When Richard Duncan pushed back on an idea last year from his boss at casual fine-dining restaurant Juni, he believed he was protecting both his staff and his place of work.
Put simply, according to court documents, the venue manager thought influential chef Michael Lambie’s proposal to use staff tips to help cover the cost of broken glassware would breach workplace laws.
Duncan says he suggested an alternative to the Lambie, the venue’s co-owner: introducing a system to track breakages without penalising employees.
The claimed disagreements at the fresh Exhibition Street venue didn’t end over glassware, though. Over the following months, court filings describe an escalating conflict over employee pay, overtime, workplace management and written warnings before Duncan was made redundant in August 2025. Duncan alleges that the redundancy was a sham.
Lambie, and the hospitality juggernaut behind Juni – it is two-thirds owned by Paul O’Brien, the man behind Red Rock Venues, which had revenue of $93 million last year – insist Duncan’s retrenchment was genuine, driven by the need to reduce labour costs through a winter slump.
The dispute, now before the Federal Circuit Court, offers a rare glimpse into the internal workings of a high-profile, high-end restaurant in Melbourne.
More broadly, the case arrives as Australia’s dining sector faces continued scrutiny over workplace compliance. While the industry employs about 7 per cent of the national workforce, it generated 18 per cent of all anonymous reports made to the Fair Work Ombudsman last year.
An ombudsman spokeswoman said the industry was high-risk because of the low barriers to entry, inexperienced operators and a heavy reliance on young staff, international students and working holiday-makers. Last financial year, the regulator recovered $3.1 million for more than 1800 underpaid dining workers and secured over $16 million in court penalties.
Against that backdrop of industry-wide enforcement, the conflict at Juni centres on specific claims over venue management, staff pay, and a workplace culture now being tested in court.
British-born Lambie became one of Melbourne’s best-known chefs during the 1990s as part of a “Brit-pack” of classically trained chefs who helped define the city’s fine-dining scene.
After leading kitchens including Stokehouse and Circa The Prince, he went on to establish successful venues including Taxi and Lucy Liu. Taxi reached its zenith in 2005 when it was named The Age Good Food Guide Restaurant of the Year.
Juni marked Lambie’s return to Melbourne after a brief stint on the Gold Coast. The restaurant, named after his late mother, opened in November 2024 and is majority owned by O’Brien. His Red Rock Ventures operates 26 restaurants and bars across Australia, including Melbourne venues Cookie and The Toff in Curtin House, the Temperance Hotel in South Yarra, and Hophaus in Southbank.
The legal dispute remained out of public view for months after Red Rock director and Juni company secretary Andrew Thomas sought a suppression order preventing publication of the proceedings, following an application by The Age for court documents.
Before the suppression order was lifted, Thomas told the court that media reporting would hurt the business and could “cause significant prejudice to the conduct of the proceedings and make the applicant’s claim more difficult to resolve at mediation”.
With those restrictions now removed, the court documents set out sharply competing accounts of what occurred inside Juni during its first year of operation.
According to Duncan’s claim, the dispute began in February 2025, only weeks after the South-East Asian restaurant opened to reasonable reviews. Duncan alleges Lambie proposed using employee tips to “ensure accountability” for breakages within the business.
Duncan says he immediately objected, warning that confiscating staff tips could breach workplace laws. According to Duncan, the proposal resurfaced three times between February and March. He says that when he warned Lambie the practice could expose the business to legal action, the chef replied that “even if they did complain to Fair Work, Fair Work wouldn’t lift a finger”.
In Juni’s defence, filed with the court, the restaurant agrees Lambie raised the idea of staff contributing from tips towards breakages but says it was “just a general comment and discussion”.
The defence says Lambie was describing a voluntary arrangement used at one of his previous restaurants to monitor commercial glass losses, where staff contributed small weekly amounts from tips that were returned if breakages stayed low.
