U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman issued his judgment against Perry’s on Tuesday, siding with the plaintiffs’ recommendations for proposed damages. The restaurant chain must now cough up the following:<\/p>\n
Tuesday’s decision follows the conclusion of a 2022 lawsuit against Perry’s and its owner\/CEO Christopher Perry. A group of 750 servers across the chain’s properties in Texas banded together to sue their employer, claiming the company had taken a portion of their tips each week and pooled them into a “mandatory tip pool” which was then used to pay staff who don’t customarily get tips. The plaintiffs argued that was illegal and violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, which states that employers are not allowed to keep tips received by employees for any purpose.<\/p>\n
Perry’s attorneys argued that the chain was well within their rights to create that tip pool, which they said was meant to equalize pay among morning and evening staff. But Judge Pitman rejected that argument and ruled against the steakhouse chain in November 2025. He also ruled against them Tuesday when the chain argued that the damages should be smaller.<\/p>\n
Friday morning, Rick Henderson, COO of Perry\u2019s Restaurants, sent Chron the following statement:<\/p>\n
“We respectfully disagree with the trial court\u2019s decision. We will continue the judicial process with an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and are confident the appellate process will provide a full and fair review.<\/p>\n
Perry\u2019s Restaurants is a respected brand committed to treating employees fairly and maintaining transparent, lawful compensation practices that are commonplace in the industry. Our team members are at the heart of everything we do, and that commitment continues as we move forward.”<\/p>\n
Correction: Perry’s Steakhouse sent a response to Chron on Friday morning. A previous version of this article stated the response was received Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
This story has been updated from the original.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman issued his judgment against Perry’s on Tuesday, siding with the plaintiffs’ recommendations for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1703,1704,27,29,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-226691","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-chronfood","9":"tag-chronstaff","10":"tag-texas","11":"tag-texas-headlines","12":"tag-texas-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}