CHEYENNE, Wyo. — When Rowan King was hired at Dog Haus Biergarten in December 2023, he didn’t know he would quit after only a few months. He also never would have guessed he’d be banned from reentering the premises.
Everything seemed normal when King signed on. The work environment seemed typical, and his coworkers were friendly, including his boss. Once on the job, however, he began to hear murmurs that his coworkers weren’t getting paid on a biweekly basis as they were promised.
Then it happened to King. It was three or four weeks before someone cut him a check, and on at least one occasion, his paycheck bounced when he brought it to the bank.
“She always had excuses for it,” King said, referring to Marlena Schultz, who owned the restaurant with her husband, Charles, and business partners Clifford Johnson and Morgan Anberson. “It was either she was switching accountants or something’s wrong with the system. … That was really the thing that [Schultz] was weird about, was payments. And whenever you would bring something up, she’d just dismiss it and try to shove it to the side.”
By late January, King decided he had had enough. Staff came and went through a revolving door during his months of employment. Many quit, he said, because they were not getting paid. The final straw for him came in late January when he and his wife almost lost their apartment due to the late payments.
Like others, he began posting on Facebook and Reddit about his experience working at the restaurant and advising others not to work there. These comments grabbed the attention of restaurant management, which emailed King to tell him that he was prohibited from ever coming back to Dog Haus and that if he continued disparaging the business publicly, they would pursue him for defamation.
“We [King and his wife] went in to return our shirts and basically told [Schultz], ‘Where’s our money?” King said. “And she was like, ‘You guys need to get out, you’re trespassing.’ And then she called the cops.”
To this day, King hasn’t been paid for his final days on the job at Dog Haus. He said the restaurant owes him more than $1,300 but he has yet to see a penny. The county court system agrees with him.
King is currently one of a few former Dog Haus employees who received court judgments stating they are owed lost wages. In a court document filed Nov. 4, King’s judgment states that FAFO Restaurant Group LLC — the owner of Dog Haus Biergarten — owes him $1,312 in lost wages. The business was also ordered to pay the state of Wyoming $1,500 in fines for noncompliance. Two other former employees received similar judgments.
Laramie County Attorney Mark Voss said he has four other judgments currently pending in county circuit court against FAFO Restaurant Group. When all are submitted, the court will have sided with seven employees, according to Voss.
The court judgments are only the latest developments in ongoing legal disputes involving Dog Haus Biergarten. Multiple complaints have been filed against FAFO Restaurant Group, including one from Shamrock Foods. The food supplier alleges in an Aug. 7 court document that FAFO owes it $14,916.57 for goods it sold and delivered to Dog Haus. Even prior to this complaint, allegations levied at the hot dog and burger restaurant piqued the government’s attention.
In March, the U.S. Department of Labor began looking into Dog Haus for potentially violating labor laws, including unpaid wages, overtime and record-keeping. The department issued a formal subpoena to restaurant owners in May.
Dog Haus owners have remained radio silent amid the investigation. According to court documents, they never responded to any request for records nor the subpoena. This prompted the labor department to file a petition in federal court in September against FAFO for failing to comply with the subpoena. Since then, the restaurant has seemingly closed permanently without any update.
Multiple individuals who worked at Dog Haus or are closely associated with the restaurant spoke to Cap City News about their experiences. Their testimonies reveal a fractured working environment that suggests dubious business practices and potential labor law violations.
Cheyenne Dog Haus’s history
The recent event isn’t the first time the restaurant shuttered its doors. Prior to FAFO Restaurant Group taking the reins, Goalz LLC operated the hot dog and burger joint, according to Cheyenne retail blog Optopolis. Goalz managed the restaurant from 2020 until March 2023.
Not long after the 2023 closure, FAFO quickly took steps to acquire the retail chain. Marlena and Charles Schultz, two of the four co-owners of FAFO Restaurant Group LLC, spoke during a public hearing at the Cheyenne City Council meeting on April 24, 2023.
“Managing people definitely is a gift,” Marlena said at the meeting, where she and Charles were requesting a bar and liquor license for their restaurant.
When asked about their restaurant management experience, Charles stated he managed a Hardee’s restaurant for a year in Torrington in the late 1980s. Marlena said she was the chief academic officer for Douglas County in Colorado. She also served as chief academic and equity officer for the Poudre School District in Colorado.
“Running school districts definitely involves a unique skill set,” Marlena said. “Not just in academics, but also as a former principal, running cafeterias and signing off on really large purchases is extremely detail oriented.”
Councilmembers on the city’s Finance Committee swiftly passed the application at their meeting May 1, 2023. The Cheyenne City Council then formally approved the bar and liquor license at its following meeting on May 8. The establishment officially reopened for business in summer 2023.
As time went on, though, the late payments began to affect more and more employees. Dog Haus’s management team addressed criticism in July 2024 regarding employee pay and staffing issues. The restaurant posted on Facebook that its “employees are paid when they complete all required paperwork.”
In early October, Dog Haus Biergarten in Cheyenne stated on its Facebook page it had closed for maintenance. However, the business appeared to have closed permanently and without warning just a few weeks later. A sign has been placed outside the restaurant stating the property is for lease. Real estate company the Selling Homes Network also posted an online advertisement for the property Oct. 28. In addition, the official Dog Haus franchise website doesn’t display the former Cheyenne location on its restaurant locator.
