The owner and manager of a now-shuttered burrito shop on Belmont Avenue are accused of wage theft in the Fresno City Attorney’s latest prosecution of a local employer for alleged labor violations — cases he previously said his office would be more aggressively pursuing this year.
Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz’s office sued the Biggie Burrito Taqueria, its owner, Claude Leon Patterson, and manager, Joseph Daniel Briseno, in late February in Fresno County Superior Court. Janz’s complaint alleges at least 12 of the restaurant’s workers were paid below the minimum wage, worked overtime without pay and were issued paychecks that “bounced due to insufficient funds.”
“Patterson and Briseno … are personally liable,” for the wage theft violations, Janz says in the complaint.
Briseno told The Bee in a text Thursday that he does “not respond to pending litigation.” Attempts to reach Patterson were unsuccessful Thursday.
The restaurant was in business between February 2023 and July 2024 at 1600 E. Belmont Ave., according to the complaint. Former workers in February 2025 began reporting that they had suffered wage theft at Biggie Burrito through the city of Fresno’s Wage Protection Program.
The civil complaint against Burrito King is at least the third Janz’s office has filed against a local employer accused of labor code violations since the city launched its program in August 2024.
Fresno’s City Council first authorized Janz to pursue civil wage theft cases in February 2024. The decision followed a 2023 state law that authorized local public attorneys to pursue civil and criminal wage theft actions within their jurisdictions, which would help ease the caseload of the California Labor Commissioner’s Office.
Since then, Janz has sued the operator of a north Fresno Holiday Inn and also a former Mexican seafood restaurant, though both those cases remain in litigation. Janz also publicly announced his office would investigate whether Valley Children’s Hospital committed wage theft at its Fresno facilties, though he told The Bee a few months ago that probe was “on pause.”
The council in December also allowed Janz to begin criminal prosecutions of employers, and added staff to the wage protection program. He told The Bee in a January interview that his office would be increasingly filing wage theft complaints this year.
Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz, left, and District 4 City Councilmember Tyler Maxwell, right, announced the city’s first wage theft prosecution at City Hall on Monday, May 12, 2025. ERIK GALICIA egalicia@fresnobee.com Former Fresno burrito shop accusations in wage theft lawsuit
Patterson, the Biggie Burrito owner, registered the restaurant as a business in Fresno County in February 2023, according to Janz’s complaint. He hired Briseno as manager, but their plan was that Briseno would eventually take over as owner, the complaint alleges.
Though Janz’s complaint calls both of them “employers,” it alleges Briseno was responsible for hiring, payroll and controlled the restaurant’s cashflow overall.
Janz alleges in the complaint that Briseno “ordered employees to sign agreements” that designated the workers as independent contractors instead of employees. But Briseno and Patterson still maintained “substantial control” over the workers, the complaint alleges.
The defendants did not pay the workers on a regular schedule, keep payroll records or consistently allow lunch breaks, the complaint alleges.
“No worker was fully compensated for their wages,” Janz alleges in the complaint. “In some cases, workers were charged for and had sums taken from their pay to reimburse for a company trip without authorization.”
Patterson shut down the restaurant’s business license in June 2024.
The city has requested a jury trial. It is seeking to recover the workers’ unpaid wages and also wants the court to assess against the defendants the “maximum amount of penalties” authorized by the state’s Labor Code, the complaint says.
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Erik is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, where he helped launch an effort to better meet the news needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief of his community college student newspaper, Riverside City College Viewpoints, where he covered the impacts of the Salton Sea’s decline on its adjacent farm worker communities in the Southern California desert. Erik’s work is supported through the California Local News Fellowship program.