The disagreement over tips was followed by broader conflict over pay and staffing. Duncan alleges he approached Lambie seeking promised salary increases for two staff members and payment of a small amount of overtime, which Lambie declined to provide.
An email from Lambie sent in March 2025, and tendered in court, warned Duncan against “arguing with me over what you perceive [as] injustice to the staff. Sometimes it’s better to see the whole picture before you start blabbing on [and] making judgments. I very rarely make bad calls regarding my staff.”
Juni’s defence denies any agreement to cap overtime or back-pay wages, stating salary increases were discretionary and employees were paid in full from their effective commencement dates in March 2025.
Relations deteriorated further over subsequent weeks.
Management issued Duncan a first written warning in April alleging inappropriate language and bullying towards a director. When Duncan requested access to venue CCTV and audio footage to dispute the claim, the human resources manager ignored the request, writing instead: “Let’s hope that it’s onwards and upwards for everyone moving forward.”
After unsuccessfully seeking to have the warning withdrawn, Duncan lodged a dispute in the Fair Work Commission. Two days later, Lambie issued him a feedback letter accusing him of being “more interested in finding problems” than running the restaurant – a response Duncan alleges was direct retaliation.
A second written warning followed in July, with Lambie criticising floor leadership and stating that “front-of-house wages are too high and have been since opening. We can’t sustain a 25 per cent front-of-house wage cost moving forward.” Duncan disputed those criticisms.
The following month, Lambie informed him his role was redundant because of cost pressures, writing that his responsibilities would be “reallocated to existing front-of-house supervisors, administration staff and myself”.
Duncan says the explanation did not stack up. According to his court filings, Lambie had told him weeks earlier that Juni had made $400,000 profit since opening and was on track to earn $1 million in its first year.
Andrew Thomas said, in a detailed statement provided to The Age last week, that the restaurant was unprofitable during the 2025 financial year.
Court documents also show Juni advertised on Seek in February this year for a full-time restaurant manager on a salary of up to $100,000 – the same salary Duncan was earning when he left, with duties matching several requirements in his contract. Juni maintains the advertisement related to a vacancy created when another manager resigned.
Duncan is seeking compensation for lost wages, penalties against the business for alleged contraventions of workplace laws and damages for harm to his reputation – arguing his abrupt dismissal damaged his standing “by reason of the small and networked nature of Melbourne’s hospitality industry”. A trial date has not yet been set.
Speaking generally about the dining sector rather than what has unfolded at Juni, Paloma Buhagiar-Cole, principal solicitor at the Young Workers Centre, said a decade of hospitality wage-theft scandals had failed to transform the industry, and all too often disputes played out between hospitality operators and their staff.
“A real difficulty for a hospitality operator that wants to treat staff right and pay them right is that you’re competing against a lot of other operators who are not doing that. The playing field is just not even – it screws over hospitality businesses who are trying to do the right thing,” she said.
Workers in hospitality who raised concerns often also experienced retaliation, Buhagiar-Cole said. “Sometimes it’s just really brazen.”
Since leaving Juni, Duncan has opened his own venue, Little House, in Smith Street, Collingwood.
Running his own business, he said, had reinforced his appreciation of the financial pressures facing hospitality operators. But it had also strengthened his belief that staff should never be treated as adversaries.
“I’ve got to act responsibly if I want to build a sustainable business, rather than treating people poorly for short-term gains.”
Duncan said there were many ethical operators across Melbourne’s hospitality industry. There were also many workplaces where underpayment and excessive hours remained commonplace.
“Without legal or financial consequences, operators will stay motivated to repeat bad behaviour because the system gives them a commercial payoff.”
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Clay Lucas is an investigative reporter at The Age who has covered urban affairs, state and federal politics, industrial relations, transport, health and aged care. Email him at clucas@theage.com.au or claylucas@protonmail.com, or via Signal +61439828128.Connect via X, Facebook or email.From our partners
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