Cap City News attempted to reach Marlena Schultz for comment on this report but did not receive a reply.
Testimony from former employees
Much like King, Austin Brazell worked at Dog Haus for only a few months in the summer. He said he was never paid on time or properly through direct deposit to his bank. Restaurant operators would send him money through Cash App. He never got wage stubs, so he isn’t sure if he was even paid the correct wages.
“If it wasn’t for me constantly asking for my check daily I probably wouldn’t have got paid,” Brazell told Cap City News via text message. “The owners just seemed to be a little more worried about their public image. … The fact that the payroll issue wasn’t top priority told me that they put themselves first and the people that worked for them second; I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.”
By the time Brazell quit his job, the owners were no longer speaking directly to employees about pay concerns, he said. Workers were referred to Dog Haus’s third-party human resources company regarding payroll inquiries. The company, Brazell said, was only available to speak to employees three or four days a week during a small daytime window.
It’s also possible the company may have also violated overtime laws. Cheyenne resident and mother Liv, whose real name is being withheld for privacy reasons, said her 15-year-old son began working at Dog Haus in July. He stopped going back just over a month later, she said.
Liv’s son did everything from dishwashing to working the grill and bussing. It was his first job, and it made a poor impression on the teen, according to his mother. He worked late into the night for a closing shift, then opened early the next morning. Her son had also worked more than eight hours on shifts, which is illegal per federal law.
“At that time, I was a bit alarmed at what was going on,” Liv said.
Liv’s son received his first paycheck two weeks after his first day on the job. The issue of pay persisted and prompted Liv to get involved in early August. She sent phone messages and emails to Marlena Schultz but never heard back. She then confronted the restaurant co-owner about her son not getting paid in person. Schultz, according to Liv, said she was overreacting. Less than two weeks later, her son refused to go back.
Liv said her son still hasn’t been paid for his last week. She wants to file a complaint to claim his lost wages, but her son doesn’t.
Sawyer Verosky’s experiences line up with what happened to King, Brazell and Liv’s son. He decided to work at Dog Haus because he wanted a part-time bartending job. Like many other employees, his time at the restaurant was short, spanning only four weeks from May to June.
Payment issues began immediately with Verosky. He requested written checks, but Schultz said they couldn’t do that because the company’s bank was located out of town. The restaurant paid him on Venmo, after which he tried setting up routing for direct deposit. When he eventually received a check through direct deposit, it was through Schultz’s personal account. He only received money for his base wage and not tips, Versoky recalls. He was also fined a $5 wire fee for the transfer.
“Every time I came in after that, I was questioning if I should even be there,” Versoky said.
Verosky quit because he lost confidence that the business could even pay him. It wasn’t uncommon for employees to come into work in tears asking about their pay, he said. Like Liv’s son, he still hasn’t been paid for his last four or five days of work. He wants to make a record of his unclaimed wages but hasn’t taken time to get around to it yet. He also doesn’t want to hire an attorney.
King has been adamant with following through to claim his wages. To him, it’s not just about recovering money owed to him but about holding others accountable.
“The people I worked with were great,” King said, “and that’s really what made me the most mad about this whole situation: I hate to see someone in a position of power like that take advantage of the community and of people that, you know, need money.”
Recovering wages
With a judgment now in his hands, King can take the next steps to recovering his wages.
According to Mark Voss, the county attorney, King can request the circuit court to give him a court order called a writ of execution. King can then take that court order to the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office, which would then seize assets from FAFO Restaurant Group and sell them at auction in order to get King his wages.
However, the success rate for wage recovery is strikingly low, according to the county attorney. He estimates around 2% of workers seeking unpaid wages are successful.
“One reality of these cases is that a large number of the ‘employers’ I attempt to pursue to enforce these administrative orders, for all intents and purposes, ‘don’t exist,’” Voss said via email. “It is simply a fact that in many of these cases, the employers that have not paid any wages have ‘gone under.’ That means they failed, declared bankruptcy, or otherwise collapsed financially. This means there is often very little chance that there will be collection, or that there would be any resources to collect from.”
Wyoming statute WS 27-4-105 considers it a misdemeanor for a business not to pay an employee. Voss said in his 30 years of practicing law in Wyoming, and from his experience, he doesn’t recall anyone being cited or prosecuted for not paying an employee.
“Under the Wyoming statutes, the employee might recover the wages owed, after what can be a significant delay,” Voss said. “The only disincentive to the employer is the potential fine of $200 a day for each day since the Order to pay was entered by the [Department of Labor]. Or maybe a criminal charge described above. I’ve never had a case from the Department where I had any indication that the employer had been charged criminally. The fine for not paying by an employer can appear to be considerable, at $200 a day, on paper. However, my experience is that any ‘maximum’ amount is unlikely to be imposed or sought.”
Voss ultimately intends to educate workers on what their rights are and what they can do to ensure they’re treated fairly, as ordained under law. He is currently composing a memo to instruct workers on how to use their court judgments to recover wages. He said employees can also bring a small claims action against employers who haven’t paid them.
The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division handles unpaid wage complaints. To learn more about how to file a complaint or contact the division, click here.
