A reality-TV chef and owner of the $400-a-plate dinner at the swanky West Village joint Le B can’t pay her own bills.
Award-winning chef Angie Mar has cooked up a tasteless dish of unpaid IOUs — allegedly owing hundreds of thousand dollars to New York state and thousands more to her lawyers while struggling to pay her debts despite her pricey dishes.
The new allegations come after Mar was sued in 2018 by her bartender on behalf of 50 other employees at the then-Beatrice Inn. They suit claimed the celebrity chef failed to pay minimum wage and stole tips from servers to compensate back-of-house workers. The case ended in an out-of-court settlement.
In 2024, a suppplier sued her for not paying for French and Italian wines.
Mar, a Seattle native and former commercial real estate agent, founded Le B in 2023 in the same revamped space as Les Trois Chevaux, her short-lived French eatery that replaced The Beatrice Inn, which she bought from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in 2016.
The restaurant and its signature Le Burger – made with dry-aged ribeye, cheese from Lyon, and onions drowned in wine from Bordeaux – draws big names like TV personality Gayle King, fashion designer Christian Siriano, and K-Pop superstar Rosé.
But behind the restaurant’s star-studded facade, Mar is in trouble. She owes The New York state Workers’ Compensation Board $126,000 in fines, spread across all three iterations of her West Village venue, according to Manhattan Supreme Court records.
Mar disputes the deadbeat allegations.
“The company’s worker’s comp is current so these look like they were filed in error as they are inconsistent with the company’s records,” Mar’s spokesperson told The Post.
Ironically, Mar now owes the lawyer who negotiated the settlement in the 2018 tip-stealing case $88,767 in unpaid legal fees, according to a lawsuit filed by Bronster LLP on Dec. 30 in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“The matter with Bronster was resolved,” Mar’s spokesperson told The Post.
The lawsuit is still active in the court’s electronic filing system. Bronster declined comment.
She also had problems with Sussex Wine Merchants, a New York-based wine importer. It sued Mar for failing to pay for more than $1,800 worth of deliveries in 2024 – including six bottles of Chardonnay from Burgundy worth $63 each, along with 12 bottles of Italian Barolo aged 20 years and worth $120 each.
A year later the importer, Petit Pois Corp., discontinued its lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court. It didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
“This was resolved one year ago, and Petit Pois is a current wine supplier to Le B,” Mar’s spokesperson said.
The spokesperson declined to comment on what financial circumstances led to Mar’s IOU backlogs in the first place, claiming “Le B is doing well.”
Even Le B’s maître D George G. Escudero seemed puzzled over the allegations against his boss, who appeared on the G.O.A.T. series on MasterClass, where the all-time greatest teach viewers their passions— from signature techniques to secret recipes.
“I’ve been [Mar’s] Maître D for nine years and this is the first time I’m hearing about any of this,” Escudero told The Post.
“I think the wage theft lawsuit is what killed her business,” a former employee, who preferred to remain anonymous due to an NDA, told the Post.