annoyance of the flies buzzing around due to the climate,” he wrote, “and the fact that our doors stay open and inviting to these flying pests. We have little recourse. Our doors stay open for our guests, yet are not equipped with a screen door. We do our best to control the population, and as the cold weather sets in, the flies become less and less. As we clean on a very regular and daily basis, the concern of dead flies is unwarranted as we strive to keep our establishment very clean.”
Armstrong said the final straw came when he had to take his asthmatic son to the hospital and he said Taylor sent him texts implying he was a liar.
When he subsequently tried to get paid, Taylor told him he was banned from the building.
Others also say Taylor banned them from the building and wouldn’t respond when they tried to collect money they were owed.
Nixon Zaye, of Desert Delivery, said her company delivered bread every day to Tranquility from Big Al’s Bakery in Oliver and also did other deliveries for Taylor. She said this went on from the time Tranquility opened in June until the end of July.
She says Taylor never paid her a cent and she’s out about $800 for deliveries and baking she did for Taylor.
“I emailed him invoices every two weeks and he just would tell me he never got the emails,” Zaye said. “So we brought the invoices down to him and he just told us to get out of his shop.”
Zaye said Taylor and his wife Selina were threatening, suggesting a meeting in a back alley.
Al Brogan, owner of Big Al’s Bakery, said Taylor did pay him initially for the bread products he sold him throughout the summer.
In September, however, those payments stopped and Taylor stopped returning calls. Text messages were read, but not replied to.
Brogan said he estimates Taylor owed him about $500 in unpaid bills. He was able to recover some of the equipment and furniture he’d leant to Taylor, but not all of it.
By many accounts, Tranquility Café was busy, at least in the summer months. And although Long-Haggerty said the Waterfall Café was hurt by the wildfires of 2015, she said it provided a storefront for a more lucrative catering business.
So what caused Taylor’s business to spiral downward so quickly? Did he intend all along to profit from the summer months and then disappear? Was he just a victim of bad business decisions?
“He talked the talk to everyone and he had a way of making you feel this person was sincere,” said Bedard of the Coyotes. “That’s what con artists do, I guess.”
Bedard said at one point Taylor sobbed in front of him about how much he was struggling.
Brogan said he believes Taylor simply didn’t understand the marketplace of the South Okanagan.
“He was charging downtown Vancouver prices,” said Brogan, adding that when the tourists were gone, locals wouldn’t pay those prices.
Despite being owed so much, Long-Haggerty is prepared to extend some benefit of the doubt to Taylor.
“I think they just couldn’t pay their bills, got scared and left,” she said. “When he came here to open this up, he had two very young children. So you don’t know the back story and it’s tough trying to feed a family with just a café. It could be a struggle for them.”
Now her concern is just to make sure that people who loaned equipment to Taylor get their stuff back and that those unpaid former employees see the money that’s owed to them.
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
Former Tranquility Cafe employee Curtis Armstrong (left) helped Coyotes owner Randy Bedard clean up the concession at the arena last week after David Taylor left it in a mess. Bedard has taken Armstrong on as an employee in October and plans to give him a contract to run the concession starting in November. (Richard McGuire photo)
